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 HatterTenniel did a lot of work that still echoes in today’s popular culture, as we see in the image “The Patient Ass,” where the animal is being crushed under the weight of increasing income taxes. These images would have been works that people in Tenniel’s time might have known him for, and therefore when they picked up the Alice works, they would have known that there might be some subtexts running through Tenniel’s illustrations. This would have changed the way they read the texts, setting the stage for major changes in the ways we conceptualize conversations taking place between images and text.   There were other subtexts in Alice that likely got people thinking this way about Tenniel’s illustrations. First, he used historical models for his characters. The Hatter, perhaps the most popular Alice character except for Alice herself, was likely modeled on Theophilus Carter, a sort of zany inventor of the day (Carroll, Haughton, and Tenniel 310). Carter was most well known for his invention of the combined bed and alarm clock, which dumped the sleeper into a tub of cold water upon waking to ensure that he didn’t go back to sleep. Tenniel was also known for his political caricatures of figures like Benjamin Disreali and William Gladstone, both of whom were British politicians and prime ministers in this era. It has been suggested and is widely believed that Gladstone is the goat and Disreali is the man dressed in white paper and in this illustration from the beginning of Through the Looking Glass (Carroll, Haughton, and Tenniel xlviii).
 
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