Best known today as the illustrator for Lewis Carroll's Alice
books, John Tenniel was the Victorian era's chief political
cartoonist. This extensively illustrated book is the first to draw
almost exclusively on primary sources in family collections, public
archives, and other depositories. Frankie Morris examines Tenniel's
life and work, producing a book that is not only a definitive
resource for scholars and collectors but one that can be easily
enjoyed by everyone interested in Victorian life and art, social
history, journalism and political cartoons, and illustrated
books.
In the first part of the book, Morris looks at Tenniel the man.
From his sunny childhood and early enthusiasm for sports, theater,
and medievalism to his flirtation with high art and fifty years in
the close brotherhood of the London journal Punch, Tenniel is shown
to have been the sociable and urbane humorist revealed in his
drawings. According to his countrymen Tenniel's work--and his Punch
cartoons in particular--would embody for future historians the
"trend and character" of Victorian thought and life. Morris
assesses to what extent that prediction has been fulfilled.
The biography is followed by three parts on Tenniel's work,
consisting of thirteen independent essays in which the author
examines Tenniel's methods and his earlier book illustrations, the
Alice pictures, and the Punch cartoons. She addresses such
little-understood subjects as Tenniel's drawings on wood, his
relationship with Lewis Carroll, and his controversial Irish
cartoons, and inquires into the salient characteristics of his
approximately 4,500 drawings for books and journals.
For lovers of Alice, Morris offers six chapters on Tenniel's
work for Carroll. These reveal demonstrable links with Christmas
pantomimes, Punch and Judy shows, nursery toys, magic lanterns,
nineteenth-century grotesques, Gothic revivalism, and social
caricatures.
In five probing studies, Morris demonstrates how Tenniel's
cartoons depicted the key political questions of his day--the
Eastern Question, which brought into opposition the great rivals
Gladstone and Disraeli; trade-union issues and franchise reform;
Irish resistance to British rule; and Lincoln and the American
Civil War--examining their assumptions, devices, and evolving
strategies. An appendix identifies some 1,500 unmonogrammed
drawings done by Tenniel in his first twelve years on Punch.
The definitive study of both the man and the work, "Artist of
Wonderland" gives an unprecedented view of the cartoonist whose
adroit adaptations of elements from literature, art, and above all
the stage succeeded in mythologizing the world for generations of
Britons.
Not for sale in the British Commonwealth except Canada
Available in the British Commonwealth, excluding Canada, from
Lutterworth Press
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