November 26, 2015 is the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
In commemoration, the British Library tweeted some images of Carroll’s hand-written manuscript, which includes illustrations. The article I saw shows a few.
Anybody know who might have drawn those illustrations? They appear to be fairly elaborate drawings, but they are certainly not the Tenniel drawings that we’ll all come to know.
(BTW, these drawings of Alice are apparently do not resemble Alice Liddell any more than the Tenniel pictures do. According to Martin Gardner, the real Alice had short hair and bangs.)
There is a photo of Alice Liddell with short hair, but I seem to remember that it’s from a couple of years before this manuscript, so she may well have grown her hair longer in the interim.
I have a first edition copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland(1907) with illustrations by Arthur Rackham who was(is) famous for his paintings of Faeries. I much prefer his take on Alice than the more standard Tenniel. But he also paints Alice as a blonde
Ohhhhh, and Mervyn (author of Gormenghast) Peake, of course! Peake was always the best illustrator of EVERYTHING. See especially the first image, of Alice going through the looking glass.
Yowza! I’ve never even heard of any of the other illustrations that several posters above have mentioned.
Pretty much, the only commentary I’ve read about the Alice books is some of the stuff that Martin Gardner has written. I don’t recall that he ever mentioned (much?) about alternate illustrations. Did I miss something there?
ETA: Alice the Tween Flapper? Now that’s different!
The Morgan Library in NYC had a recent Carroll exhibit, with objects that belonged to the real-life Alice, Carroll photographs, and lots of Tenniel artwork, not all of it Carroll-related. In the center of the smallish room was a plexiglas case with the ms., opened to a page spread which showed the author’s elongated-neck Alice. It was the first time in years that this ms. had been out of the British Library. I had this amazing view (mere inches from my face) more or less to myself for several minutes on a Saturday afternoon.
As if this wasn’t sufficiently heaven, across the hallway was a spectacular Ernest Hemingway exhibit that had opened that day (on loan from Washington, D.C.), with his actual dogtags, a single-spaced typewritten letter from J.D. Salinger to Hemingway, and many, many manuscripts and letters, both personal and professional.
That was a great show. Did you get to their Poe exhibit two years ago? in addition to three copies of Tamarlane and a slew of original mss, there was a TON of original illustration artwork.
I was particularly interested in the Harry Clarke stuff, because JESUS CHRIST, HARRY CLARKE WAS A GENIUS, but also blown away by the Dore, the Beardsley, the Rackham, and the Edmund Dulac. And others I can’t remember offhand.
Okay, surreal. Those remind me more of Ralph Steadman’s art. (You know, the guy who illustrated Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas.) And what’s with that jump-rope?
U. Ike: No, but the Morgan had another Poe exhibit something like 10 years ago. His handwriting was so tiny (to save on paper costs?) that a lot of it I could not even read (and I’m a proofreader).
I am more of a New-York Historical Society and Metropolitan Museum-goer, and had gone to the Morgan only 'cause it was the annual Smithsonian Free Museum Day.
This was the first time I saw their permanent exhibit rooms, and–wow!!
Mervyn Peake was very much into sex. He was a very handsome guy, and his wife Maeve was a total babe. If you read his biographies, the two of them seemed to spend most of their time in the sack. A lot of his illos are intensely erotic.
In the 1980s, a facsimile edition of Carroll’s hand-written and -drawn first version of Alice’s Adventures Underground was released. It’s the version of Alice I’m most familiar with.
