The King's Messenger in prison — Illustrations for Through the Looking Glass by John Tenniel

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The King's Messenger in prison

Sir John Tenniel

Wood-engraving by Dalziel

Illustration for the fifth chapter of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (1871)

"There's the King's Messenger. He's in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn't even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all."

In 2000 student assistants from the University Scholars Program, National University of Singapore, scanned this image and added text under the supervision of George P. Landow. For commentary, see below. Mouse over the text for links.

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Commentary by Ray Dyer

At first glance this is one of the less striking of Tenniel’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll's second children’s book. But it is intriguing in at least two ways.

First, who exactly is the King’s Messenger? Tenniel, as so often in his political cartoons, has skilfully supplied his own visual clue. This is the hat seen on three separate occasions in the illustrations to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, at the Mad Hatter's Tea-Party (Ch. VII). The Messenger-come-prisoner is apparently The Hatter of Carroll's first foray into Wonderland. However, the Messenger is given the personal name “Hatta.” With such a device, at once both sufficiently similar to and sufficiently different from the previous hat-owner, the reader could be forgiven some confusion, or even worse the suspicion that a passing ennui and lassitude may have briefly overcome the author in his search for new nonsense characters. Moreover, and as two illustrations to Chapter VII will show, a similar and apparently facile duplicity of character-identity is employed by Carroll in his introduction of a Second Messenger, who strikingly resembles the March Hare of the same Tea-Party. Curious indeed.

Yet it would be wrong to suspect Carroll of a lack of creative inspiration. As elsewhere, he is here permitting himself a certain degree of disguised Romantic mourning and melancholy for the loss of past experiences - golden sunsets, drifting boats on quiet rivers, lost loves, friendships sadly changed - which can be seen by reference to the Carroll chronology. The decade 1862-1872 was crucial for his social and emotional relationships with the real Alice Liddell, her sisters and family — the essential backcloth to his two Wonderland masterpieces.

The ten-year-old Alice, who with her two sisters had persuaded Carroll to write up his oral fairytale of the summer of 1862, had turned into a less-available and then more unpredictable twelve year old by 1864 when he “finally sent to Alice. Nov: 26. (Sat.)” his handwritten and personally illustrated unique copy (Diaries, 5: 9, 11 n1). His next reported meeting with her was not until Thursday 11 May, 1865, when he noted a difficult encounter in the Christ Church quadrangle - Alice seemed “changed a good deal, and hardly for the better”, which he put down to her “going through the usual awkward stage of transition” (74).

With the appearance of the first printed copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland later that year, Carroll noted on Saturday 15 July that he was at his publisher Macmillan’s “and wrote in 20 or more copies of Alice to go as presents to various friends”. However, the special copy bound in white vellum for Alice Liddell was “not inscribed” (93 and n.1; copy housed at Harvard University). Clearly, some part of the friendship was gone. That it was already being mourned was indelibly printed into the book’s opening frame-poem "All in the golden afternoon," by “that weary one” (v.5); and the “merry crew” (v.6) is oddly juxtaposed with the “pilgrim’s wither’d wreath of flowers” (v.7). By the time he finally published the follow-up Through the Looking Glass, Carroll’s melancholy and mourning were even more apparent in his closing frame-poem, "A boat beneath a sunny sky": “Long had paled that sunny sky:/ Echoes fade and memories die./ Autumn frosts have slain July” (v.3). His final words strike a similar chord on his private and complexly intertwined feelings: “Still she haunts me, phantomwise" (v.4); "Dreaming as the summers die" (v.6); and "Life, what is it but a dream"? (v.7).

Even the mournful words penned above seem to have been insufficient balm for Lewis Carroll’s painful memories; the need to surround his children’s writings and himself with wish-fulfilment images is still apparent, albeit disguised. The presence of the King’s Messengers, here in the Tenniel illustration and in the later Wonderland journey, most likely sprang from deep psychological motives, and allowed their creator to revisit happier times that had meant so much to him.

Apart from these repetitions, another puzzle here, to which not even Tenniel’s skilful pencil could supply a clue, is the very fact of the Messenger’s incarceration for a trial that had yet to come about: “and of course the crime comes last of all”, as the White Queen told Alice. A similar conundrum had been placed in Chapter 12 ("Alice's Evidence") of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when the Queen of Hearts had declared the nonsensical rule of “Sentence first - verdict afterwards.” Beyond the nonsense, however, lay Carroll’s long standing interest in Time, and even the possibility of altering Time by some form of travel. Some two decades later, in his final children’s fantasy work, Carroll would include a whole chapter exploring the - for him largely humorous - creative possibilities of Time Travel (Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, Chapter XXIII, "An Outlandish Watch"). The fact that Carroll had there effectively invented the Time Machine, some years before the eponymous novel of 1895 by H. G. Wells, was noted by Edmund Miller as long ago as 1976.

Bibliography

Carroll, Lewis. Sylvie and Bruno. London: Macmillan, 1889.

_____ . Lewis Carroll’s Diaries. The Private Journals of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Vol. 5. Ed. Edward Wakeling. England: Lewis Carroll Society, 1999.

Miller, Edmund. “The Sylvie and Bruno Books.” Lewis Carroll Observed: A Collection of Unpublished Photographs, Drawings, Poetry and New Essays. Ed. Edward Guiliano. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1976. 132-144.

Last modified 25 May 2021