Sir John Tenniel

Self-portrait of and by Sir John TENNIEL

(1820-1914. Knighted in 1893.)

Best known for his illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Tenniel was, in his day, a household name as one of Punch’s principal political cartoonists. His full-page studies – caricatures more than jokes, appearing every week – were the backbone of the magazine, and took up a great deal of his time. Punch would suggest a subject on Wednesday, then Tenniel would spend all Thursday thinking how to interpret it as a cartoon, spend Friday drawing it, and on Saturday take the supposedly finished work and carefully transfer it to a wood block for engraving. Three days (two and a half in a good week) to prepare a single cartoon.

Not only was he a top-rate cartoonist and illustrator he was, later in life, an accomplished fairy artist. His first book work of note was Undine in 1841 though it was his illustrated Aesop’s Fables in 1848 that caught the attention of Punch editor Mark Lemon and allowed Tenniel to start with the magazine in 1851. He became principal cartoonist there in 1864. Alice in Wonderland came out the following year (1865) and Through the Looking Glass in 1872.

But I’m ignoring the Alice books here. I’ve chosen instead to show some examples of his work elsewhere, in particular the fine drawings he made for Thomas Moore’s book-length poem Lalla Rookh (an Oriental Romance).

Lalla Rookh was issued in several editions, none finer than the one Tenniel illustrated for the publisher Longmans, Green in 1861. He and Moore gave us a romanticised Western view of the Orient, in which

Its shrines and domes and streets of sycamore, –

Its lone bazaars, with their bright cloths of gold,

Since the last peaceful pageant left unroll’d, –

Its beauteous marble baths, whose idle jets

Now gush with blood, – and its tall minarets,

That late have stood up in the evening glare

Of the red sun, unhallow’d by a prayer; –

O’er each, in turn, the dreadful flame-bolts fall,

And death and conflagration throughout all

The desolate city hold high festival!

But, “Bring on the dancing girls,” the Western reader cried:

Forms such as Nature moulds, when she would vie

With Fancy’s pencil, and give birth to things,

Lovely beyond its fairest picturing.

The poem would not be complete without its harem section – a section Moore called The Light of the Haram, in which the beautiful young Nourmahal gathers flowers and herbs for the enchantress Namouna.

All in that garden bloom, and all

Are gather’d by yong Nourmahal,

Who heaps her basket with the flowers

And leaves, till they can hold no more;

Then to Namouna flies, and showers

Upon her lap the shining store.

In a book filled with lovely maidens, none come fairer than the “Peris, those beautiful creatures of the air, who live upon perfumes…”

It is the Peri who, when the Hero fell in battle and

…when the rush of war was past,

Swiftly descending on a ray

Of morning light, she caught the last –

Last glorious drop his heart had shed,

Before its free-born spirit fled!

As well as the fallen Hero the poem portrays some beautiful if earthly women around the battlefield. Here is the lovely if unfortunate Hinda, rescued by

…her own loved Gheber, mild

And glorious as when first he smil’d

In her lone tower, and left such beams

Of his pure eye to light her dreams,

That she believ’d her bower had given

Rest to some wanderer from heaven.

But (Spoiler Alert) their love is doomed, for before long:

Her soul’s first idol and its last,

Lies bleeding in that murderous strife

And when Hinda, on “yonder drifting bark”, sees his funeral pyre,

One wild, heart-broken shriek she gave;

Then sprung, as if to reach that blaze,

Where still she fix’d her dying gaze,

And, gazing, sunk into the wave, –

Deep, deep, – where never care nor pain

Shall reach her innocent heart again!

Doom, doom. Such is all too often the fate of the virtuous maiden. (Just as in modern crime books, many would say.) And staying with doom, doom for a moment, here is Tenniel’s opening page to the Sampson Low edition of the Collected poems of Edgar Allan Poe:

But although Tenniel illustrated many Victorian books the work that kept him busiest was that for Punch where he not only drew the full-page political cartoon each week, but he contributed any number of cartoons and squibs. This initial letter (one of many he drew) seems more in his Alice vein:

Most of his political cartoons, brilliantly drawn as they were, mean little to us now; we generally fail to recognize the characters in them, though this one in which the belligerent ass hides inside the skin of a ferocious lion retains some force for us today when, at the scent of war, our own stay-at-home politicians throw out their chests and bray for war.

His work was vast and various and I’ve barely skimmed the surface here. But we’ll say farewell with this seasonal caricature from Punch in which the year 1870 is welcomed in by the taxman: