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Commentary by Ray Dyer

Tenniel's masterpiece here is a dynamic and fluid illustration which provides a grandly fitting conclusion to the fantasy tale of Through The Looking Glass, and to the two Alice in Wonderland sagas in general. There only remained to portray, in the three following illustrations, the abrupt and necessary return of young Alice to her above-ground world of familiar Victorian conventionality.

The rare return of John Tenniel here, to provide only his fourth distinctly quarter-cropped picture in almost a hundred throughout the two Alice books, makes one suspect that he is allowing the author one last clever attempt at disguise and concealment. As early as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the first of the four such illustrations, Alice and the Cheshire Cat, shows a composed and dutifully attentive Alice in the lower quadrant, gazing upwards to the Cheshire Cat - undoubtedly an avatar of Lewis Carroll, who had been born at Daresbury in Cheshire, and who loved cats. In another cropped illustration, Alice Meets Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, Tenniel again depicts Alice in the lower quadrant, looking up at Humpty Dumpty (another avatar of Carroll) in the upper quadrant. In the present cropped illustration of the dinner party, Tenniel once more shows Alice securely based on the ground whilst looking up at the fireworks display (possibly yet another disguised representation of the contrarian and mercurial Lewis Carroll). Could Tenniel have been reflecting his author's unconscious (or determined!) wish for some continuing reciprocated interest and liking between himself and and the appealing - though volatile and changeable - real child behind his story? Humpty Dumpty's words in Chapter VI seem to support such an interpretation, with his stern directive to the child (superficially presented as, or cloaked in, a struggle between verbs and other words) - "The question is ... which is to be master - that's all."

When we turn to the general content of Tenniel's splendid illustration of the dinner party (and the dream's final chapter), we find a recurrent theme, namely that of superbly organised chaos. The roots of this entertaining and, eventually, productive disorder stretch all the way back to Lewis Carroll's own early childhood, and lie in a rare intervention into it by his usually stern and Augustan Anglican father. In the winter of 1840, as the future children's author approached his eighth birthday in Cheshire, he received a remarkable letter from his father who was away fulfilling his annual duties as a Canon of Ripon Cathedral, in the North Riding of Yorkshire. The letter is a veritable tour de force of creative originality, describing the Canon's return journey via Leeds in highly imaginative terms. He tells his son of: "....Six hundred men [who] rush out of their shops [to] fly, fly in all directions ... set the town on fire ... Pigs and babies, camels and butterflies... ," all of whom roll in the gutters together with "... old women rushing up the chimney and cows after them." In this flight of fancy, the austere Lord Mayor of Leeds would find himself "in a soup plate" and covered with "thick custard," whilst another man would hide in a teapot and cry out "Oh, I have dropped my donkey..." (Letter of 4 January 1840, I: 4). Such impossible events, recounted by Carroll's "affectionate Papa," would find a renewed life in the words and activities of the Red Queen and the White Queen, and here also in the description of the extraordinary dinner party. As for his illustrator, this is far from Tenniel's usual vein. In his own political contributions to Punch, both before and after his association with Lewis Carroll, Tenniel preferred to rely on strong draughtsmanship and statuesquely arranged characters, in accord with standard early-mid Victorian preference.

The Tenniel-Carroll partnership produced other notable moments of carefully crafted chaos elsewhere: in the culmination of the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, for instance, and in the swirling pack of cards at the culmination of the court-room scene . Some twenty years later, with younger artist-illustrator Harry Furniss, similar chaos erupts with the abrupt entry of the giant Porcupine in the concluding part of Carroll's final fairy story, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (Ch. XXIV; see Dyer 547 and n.9). There Carroll would introduce the term "Babel" for the voices and wide uproar, whilst his modern editor would employ the term "chaos crescendo" (Dyer 522, n.12), with reference to the orchestral crescendo so familiar to Lewis Carroll from his regular and enthusiastic, though not always noted, visits to London's Exeter Hall (see, for example, Carroll's chronology, March 1877), for performances of Handel's powerful Messiah.

Bibliography

Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. London: Macmillan, 1865.

_____. The Letters of Lewis Carroll. Ed. Morton N. Cohen, assisted by ‎Roger Lancelyn Green. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1979.

_____. Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. London: Macmillan, 1893.

_____. Through The Looking Glass. London: Macmillan, 1872.

Dyer, Ray. Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno with Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. Annotated Scholar's Edition. Leicester: Troubador, 2015.

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Last modified 6 January 2022