Animals of Wonderland

TITLE The Animals of Wonderland Tenniel as Carrolls Reader SOURCE Criticism 45 no4 383-415 F every last(predicate) 2003 The magazine publisher is the right of first publication holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To cont do work the publisher http//wsupress. wayne. edu/ ROSE LOVELL-SMITH WHEN JOHN TENNIEL was providing 42 cases for Alices Ad adventures in Wonderland in 1864 he was in his mid-forties, an established illustrator and a Punch car in additionnist.At that time C. L. Dodgson and Lewis Carroll were equall(a)y unkn witness as authors, for adults or children. Tenniel, on the otherwise hand, already had a victor understanding of the visual codes and illustrative techniques of his day, and already had an audiencean adult preferably than a child audiencewho would expect from him a certain level of proficient proficiency, humor, and social nous.Tenniels illustrations s hould t herefore interest us today non just for their remarkable and continuing success as a felicitous adjunct to Carrolls text edition, tho as well as as the firstarguably, the bestVictorian read or interpretation of Carrolls text. After all, as a reader Tenniel enjoyed considerable advantages, including his personal placement and experience, his access to the authors own illustrations to the manuscript version of the story, and access to the author himself.In his study of illustration in childrens literature, Words ab verboten Pictures, Perry Nodelman has argued that the pictures in a sequence act as schemata for from each virtuoso otherthat is, all the expectations, understanding, and in unionis feedion we bring to reading an illustrated book, and all the information we accumulate as our reading proceeds, makes a schema for each new page of words and each new picture as we continue through start a book. (FN1) If this is so, all Tenniels options relating to subject matte r, size, position, and style of illustration moldiness come to operate, as we proceed through Alice in Wonderland, as a kind of guide to reading Carrolls text. An examination of Tenniels opening sequence of illustrations as they appe atomic number 18d on the page in the 1866 edition of Alice in Wonderland(FN2) will therefore begin to reveal Tenniels preoccupations, the kind of interpretation of Carrolls text he is nterested in making. As William Empson show uped by in 1935, two aspects of Alice are traditional in childrens stories the appraisal of characters of unusual size (miniatures and giants) and the idea of the talking beast. (FN3) Tenniels opening drawing, the White Rabbit at the transport of chapter 1, draws on both these traditions. The run occupies a point surrounded by animal and humanity, simultaneously both these things and neither of them, an importation hardly made so firm by Carrolls text.The rabbitness of the rabbit is emphasized by the meadow setting, th e absence of trousers, and the accusationful attention paid to anatomy and proportion. nevertheless the rabbit is slightly distorted towards the human by his upright posture, his clothing and accessories, his pose, and his human eye and hand. Less obviously, Tenniel also extends Carrolls text by offering information approximately the size of the rabbit. From the grass and blowball clock (a visual joke) in the background the reader grasps the rabbit as rather larger than normal bunny size about the size of a toddler or small child, perhaps.As this illustration was invented by Tenniel (Carrolls headpiece illustration shows Alice, her sister, and the book), the contrast is clear amidst Carroll, whose picture draws attention to the frame of the story, to the affectionate kindred of sisters, and thereby to Alices membership of the human family, and Tenniel, who selects a traditional story idea that shifts the focus a nonher way, toward a mediation between distinct kinds familiar f rom those more(prenominal) forms of art in which animal behavior is used to represent human behavior.In further illustrations, Tenniel offers more images indicateive of unusual telling size. The second picture, page 8, shows Alice too large to go through the niggling door. On page 10 she holds the bottle labeled DRINK ME which will shrink her on page 15 she is growing taller, with the text elongated to match. Then comes page 18, where the frame and larger size suggest that here is an important picture. In it the human/animal rabbit and the idea of Alices unusual size occur together.Alice looks gigantic in relation to the hallway, and the White Rabbit, normal size for the hallway (it appears) solo perhaps (in that case) outsize for a rabbit, is much reduced from the importance he assumed in the first illustration and is shown fleeing from her terrifying figure. The pool of tears illustration on page 26 also relates to these motions. Here a fully clad human, Alice, is depicted much the same size as the unclothed mouse with which she swims.Note, too, that in the text, Alice frightens the mouse out as she had previously frightened the rabbit, although this time it is by talking about her pet, her cat Dinah. The reader who ponders this opening sequence of illustrations might consult that Alice would also be frightened of Dinah if she met her while still mouse-sized. The schemata, then, direct the reader towards a cluster of ideas in which animal fears and anxieties about survival are connected with images of lesser or greater relative size. FN4) Tenniel appears to have arrived at this interpretation independently while he does frequently follow Carrolls designs closely in the subject and overall flack to an illustration (Michael Hancher provides some useful opportunities to affect comparisons),(FN5) of the pictures just discussed unless the one of Alice growing taller at the head of chapter 2 real much resembles a agree drawing in Carrolls manuscript .Moreover, when Tenniel does follow Carroll in choice of subject he usually makes significant changes in treatment Tenniels Alice, for instance, having slipped into the pool of tears, is very much more alarmed than Carrolls Alice. (FN6) Edward Hodnett, who reviewed Tenniels work for the Alice books picture by picture, makes rather slighting remarks about several of the designs in this opening sequence those on pages 8 and 10 are too matter-of-fact to be necessary, the elongated Alice stands merely look round-eyed, and the second vignette of Alice swimming with the mouse makes the first superfluous. (FN7) Hodnett seems to me to have missed the point. These designs are in my view extremely consistent in seeking and developing a particular nexus of ideas. Despite the evident connection between many another(prenominal) Tenniel illustrations and Carrolls own illustrations, then, this is clearly Tenniels own interpretation. tho if this is so, what is to be made of it?My thesis in this p imitater is that through his animal drawings, Tenniel offers a visual angle on the text of Alice in Wonderland that evokes the life sciences, cancel explanation, and Darwinian ideas about evolution, ideas closely related by Tenniel to Alices size changes, and to how these affect the animals she meets. (FN8) As I will show, this is partly a matter of Tenniels drawing out an underlying field of reference in Carrolls text. I will also argue, however, that when Tenniels approach to his animal subjects is compared to that in earlier and modern illustrated pictorial istory books, the viewer is certain of resemblances which indicate that Tenniels pictures are best situated and read in that context. The effect of the initial sequence described above, for instance, is that as chapter 3 unfolds Alices encounters with various different creatures, the illustrations begin to re-create Alice itself as a kind of zany native memoir for children. Our post-Freudian view of Alice in Wonderland tends to be of a private, heavily encoded, inward exploration or adventure.But Tenniels reading, I would argue, offers us an outward-looking text, a public adventure, a jocular reflection on the natural history hysterical neurosis, on reading about natural history, and on Darwins controversial new scheme of natural selection. I will return to Tenniel as reader later, and in allege to establish that this interpretation is no mere add-on but a genuine response to the text, I essential first deal with science, natural history, and evolutionary ideas as themes that Carroll himself originates.Interest in contemporary ideas about the animal kingdom is signaled early on in Alice in Wonderland, in chapter 2, when Alice finds that the well-known childrens recitation piece How doth the little busy bee has been mysteriously ousted from her mind by new verses that celebrate a pirana, the crocodile. Carrolls parody of Isaac Wattss pious poetry for children(FN9) thereby establishes his b ooks reference to a newer, more scientific view of natureapproaching a controversially Darwinist view.It does this by mocking and displacing the fieldview often called natural theology. According to natural theology, a set of convictions much touted in childrens reading, Gods existence can be deduced from the wondrous design of his creation. The universe is benign and meaningful, a book of signs (like the industrious bee) of Gods benevolent and educative intentions just waiting to be read by humans. Carrolls crocodile, all tooth and claw, signifies other things amorality, the struggle for existence, predation of the weaker by the faster.Readers of Alice in Wonderland are also likely to notice that the animal characters do not behave or talk much like animals in traditional fairy tales or captions. They are neither helpers nor donors nor monsters nor prophetic truth-tellers, the main narrative functions of animals in traditional fairy tales,(FN10) but nor are they the exemplary fi gures illustrative of human fallibilities and moralities familiar from fables. They do not teach lessons about kindness to animals, as animals in childrens stories often did, and they do not much resemble the creatures in nursery rhymes or jingles or Edward Lears nonsensical poems either.Instead, they talk, chopping logic, competing with Alice and each other, and often mentioning things natural animals might be imagined to talk about, like fear, death, and being eaten. I think Denis Crutch is also roughly right when he points out that there is in Alice a hierarchy of animals analogous to the Victorian class system but also suggesting a competitive model of nature the white rabbit, caterpillar, and March Hare seem to be gentlemen, anuran and fish are footmen, Bill the lizard is bullied by everybody, hedgehogs and flamingos are made use of, and the dormouse and the guinea pigs are victimized by larger animals and by humans. FN11) William Empsons 1935 probe notes how Carrolls ideas and manuscript illustrations associate evolutionary theories with Alice in Wonderland. (FN12) This is a crucial point and, I believe, the best explanation for the presence of so many animals in Wonderland. It was aft(prenominal) all Carroll who put a dodo, best known for being extinct, into the text,(FN13) and Carroll who first included an ape, that key symbol of evolutionary debate, in his drawing of the motley conference of beasts in the pool of tears.But Carrolls evolutionary reference is much more extensive than Empson found it, for a Darwinist view of life as competitive struggle is also promoted by Alice, whoapparently unconsciously, as if she really cannot help itrepeatedly reminds us that in life one must either eat or be eaten. Alice will keep talking about Dinah to the little creatures she meets who are the natural victims of cats (26-27), she has to admit to the pigeon that she herself has eaten eggs (73), and in the Mock Turtle scene she has to check herself rather th an reveal that she has eaten lobster and whiting (148, 152).The Mock Turtle, of course, is a very creature of the table, while Dinah the predator, the surface cat, has a place maintained for her in Wonderland by the Cheshire Cat, a lucky but slightly sinister appearing and disappearing cat whose virtually significant body part is his grinning, tooth-filled mouth (he grins like the crocodile, as Nina Auerbach has noted). (FN14) The little bright-eyed terrier of which the aboveground Alice is so fond (27) also has other-selves in Wonderland, Fury in the Mouses Tale, the puppy in chapter 4.Moreover, the Mouses Talethe next poem in the book after the crocodile poemtalks about predation as if it were a legal process. The reader should therefore take the hint and connect the animal eat or be eaten melodic theme elsewhere in the story with the trial scene in the last stage of the book. Carroll has the White Rabbit make this association of ideas when he mutters The Duchess The Duchess Oh my dear pawsOh my fur and whiskers Shell get me executed, as sure as ferrets are ferrets (41). This is one of those moments when Alice reveals its ferocious under certain. The White Rabbit here anticipates legal execution as simultaneous with the process of being prepared for table that is, these civilized human behaviors are proffered by Carroll as analogous to predation by a natural enemy, ferrets.Alice herself, by kicking Bill the Lizard up the chimney (an incident memorably illustrated by Tenniel in a very funny picture) and by looking on approvingly while the guinea pigs are so unkindly treated in court, inverts the theme of kindness to animals established in more Orthodox childrens literature like Maria Edge costs tale of Simple Susan, where a girls pet lamb is saved from the slaughterers knife. FN15) In Alice in Wonderland there is humorous delight in the misappropriation of the creatures in the croquet scene, and there are many other versions of a cruel carnival in the book for instance, Alice imagines herself being set to view a mousehole by her own cat. She also resents being ordered about by mice and rabbits (46)a phrase that suggests the world upside down of carnival but which might also be taken as summing up the new evolutionary predicament of humanity.Fallen down the rabbit hole from her lordly position at the top of the Great Chain of Being, Alice instead finds herself, through a series of size changes, continually being repositioned in the pabulum chain. The importance of the theme of predation, the motif of eating and being eaten, is such that it has attracted a number of commentaries. It is fully described by Margaret Boe Birns in Solving the Mad Hatters Riddle and by Nina Auerbach in Alice and Wonderland A Curious Child. (FN16) Birns remarks in opening her essay that Most of the creatures in Wonderland are relentless carnivores, and they eat creatures who, save for some outer physical divergences, are very like themselves, united, i n fact, by a common humanity. Birns therefore even cites a crocodile-eating fish as a case of cannibalism,(FN17) quoting in support of this idea Alices Nurse Do lets pretend that Im a hungry hyaena and youre a bone (Looking-Glass, 8). She also remarks that Wonderland contains creatures whose all degree of self-definition is expressing a desire to be eaten or drunk, and offers other comments on scenes in Through the Looking-Glass where, as she puts it, food can become human, human beings can become food. (FN18) I do not continuously find cannibal readings supported by the parts of the text in question.Auerbach also makes claims about cannibalism, but a little differently, referring the idea of eat or be eaten back to Alice, her subtly cannibalistic hunger,(FN19) the unconscious cannibalism involved in the very fact of eating and the desire to eat. (FN20) Auerbach associates this interpretation with Dodgsons own attitude to food. But textual support for the quality Auerbach calls A lices cannibalism seems lacking. Alice does not really eye the other animals in her pool of tears with a strange hunger as Auerbach suggests,(FN21) nor do the Hatter and the Duchess sing savage songs about eating as Auerbach claims. FN22) To describe a panther eating an owl as cannibalism, Auerbach(FN23) must assume (like Birns) that the creatures in Alice are definitely to be read as humans in fur and feathers. My path of work is that they need not be so read the point might be their and Alices animal nature. Nor does the food at Queen Alices dinner party at the end of Through the Looking-Glass begin to eat the guests(FN24) as Auerbach claims, although food does misbehave in Looking-Glass and the Pudding might have this in mind (Looking-Glass, 206).Overall, however, in my view the preoccupation of Alice in Wonderland with creatures eating other creatures is much discontinue accounted for by the more sinister and Darwinian aspects of nature(FN25) which Auerbach and Birns(FN26) al so recognize as a part of the Alice books. I now return to my main business, that Tenniels illustrations weft up on but also extend this Darwinist and natural history field of reference in Carrolls text.As already noted, Tenniels drawings of animals do not stylistically suggest a childrens fairy tale(FN27) but rather produce Alice as a kind of natural history by resembling those in the plentiful and luxuriously illustrated habitual natural histories of the day (see figs. 1 and 2). My argument therefore differs from Michael Hanchers, which emphasizes social and satirical contexts by comparing pictures of various Wonderland and Looking-Glass creatures to those in Tenniels and others Punch cartoons. FN28) While Hancher establishes the human kindred with Punch as an important one, however, the most convincing animal resemblances he reproduces from Alice in Wonderland (I am not here concerned with Through the Looking-Glass) amount to besides two pictures, the Cheshire Cat in a tre e resembling the Up a Tree cartoon of a raccoon,(FN29) and the ape on page 35 of Alice resembling the ape in Bombas Big Brother,(FN30) Tenniels frog footman and fish footman are Grandvillian figures with animal heads but human bodies, and also evidently suggest social commentary.But they stand apart from the argument I am presenting here because no effort is made by Tenniel to present them as animals. The satiric side of Tenniels animal illustrations in Alice, hinted at by echoes of Punch, is never very dominant, then, and should not be seen as precluding another field of reference in natural history reading.The scope, persistence, eccentricity, and variety of the natural history crazeor rather, series of crazesthat swept Britain between 1820 and 1870 are described for the general reader by Lynn Barber in The Heyday of congenital account statement and by others in more specialized publications, and need not be redescribed here. (FN31) The importance of illustration in contemporary natural history publishing, however, is central to my argument and must be touched on briefly.Even in the midcentury climate of Victorian self-improvement and self-education, the volume of this well-established branch of publishing is impressive the standard of illustration in popular periodicals and books was high, and sales were also impressively high in Victorian terms. Rev. John George Wood, according to his son and biographer Theodore Wood, a pioneer in writing natural history in nontechnical language, had reasonable sales for his one-volume The Illustrated Natural History in 1851 and very good sales for Common Objects of the Sea Shore in 1857.But when Routledge brought out his lavishly illustrated Common Objects of the Country in 1858 it sold 100,000 copies within a week of publication, and the first edition was followed by many others, a figure deserving comparing with Darwins more modest first-edition sell-out of 1,250 copiesor, indeed, with Dickenss sales of Bleak House ( 1852), which were 35,000 in the first two years.The result of Woods success was a much grander publishing venture by Routledge, Wain and Routledge, a three-volume The Illustrated Natural History with new drawings including some by Joseph Wolf volume 1 (1859) was on mammals, volume 2 (1862) on birdsthe frontispiece is reproduced in figure 2and volume 3 (1863) on reptiles, fish, and mollusks. FN32) Woods astonishingly prolific career as a popularizer, however, of which I have described only a tiny fraction (he was dashing off such productions as Anecdotes of Animal Life, Every Boys Book, and Feathered Friends in this decade as well), is in line with much other more or less theologically inclined and intellectually respectable natural history publishing in the 1850s and 1860s, often by clergymen.Children were important consumers of such books and periodicals and sometimes are obviously their main market, and a number of fictional works, such as Charles Kingsleys The Water-Babies (1863) and Margaret Gattys Parables from reputation, of which the first four series appeared between 1855 and 1864 (that is, in the decade prior to Carrolls publication of Alice in Wonderland), capitalize on the contemporary conviction that natural history was a subject especially allow for for children. (FN33) Tenniel connects his Alice and natural history illustration by a number of stylistic allusions.He borrows the stodgy techniques of realism, such as the cross-hatching and fine lines used to suggest light, shade, and solidity of form in the Mock Turtles shell and flippers, or the crabs and lobsters claws. Accuracy in proportion and a high level of anatomical detail are equally important. As can be seen by comparing figures 1 and 2, too, the grouping of subjects may also be suggestivea point first noted by Narda Schwartz, who also drew attention to the resemblance between the etching of the dodo in Woods three-volume natural history and Tenniels dodo. FN34) Also significant is the way Tenniels design wake the creatures recently emerged from the pool of tears includes a rather furry-haired Alice among, and on a level with, the beasts and birds. Carrolls own pictures for the pool of tears sequence have the quite different effect of separating Alice from the animal world, a point 1 will return to. Another Tenniel habit that suggests natural history illustration is his provision of sketchy but realistic and appropriate backgrounds.Here Tenniels viewpoint sometimes miniaturizes the reader, setting the viewpoint low and thus letting us in on the ground level of a woodland world magnified for our information (compare figs. 3 and 4). When Alice stands on tiptoe to peep over the edge of a mushroom, when she carries the pig baby in the timberland or talks to the Cheshire Cat, Tenniel uses a typical natural history technique, placing a familiar woodland flowera foxglovein the background in such away as to remind the reader of Alices size at that time.Similarly, Tenni el makes use of the difference between vignettes for simple or single subjects, and framed illustrations, including full-page illustrations, for larger-scale and more important and complex subjects, in a way that very closely resembles a akin(predicate) distinction in natural history illustrationpopular natural histories like Woods tend to use large, framed illustrations to make generalized statements, showing, for instance, a group of different kinds of rodent, while vignettes present an individual of one species.And above all, although Tenniel certainly endows his creatures with personality and facial expressions, his animals, unlike his humans, are never grotesques. In fact, nineteenth-century natural history illustration also delights in endowing the most solidly realistic creatures with near-human personality or expressiveness, a quality that Tenniel builds on to good effect, for instance, in his depiction of the lawyer-parrots, which remind one of Edward Lears magnificent ma caws (see figs. 5, 6, and 7).Thus while Tenniels animal portraits reflect the Victorians pleasure in their expanding knowledge of the variety of creatures in the world, they also faithfully reproduce the contemporary assimilation of this variety to familiar human social types, a sleight of hand of which Audubon, for example, is a master his Great Blue Heron manages also to subtly suggest a sly old gentleman, likely shortsighted, and with side-whiskers. In the visual world inhabited by Tenniel, then, the differing works of Audubon and Grandville (the latter could depict a heron as a priest merely by give the bird spectacles) slide together.Where few of Tenniels successors have been able to resist the temptation to turn the animals in Alice in Wonderland into cartoon or humorous creations, though, it is Tenniels triumph that he drew his creatures straight, or almost straight the Times review of Alice in Wonderland (December 26, 1865) particularly noted for praise Tenniels truthfulne ss in the delineation of animal forms. (FN35) It was, indeed, his accomplishment in drawing animals that first established his reputation as an illustrator, when he provided illustrations for Rev. Thomas Jamess Aesops Fables in 1848. FN36) Can sources for Tenniels remarkable animal drawings be more scarce identified? An early biographer of Tenniel records his acknowledgment that he liked to spend time observing the animals at the Zoo. (FN37) However, comparisons between pictures reveal that in addition Tenniel almost certainly consulted scientific illustrations or recalled them for his Alice in Wonderland drawings. For example, in the mid-eighteenth century George Edwards produced a hand-colored engraving of a dodo which, he wrote, he had copied from a painting of a rest dodo brought from Mauritius to Holland.The original painting was acquired by Sir Hans Sloane, passed on to Edwards, and given by him to the British Museum. (FN38) In 1847 C. A. Marlborough painted a picture of a dodo, which is now in the Ashmolean Museum (it was reproduced on the cover of the magazine Oxford Today in 1999). And in 1862 the second volume of J. G. Woods The Illustrated Natural History includes a picture of a dodo. (FN39) Compare all these with Tenniels dodo (figs. 8, 9, 10, and 11) they surely either have a common ancestor or are copies one from the other. The dodo is a special case in that Tenniel could hardly have studied one at the London zoo.But I wish to put forward a claim that Woods 1851 one-volume and, later, expanded three-volume Illustrated Natural History were very probably familiar to Carroll and the small Liddells and also to Tenniel, not only because Woods dodo illustration is a attainable source for Tenniels but because these volumes also scupper smiling crocodiles, baby eagles in their nest, and the lory,(FN40) as well as illustrations of numerous more familiar animals that appear in the words and/or pictures of Alice, including the edible crab, the lobster , the frog, the dormouse, guinea pigs, flamingos, varieties of fancy pigeon, and so forth.Given the compendious nature of Woods works, this is hardly surprising, of course. But Wood must be favored as the source of animal drawings most probably known to Tenniel for the further reason that Wood illustrations often quite strongly resemble Tenniel illustrations, as readers may judge by comparing figures 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16, to the toucan, eagle, and crab from Alice (see fig. 1) and the lobster and dormouse (see Alice in Wonderland, 157 and 97). (FN41) No matter how good Tenniels famous visual memory, he is unlikely to have drawn such a menagerie without some research.Hancher noted the strong resemblance between a Bewick hedgehog (from the General History of Quadrupeds, 1790, often reprinted) and the evasive croquet-ball hedgehog at Alices feet on page 121. (FN42) Bewicks hedgehog, however, had already been recycled by William Harvey for Woods one-volume Illustrated Natural History w here Tenniel is equally likely to have seen and remembered it all three hedgehogs have the same dragging rear foot (see figs. 17, 18, and 19). This is another case, like that of the dodo, where scientific natural history illustrations have been copied, recopied, or reworked for reprinting.A similar argument could be presented about the large number of depictions of sinuous flamingos that Tenniel might have consulted. The volume of contemporary natural history publishing for children and adults, the evident contemporary interest in illustrations of animals, and the resemblance between Tenniels and contemporary natural history drawings have important implications the resemblance indicates that Tenniel is here creating the context within which he wants his pictures to be read.He shows us that he saw (and wanted the viewer to be able to see) Carrolls animals as real animals, like those that were the objects of current scientific study and theories, at least as much as he saw them as Gra ndville or Punch-type instruments of social satire, or fairy-tale or fable talking beasts. (FN43) In line with his scientific interpretation, then, Tenniel in illustrating Alice in Wonderland intensifies Carrolls reference to Darwins theory of evolution by carrying out his own visual editing of the Carroll illustrations in the manuscript.Tenniel makes the ape appear in two consecutive illustrations in the second, it stares thoughtfully into the eyes of the readerappearing to claim kinship. Tenniel includes among the creatures in these illustrations on pages 29 and 35 a fancy pigeon, perhaps a fantail or a pouter, which should in my view be taken as a direct reference to Darwins argument from the selective breeding of fancy pigeon varieties in chapter 1 of The Origin of Species. FN44) A visual detail that Tenniel introduced into the book, the glass dome in the background to the royal tend scene on page 117, looks like the dome at the old Surrey Zoological Gardens(FN45) and therefore constitutes another reference to the study of animals. And as already noted, Tenniel does not reproduce Carrolls rather lonely image of Alice abandoned by the animals, which would have had the effect of separating her human figure from the animal ones and thus emphasizing Alices difference from them.Instead, Tenniel provides two images of Alice among, and almost of, the animal world, developing a radical implication of Carrolls text of which Carroll himself was possibly unaware. On the other hand, Carrolls interest in predation, in the motif of eat or be eaten, is not one on which Tenniel expands. No doubt it would have been thought too frightening for children one must recall the care taken by Carroll over the positioning of the Jabberwocky illustration in Through the Looking-Glass. FN46) But while Carrolls text here develops emphaticallyalbeit peripherallysome ideas that Tenniel could only leave aside, Tenniels recognition of the importance of such themes is strongly demonstrated by the puppy picture. This illustration is a particularly large one, dominating the page (55) on which it appears. It is framed, and therefore gives an impression of completion and independent significance, very different from that given by the more common vignette with its intimate and fluid relationship to the text.These things make it probable that the puppy scene and its illustration were especially important in Tenniels reading of Alice in Wonderland. Yet commentaries on Alice in Wonderland tend to ignore the puppy scene, perhaps because critics are often most interested by Carrolls verbal nonsense, and the puppy is speechless. Indeed, Denis Crutch disapproves of the puppy as an intruder from the real world and Goldthwaite takes up this point, commenting that the puppy was Carrolls most glaring aesthetic mistake in Aliceneither seems to have noticed that the hedgehogs and flamingos are also not talking beasts. (FN47) Another reader of Tenniels illustrations, Isabelle Nieres, t akes a similar line, remarking that the full-page illustration is perhaps placing too much emphasis on Alices encounter with the puppy. (FN48) But what Tenniels puppy illustration encapsulates, in my view, is the theme of the importance of relative size. Here is Alices fearful moment of uncertainty about whether she is meeting a predator or a pet. As reader and Alice will discover, the puppy only wants to play.But Alice is terribly frightened all the time at the thought it might be hungry, in which case it would be very likely to eat her up in spite of all her coaxing (54), and Tenniels illustration with the thistle in the foreground towering over the tiny Alice, like many of his memorable illustrations, primarily signifies her anxiety. Later, too, Tenniels choice of the lobster as the subject of a drawing is a visual reminder of the transformation of animals into meat it brings the viewer uncomfortably close to recognition of kinship with the devoured, so human is the lobster and s o warily is his eye fixed on the viewers.The lobster is another illustration that Hodnett found an inexplicable presence in the text the song in the text provides insufficient excuse for an illustration, he remarks. (FN49) My analysis of Tenniels composite verbal/visual Alice in Wonderland is very different. Possibly going well beyond Carrolls conscious intentions, Tenniel offers a Wonderland that concurs with the evolutionist view of creation by showing animals and humans as a continuum within which the stronger or larger prey upon the smaller or weaker.The implicationone many readers of Darwin were most reluctant to acceptis that if animals are semihuman, humans may conversely be nothing but evolved animals. Alices extraordinary size changesin which Tenniel is so interestedtherefore play a significant role in this new world, for as I already pointed out, it is through her series of size changes that Alice finds herself continually being repositioned in the food chain.Wonderland is truly the place of reversals its theme of a world upside down is traditional, as Ronald Reichertz has reminded us in an lighten study that positions Alice in Wonderland in relation to earlier childrens reading. (FN50) Size changes can represent the topsy-turvy, of course. But while Alice has some recognizably Jack-in-Giant-land experienceslike struggling to draw close up the leg of a tableand some Tom Thumb experienceslike hiding behind a thistlewhat is so weird or Wonderlandish about her story is not her sudden growth spurts but that she transforms rapidly from the small to the large and vice versa. FN51) Alices body changes at times suggest being outsize and aggressivefor example, when she is trapped in the White Rabbits house and terrifies the little creatures outside, or when she is accused of being an egg-stealing serpent or predator by the pigeon. But she is undersized and therefore vulnerable when she slips into the pool of tears or when she meets the puppy. (FN52) The si ze changes connect back to eat or be eaten where the dangers of large and small size, a theme especially horrifying to children, is a traditional one, found in tales of giants and ogres, Hop-o my Thumb or Mally Whuppie. FN53) But as we have seen, the Tenniel/Carroll Alice in Wonderland links forward to ideas of predator and prey, eat or be eaten, and the animal nature of humanity, all recently given new urgency by Darwin. A contemporary illustration worth pondering that deals with these important ideas (it appeared at almost exactly the time of the publication of Alice in Wonderland) is the cover of Hardwickes Science-Gossip A Monthly Medium of Interchange & Gossip for Students and Lovers of Nature (January 1866).This cover represents (see fig. 20) the scientific technology that interested Carroll, as well as, more sentimentally, the small creatures and plants of woodland and seashore that are a part of the natural history background. These subjects, however, make a mere frame to th e central illustration, both grisly and amusing, which is a depiction of the chain of predation, eat or be eaten, in action. wizard could hardly ask for a more succinct visual summary of this important element in the contemporary contexts of Alice.Recognition of this theme will, as well as accounting for lobster and puppy illustrations, also account for the otherwise somewhat puzzling centrality of Dinah and the Cheshire Cat in Carrolls text. Nina Auerbach quotes Florence Becker Lennons insight that the Cheshire Cat is Dinahs dream-self, and certainly one or the other is more or less ever-where in Wonderland. (FN54) I think the reason for this must be that this familiar household pet best emphasizes the paradoxical difference between being large, in which state the cat is a delightful little furry companion, and being small, in which state the cat might stamp out you and eat you.In the Darwinian world, size can be the key to survival. And yet, Carroll selected a smiling crocodile to stand for the new view of creation. The cruelty of the Darwinian world is, in his view, somehow inseparable from delight. To suggest a context for this unexpected but quintessentially nineteenth-century state of mind,(FN55) a comparison may be made here between Carrolls poetic vision of his particular predator and Henry de la Beches 1830 cartoon of life in A More Ancient Dorset or, Durior Antiquior (see fig. 1). De la Beche was English disrespect his name, and was the first director of the British Geological Survey. According to Stephen Jay Gould, who includes it in his preface to The Book of Life, de la Beches spirited cartoon, simultaneously grim and humorous, was reproduced endlessly (in both consistent and pirated editions) and is an important model, becoming the canonical figure of ancient life at the inception of this genre. (FN56) In short, this is the first dinosaur picture.Victorian paintings of nature (showing a similar pleasure to Carrolls in his crocodile) do tend t o center on hunting and predationsee The Stag at Bayand de la Beches influential image, Gould explains, became a thoroughly conventional depiction of prehistory, first, in showing a pond unnaturally crowded with wildlife (rather like Carrolls pool of tears), and second, in depicting virtually every creature in it as either a feaster or a meal(FN57)something one may also feel about Carrolls characters.Particularly striking is the gusto, the pleasurably half-horrified enjoyment of crashing(a) prehistory, in de la Beches cartoon, which in my view is very comparable to the enjoyment of the image of the devouring crocodile in Lewiss brilliant little parody. A slightly acid gusto also animates Alice in Wonderland, a book that fairly crackles with energy although the energy has always been rather hard to account for.While on the official levels of his reason Carroll stood apart from the theological storms of the time,(FN58) is it possible that the news of evolution through natural selec tion was, on another level of his mind, good news to him as to many other Victorians, coming as a kind of mental liberation? Humanity might well have found crushing, at times, the requirements of moral office and constant self-improvement imposed by mid-Victorian ideals of Christian duty.Alice, for one, young as she is, has already thoroughly internalized many rules of conduct, and Alices creator, equipped as he was with what Donald Rackin has called a do for standards and order,(FN59) revels in the oversetting of order (as well as disowning this oversetting thoroughly when Alice awakens from her dream). The exhilaration of an amoral anti-society in Alice in Wonderland may be, therefore, in part the exhilaration of a Darwinist dream, of selfishness without restraint.As we all know, Alices route out of Wonderland is to grow out of it. In closing this essay a final suggestion may be made about Carroll and his self-depiction in Wonderland. If the book is full of expressions of anxiet y about relative sizeand the dangers of largeness and smallnessthis may not merely be because a new theory of evolution by natural selection had enlivened this ancient theme. Possibly Carroll had adapted this theory as a private way of symbolizing for himself the anxieties and dangers of his relationship withAlice and the other Liddell children. In Morton N. Cohens archives Lewis Carroll, a table numbers the occurrences of guilty self-reproach and resolves to amend in Carrolls diaries and shows how these peaked at the time of his deepest involvement with the Liddell family. (FN60) Is it possible that Carroll, far from suffering a repressed interest in little girls, consciously acknowledged and wrestled in private prayer with his own impossible desires?It seems to become ever more difficult, rather than easier, to read this aspect of Carrolls life. In a recent Times Literary Supplement (February 8, 2002), Karoline Leach argues that Carrolls friendships with children were emphasized in his nephew Stuart Collingwoods biography to distract attention from the potentially more scandalous fact of the older Carrolls friendships with mature women.A letter in response by Jenny Woolf, on February 15, points out that Carrolls sisters continued to recognize Carrolls women friends, so obviously perceived these friendships as chaste, but reminds us of the possibility that Dodgson may have cultivated girl children as friends because of their innocence, because they were sexually safe to him, rather than because they were dangerously enticing.A response to this position, of course, would be that the assiduity with which Carroll cultivated friendships with small girls seems out of proportion to such a purpose. Whatever the truth of these matters, it appears to me that Carroll, inconvenience by the emotional battles documented in his diary, might well have developd a set of imaginative scenarios in which a little girls growing up or down is reversible according to her own desi re this offers one kind of explanation of some of the more mysterious events of Wonderland.The dangerous but lift up aspects of Carrolls relationship with his little friends seems to fit neatly into a tooth and claw model of society, too, for each party to such a friendship, although acting in innocence and affection, has a kind of reserve capacity to destroy, to switch from pet to predator. Carroll might even have dramatized himself as a beast in a Darwinian world in relation to these little girls who are never the right size for him.At times he is only the peta romping, anxious-to-please, but oversized puppy. But there are other times when he might fear becoming the predator, a crocodile whose welcoming smile masks the potential to devour. And conversely, of course, Carrolls beloved little friends had the unreasonable capacity to destroy him, morally and socially, if he should ever overstep the boundaries of decency and trust.Tenniel, presumably unaware of any secret underside t o Carrolls life, was anyway debarred by Victorian figure for children as viewers from depicting the savage underside of Alice. But by referring the reader outward to current controversies and current interests in the natural sciences, he has succeeded toppingly in rendering in art both Carrolls, and his own, grasp of the importance of a new worldview, and of the explosive anxiety and exhilaration to which it gave birth. ADDED MATERIAL ROSE LOVELL-SMITH