From Carroll’s copy of a real bunny to Tenniel’s scurrying figure
Carroll’s earliest drawings filled sheets of letter-writing paper. Here, he begins with a sketch of a real rabbit, which evolves over the first page into a fully anthropomorphized form. (A study of Alice in profile appears upside-down on the left.) On the second page, Carroll begins working out Alice’s first meeting with the White Rabbit.
In Carroll’s finished illustration, the White Rabbit is essentially a human figure that has donned a full suit. Carroll depicts the exact moment just before Alice’s encounter with the White Rabbit, when she leans down for her first conversation in Wonderland.
Tenniel’s original drawing—which he later hand colored, presumably at the request of a collector—shifts the emphasis to the moment after Alice first speaks to the White Rabbit, and shows the startled creature, now more rabbit-like and no longer in a full suit, scurrying away.
Carroll oversaw every aspect of the design for Alice. He selected the scenes for Tenniel to illustrate and ordered the precise size (down to eighths of an inch) and placement of each picture in the book. Closely attuned to the relationship between word and image, the text below this illustration also functions as a caption.
Image credit:
Lewis Carroll (1832—1898)
John Tenniel (1820—1914), illustrator
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
London: Macmillan, 1865
The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. PML 352027.
Photography by Graham S. Haber 2014.
In the decades following the book’s immediate success, Tenniel was frequently requested to make drawings of his own illustrations for collectors. This fine example was commissioned some time after the book appeared in 1865.