About the AuthorErin Clark Frost is a graduate assistant at Illinois State University. She is pursuing a PhD with specializations in rhetoric and composition, technical communication, and women's and gender studies. She especially enjoys studying visible rhetoric and culture.
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The Brothers TweedleThese pictures are also interesting because they suggest a possibility that the Disney illustrators stayed more true to Tenniel’s illustrations than the Disney writers did to Carroll’s text. This final set of images shows the brothers Tweedle—Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I think it’s apparent that if Tenniel were alive today and maintained a copyright on this image, he would certainly have grounds for a lawsuit based upon how close these images are. The Disney illustrators certainly drew upon Tenniel’s work in representing Carroll’s text in their movie.
  It’s important also to know the context of Sir John Tenniel and how people would have known him in the 1860s and 1870s when he was working on the Alice books. Tenniel was knighted in 1893, underlining the cultural importance of his work (“Sir John Tenniel”). Tenniel was also a children’s illustrator for other woks as well as being a political cartoonist for Punch magazine. His name was almost synonymous with Punch. In fact, when people picked up Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, they likely would have known John Tenniel’s name and not Lewis Carroll’s. In 1865, Tenniel agreed to illustrate Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for Carroll—nothing short of a miracle given his heavy workload, but Carroll was very convincing. In 1872 he agreed to collaborate with Carroll again on Through the Looking Glass, although after that he called the man impossible and refused to ever work with Carroll again. Besides being an important political cartoonist of the era and a popular children’s illustrator, Tenniel was also known for his work in high art and he certainly would have known what was happening on the art scene. Realism and naturalism were in vogue at this time, and both of these movements had artists attempting to portray objects as they truly are. In naturalism, it is particularly important that an object be shown in its natural environment. Obviously some tensions quickly arise with Carroll’s text and Tenniel’s illustrations. A hookah, for example, is not traditionally found in the hands of a caterpillar on the back of a mushroom. The art scene—and Tenniel—was also starting to revert to some pre-Raphael influences at this time. Raphael introduced a style of art in which flaws were glossed over and pieces looked almost airbrushed. This reversion to a style that tried to get at the real eventually gave rise to surrealism. This was after Tenniel’s death, but it’s likely that Tenniel had a great influence on the surrealist movement. Surrealism focused on the role of the unconscious in art, flaws and all, and it broke down the line between what is real and what is imaginary, playing with the tension also between sense and nonsense, a tension that runs throughout the Alice books. It’s important to understand that Tenniel knew the art scene at the time of these illustrations and that many of his readers would have understood these things as well.
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