Aug. 27, 2026
Mythmakers Encore: John Tenniel
Key Takeaways
- Sir John Tenniel, the legendary illustrator behind Lewis Carroll's Alice books, originally viewed the Alice commission as a sideshow to his main career as a lead satirical illustrator for Punch magazine.
- Tenniel suffered a tragic fencing accident in his youth that caused him to gradually lose sight in his right eye, a secret he kept from his father to spare him worry.
- His artistic style was heavily influenced by the theater, his photographic memory, and the German Nazarene movement, which emphasized shaded outlines and narrative depth.
- Tenniel made history as the first illustrator ever to be knighted for his artistic contributions, cementing a legacy that bridged political satire and classic fantasy illustration.
- The enduring success of the Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass illustrations demonstrates the immense power of a close, collaborative relationship between a writer and an artist.
Let's celebrate the contribution to fantasy of our favourite illustrators. Today we start with the grandaddy of Oxford Fantasy Illustration, Sir John Tenniel, the illustrator behind the Alice in Wonderland images. Find out about the unfortunate accident in his youth that he hid from his father, his extraordinary memory and his artistic influences. Guess who was at his retirement dinner? It is quite a fantasy dinner party moment!
00:00 Introduction: Welcome to Mythmakers and Celebrating Illustrators
01:07 John Tenniel: The Man Behind Alice's Wonderland
02:22 A Victorian Life: Family, Tragedy, and the Fencing Accident
05:49 Artistic Influences: From Theatre to the Nazarene Movement
08:37 Breaking Through: The Houses of Parliament Competition
09:24 The Craft of Victorian Illustration: From Drawing to Woodblock
10:26 Meeting Lewis Carroll: The Perfect Collaboration
11:23 Words and Images United: The Alice Books as Visual Experience
12:22 A Knighted Legacy: Sir John Tenniel's Retirement and Recognition
13:28 Enduring Impact: Tenniel's Legacy in Fantasy Illustration
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who illustrated the original Alice in Wonderland books?
The original illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass were created by Sir John Tenniel.
What was Sir John Tenniel's primary job?
While famous for his fairy tale illustrations, Tenniel's main role was as a lead political cartoonist and illustrator for the Victorian satirical magazine Punch.
Was John Tenniel the first illustrator to be knighted?
Yes, Sir John Tenniel achieved the historic distinction of becoming the very first illustrator to be made a knight for his contributions to art.
How did John Tenniel lose vision in his eye?
As a young man, Tenniel accidentally took a hit to the eye from a foil tip during a fencing match with his father, gradually losing sight in that eye over his lifetime.
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Hello and welcome to Myth Makers.
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Myth Makers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
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Now, my name is Julia Golding and I'm the director of the centre and also an author.
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One thing I'm not, though, is a professional illustrator.
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I do like drawing and I have had a few maps included in books, that kind of thing.
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But I absolutely take my hat off to anybody who can illustrate art.
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And in this era when there's a lot of discussion about AI generated images and their value versus those produced by real people, I thought I would start dedicating a few of our MythMaker podcasts to the people behind some of the most famous illustrations that we all have in our imaginations to help us understand somebody's fantasy world.
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Thinking about this, I knew exactly where I wanted to start.
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I wanted to start by celebrating John Tenniel, who is associated very strongly.
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In fact, he is the original illustrator of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass.
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Now, the one thing about John Tenniel, which struck me when I began reading up about him, in fact, going down my own kind of rabbit hole following things about him, was that he himself saw the Alice Commission as somewhat of a sideshow to his main role, which was as a lead illustrator for the satirical magazine Punch.
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Yeah.
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Punch was a magazine famous in the Victorian times for its political satires.
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And if you pick up any history book about that era, you'll no doubt find elements of Punch brought in to illustrate it.
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It's become synonymous with the period.
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And he was one of the lead illustrators.
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And so his weekly life was thinking about political cartoons.
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But let's start at the very beginning.
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So he was one of a large family born at the beginning of the 19th century, and he had actually a long life.
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He died either in 1992 or 1993, because he died around his birthday, in 1914.
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So he basically...
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lived the whole Victorian period and into the Edwardian period before dying.
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His actual private life doesn't seem that tempestuous, but it is quite sad in that there's quite a lot of deaths in the family and his own wife
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whom he married in 1853, only survived two and a half years.
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She had ill health.
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So she died in 1856.
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Her name was Julia from an Italian family.
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And after that, his mother-in-law stayed with him in his house until her death and then a sister.
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So he was a man without his own family, next generation family, so living quite quietly.
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So a lot of the energy and energy
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his connections were through his work and his art, from what I can gather.
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He also does seem an incredibly kind man and desperate not to make other people suffer.
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One of the strange things in his biography that came up in a number of sources talking about him is that his father was a fencing and dance master.
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Sounds quite a Dickensian character.
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The sort of person who gave lessons in schools to teach people those social graces.
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And when he was young, he was said to have been fencing with his father, just as a friendly match.
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And the tip came off the end of his father's foil, which went into Tenniel's eye and caused some damage.
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And then increasingly over life, he lost the sight of that eye and, again, he lost the sight of that eye.
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But he never told his father because he didn't want his father to worry about him, which I think that is, sometimes it's these small things about somebody.
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It's a big event in his life, but a habit or a trait like that really says a lot about the innate kindness of someone.
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And actually, when you look at the world of Alice's drawing, so there is a satirical
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feel to it and certainly a quirkiness and a grotesqueness.
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There's also an element of is kindness the right word?
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I always feel they feel quite a welcoming world despite the fact that the characters are so outrageous.
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Anyway, so that was some of the things I learned about him as a person.
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He also had the distinction of having a photographic memory.
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And the way he got into art was he would go around sketching, creating a portfolio, which got him into the Royal College of Art.
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And these were in the era when what you did is you went and drew statues, Greek statues, that kind of thing, and showed that you were a good draftsman.
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He was very unimpressed by the education he then got at college.
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And it was other places that he drew his inspiration, notably the theatre.
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He would go and sketch, sitting, watching performances.
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He would appear in them himself.
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There's an article about him on the V&A website, the Victoria and Albert Museum website,
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when they had an exhibition of his work, which includes the absolute classic photo of him because he's in the era when photography is just happening.
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He's in a production which is a benefit performance, like a charity performance.
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And it's a kind of who's who of luminaries at the time, including Arthur Sullivan, the Gilbert and Sullivan composer, and Ellen Terry, who was the lead actress of her day.
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She was...
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the most famous.
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And he's there in the cast with his wonderful walrus moustache in the back row.
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Well worth looking at.
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So, theatre was definitely an influence, but looking through where he got his artistic influence from, many of the articles, books about him mentioned the Nazarene movement of the early 19th century.
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Now, this was new to me.
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My background is more in literature rather than in the fine arts.
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So, I hadn't really heard of this
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which was a German romantic movement of young artists who were revolting against the idea of the neoclassicism.
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They thought that was cold and lacked spirituality.
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And they lived together in an experimental community.
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They left Germany, went to Rome,
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and a group of them lived together for a few years until about 1830, where they were taking their models from medieval and early Renaissance art.
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This makes them precursors to the movements I am more familiar with, and I expect many of you are, which is the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
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It was
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the German version of this, the Nazarene movement that influenced Tenniel.
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And if you're thinking, well, what does that mean?
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Apparently, it means that you have a sort of shaded outline.
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And if you think of how the Alice illustrations are produced, you have that.
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You've got the sort of outline, but you've got the shades and the hatching to kind of give the color, the
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the sense of the character and the landscapes.
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It also leads to, and it's a good way of building up the basis of a fresco.
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There was in public buildings, there was a fashion for the old idea of frescoes, which obviously is a, you would have found in many buildings in Greece and Rome, but also in medieval periods, Antenio was part of that movement because he entered a competition
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before he was known, to design a fresco for the newly rebuilt Houses of Parliament.
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The old Houses of Parliament, or parts of them, had burnt down.
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And the building that you know today, the one with Big Ben, was built in the 1830s.
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And he entered that competition and won, and that became his sort of start in life.
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So competitions are obviously good.
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He then became an illustrator for books and his first commission in that way was the 1842 Book of British Ballads.
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He was also illustrating for people like Dickens in the magazine world.
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And it was from that that he then got the role of working for Punch, which demanded a lot of drawings each week.
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So how did they actually go about doing their art?
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Now we're used to the idea of people designing on computers and iPads and what have you.
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What was the equivalent then?
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Well, he would draw his illustrations and then it would be transferred to woodblocks.
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And one of the reasons why he got his job was he knew how to do that.
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And these wood blocks would then be, they're engraved by people who knew how to do that.
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And then they were turned into electrolyte copies for reproduction.
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That was what the publisher used.
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So there's like a three-stage process.
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You've got the drawing.
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So there's Tenniel doing his drawing.
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But he has to bear in mind that it's going to become a wood block.
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Yeah.
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So you can only use techniques that transfer to wood.
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They're engraved on the wood block and then become electrotype copies.
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So he had this long and successful career.
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And during that, he met many people in the Victorian establishment.
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And one of those people he met was Lewis Carroll.
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And so Lewis Carroll probably didn't know him from the time before Punch, as far as we can tell, but he understood that there was something, uh, particularly suited the world of the caricature cartoon that suited the zany world of Alice in Wonderland.
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And there were a number of things, I think, that drew him to Tenniel.
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One is this ability to have something that could be well-produced in a book.
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You know, he's got the craft, he's got the craft.
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But there's a sense of,
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something specific about the faces.
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He's very good at individual characters and even his settings, they're just little details which really do root it.
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And another part which is pushing the grotesque but not to the point where it becomes to act against the words.
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There's a very important relationship between the words and the illustrations in the Alice books.
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If you've looked at and
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one that reproduces the original pages, you'll see that the words fit where the illustrations are and vice versa.
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It's not a situation where you've got color plates that sort of slot into the book and could almost be anywhere.
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The words and the illustrations work together in the same way the shape poem, like the mouse's tail, has to be set in a certain way.
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So it is very much a collaboration
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Probably the words came first, it's that thing.
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The words came first, but then once they were putting it in the book, the illustrations were very much meant to enhance the experience of reading.
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So how did it come to an end?
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So after these...
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two most famous commissions.
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He also did further work for Lewis Cowell, but they are obviously his most famous ones.
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He lived a long, successful life.
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One fascinating thing about John Tenniel, which I had no idea about before I started reading up on him,
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was that he was the first illustrator to be made into a knight.
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So he ended his life as Sir John Tenniel.
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After that stage, it was quite rare for somebody in the arts to be knighted, but there was a change during the Victorian period with famous actors being knighted and the occasional author.
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But he was the first in the illustrators to be knighted for that reason.
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When he retired because of his failing eyesight, amongst other things, he had an amazing retirement banquet where on the guest list were Bram Stoker, he of Dracula, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he of Sherlock fame.
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So what an amazing...
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banquet.
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It was actually chaired by the then leader of the House of Commons.
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He did straddle this world between politics and literature, which makes him a very interesting figure.
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What has been his legacy?
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Well, I think his legacy is seen in later illustrators like Chris Riddell.
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The idea that you can be both a cartoonist and an illustrator seems to have a sound lineage.
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I think he also set up this idea that you could make a book
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almost like a visual experience.
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You knew exactly what it was.
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It was so distinct.
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And because it's never really gone out of fashion, why bother to re-illustrate Alice?
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And people have done, but all of us have in our minds those original images, unless you grew up on the Disney film, which I'm sorry if you did, but even the Disney film has the 10-year-old drawings underneath.
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And I think that this shows how when there's a really good, strong collaboration between an artist and the writer, as there is in this case, that this is something that no...
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commission that doesn't involve real people.
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So no sort of, it could be AI generated or just an illustrator doing drawings when they haven't read the book, which something does happen.
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You know, you often get front covers sent to you as authors where you think, have they read the book?
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When there is actually the knowledge of the material and understanding of the material, the illustrations really send it off into a much better way.
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they improve the artistic experience.
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And I think the other thing about Tenniel is that there's an understanding that fantasy can be serious, seriously funny, but also serious.
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I think the identity of the Alice books is adult.
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The philosophy of it is something which definitely you realize as you get older how clever they are.
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In fact, I've liked them more reading them as an adult than I probably did as a child because there's something very random and anarchic and unsafe about the Alice worlds, which as a child you were unsettled by.
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Whereas now as an adult, I think they're absolutely brilliant.
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So...
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I think the Tenniel drawings grow with that, a bit like Alice grows and shrinks.
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So here we are with Tenniel at the beginning of the most famous phase of Oxford fantasy.
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The artist who gave an eye equivalent for the reading experience of the Alice books.
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And it goes to show that illustrators come in all kinds of flavours.
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Here we've got a grand old man of political satire in Victorian period, able to turn his hand to these charming but challenging illustrations.
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If you have a favourite illustrator, do let us know.
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And we look to feature their work in a later episode.
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Thank you very much for listening.
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Thanks for listening to MythMakers Podcast.
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Brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
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Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.org to join in the fun.
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1
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Hello and welcome to Myth Makers.
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00:00:07.808 --> 00:00:15.416
Myth Makers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
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00:00:16.409 --> 00:00:21.752
Now, my name is Julia Golding and I'm the director of the centre and also an author.
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00:00:22.532 --> 00:00:26.674
One thing I'm not, though, is a professional illustrator.
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00:00:27.095 --> 00:00:32.497
I do like drawing and I have had a few maps included in books, that kind of thing.
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00:00:32.878 --> 00:00:38.641
But I absolutely take my hat off to anybody who can illustrate art.
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00:00:39.421 --> 00:01:03.564
And in this era when there's a lot of discussion about AI generated images and their value versus those produced by real people, I thought I would start dedicating a few of our MythMaker podcasts to the people behind some of the most famous illustrations that we all have in our imaginations to help us understand somebody's fantasy world.
8
00:01:04.545 --> 00:01:07.668
Thinking about this, I knew exactly where I wanted to start.
9
00:01:07.748 --> 00:01:14.674
I wanted to start by celebrating John Tenniel, who is associated very strongly.
10
00:01:14.754 --> 00:01:21.800
In fact, he is the original illustrator of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass.
11
00:01:23.254 --> 00:01:49.049
Now, the one thing about John Tenniel, which struck me when I began reading up about him, in fact, going down my own kind of rabbit hole following things about him, was that he himself saw the Alice Commission as somewhat of a sideshow to his main role, which was as a lead illustrator for the satirical magazine Punch.
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Yeah.
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Punch was a magazine famous in the Victorian times for its political satires.
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And if you pick up any history book about that era, you'll no doubt find elements of Punch brought in to illustrate it.
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It's become synonymous with the period.
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And he was one of the lead illustrators.
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And so his weekly life was thinking about political cartoons.
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But let's start at the very beginning.
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So he was one of a large family born at the beginning of the 19th century, and he had actually a long life.
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He died either in 1992 or 1993, because he died around his birthday, in 1914.
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So he basically...
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lived the whole Victorian period and into the Edwardian period before dying.
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His actual private life doesn't seem that tempestuous, but it is quite sad in that there's quite a lot of deaths in the family and his own wife
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whom he married in 1853, only survived two and a half years.
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She had ill health.
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So she died in 1856.
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Her name was Julia from an Italian family.
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And after that, his mother-in-law stayed with him in his house until her death and then a sister.
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So he was a man without his own family, next generation family, so living quite quietly.
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So a lot of the energy and energy
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his connections were through his work and his art, from what I can gather.
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He also does seem an incredibly kind man and desperate not to make other people suffer.
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One of the strange things in his biography that came up in a number of sources talking about him is that his father was a fencing and dance master.
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Sounds quite a Dickensian character.
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The sort of person who gave lessons in schools to teach people those social graces.
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And when he was young, he was said to have been fencing with his father, just as a friendly match.
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And the tip came off the end of his father's foil, which went into Tenniel's eye and caused some damage.
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And then increasingly over life, he lost the sight of that eye and, again, he lost the sight of that eye.
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But he never told his father because he didn't want his father to worry about him, which I think that is, sometimes it's these small things about somebody.
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It's a big event in his life, but a habit or a trait like that really says a lot about the innate kindness of someone.
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And actually, when you look at the world of Alice's drawing, so there is a satirical
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feel to it and certainly a quirkiness and a grotesqueness.
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There's also an element of is kindness the right word?
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I always feel they feel quite a welcoming world despite the fact that the characters are so outrageous.
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Anyway, so that was some of the things I learned about him as a person.
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He also had the distinction of having a photographic memory.
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And the way he got into art was he would go around sketching, creating a portfolio, which got him into the Royal College of Art.
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And these were in the era when what you did is you went and drew statues, Greek statues, that kind of thing, and showed that you were a good draftsman.
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He was very unimpressed by the education he then got at college.
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And it was other places that he drew his inspiration, notably the theatre.
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He would go and sketch, sitting, watching performances.
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He would appear in them himself.
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There's an article about him on the V&A website, the Victoria and Albert Museum website,
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when they had an exhibition of his work, which includes the absolute classic photo of him because he's in the era when photography is just happening.
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He's in a production which is a benefit performance, like a charity performance.
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And it's a kind of who's who of luminaries at the time, including Arthur Sullivan, the Gilbert and Sullivan composer, and Ellen Terry, who was the lead actress of her day.
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She was...
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the most famous.
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And he's there in the cast with his wonderful walrus moustache in the back row.
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Well worth looking at.
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So, theatre was definitely an influence, but looking through where he got his artistic influence from, many of the articles, books about him mentioned the Nazarene movement of the early 19th century.
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Now, this was new to me.
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My background is more in literature rather than in the fine arts.
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So, I hadn't really heard of this
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which was a German romantic movement of young artists who were revolting against the idea of the neoclassicism.
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They thought that was cold and lacked spirituality.
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And they lived together in an experimental community.
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They left Germany, went to Rome,
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and a group of them lived together for a few years until about 1830, where they were taking their models from medieval and early Renaissance art.
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This makes them precursors to the movements I am more familiar with, and I expect many of you are, which is the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
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It was
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the German version of this, the Nazarene movement that influenced Tenniel.
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And if you're thinking, well, what does that mean?
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Apparently, it means that you have a sort of shaded outline.
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And if you think of how the Alice illustrations are produced, you have that.
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You've got the sort of outline, but you've got the shades and the hatching to kind of give the color, the
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the sense of the character and the landscapes.
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It also leads to, and it's a good way of building up the basis of a fresco.
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There was in public buildings, there was a fashion for the old idea of frescoes, which obviously is a, you would have found in many buildings in Greece and Rome, but also in medieval periods, Antenio was part of that movement because he entered a competition
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before he was known, to design a fresco for the newly rebuilt Houses of Parliament.
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The old Houses of Parliament, or parts of them, had burnt down.
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And the building that you know today, the one with Big Ben, was built in the 1830s.
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And he entered that competition and won, and that became his sort of start in life.
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So competitions are obviously good.
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He then became an illustrator for books and his first commission in that way was the 1842 Book of British Ballads.
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He was also illustrating for people like Dickens in the magazine world.
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And it was from that that he then got the role of working for Punch, which demanded a lot of drawings each week.
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So how did they actually go about doing their art?
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Now we're used to the idea of people designing on computers and iPads and what have you.
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What was the equivalent then?
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Well, he would draw his illustrations and then it would be transferred to woodblocks.
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And one of the reasons why he got his job was he knew how to do that.
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And these wood blocks would then be, they're engraved by people who knew how to do that.
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And then they were turned into electrolyte copies for reproduction.
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That was what the publisher used.
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So there's like a three-stage process.
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You've got the drawing.
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So there's Tenniel doing his drawing.
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But he has to bear in mind that it's going to become a wood block.
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Yeah.
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So you can only use techniques that transfer to wood.
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They're engraved on the wood block and then become electrotype copies.
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So he had this long and successful career.
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And during that, he met many people in the Victorian establishment.
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And one of those people he met was Lewis Carroll.
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And so Lewis Carroll probably didn't know him from the time before Punch, as far as we can tell, but he understood that there was something, uh, particularly suited the world of the caricature cartoon that suited the zany world of Alice in Wonderland.
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And there were a number of things, I think, that drew him to Tenniel.
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One is this ability to have something that could be well-produced in a book.
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You know, he's got the craft, he's got the craft.
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But there's a sense of,
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something specific about the faces.
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He's very good at individual characters and even his settings, they're just little details which really do root it.
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And another part which is pushing the grotesque but not to the point where it becomes to act against the words.
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There's a very important relationship between the words and the illustrations in the Alice books.
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If you've looked at and
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one that reproduces the original pages, you'll see that the words fit where the illustrations are and vice versa.
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It's not a situation where you've got color plates that sort of slot into the book and could almost be anywhere.
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The words and the illustrations work together in the same way the shape poem, like the mouse's tail, has to be set in a certain way.
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So it is very much a collaboration
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Probably the words came first, it's that thing.
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The words came first, but then once they were putting it in the book, the illustrations were very much meant to enhance the experience of reading.
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So how did it come to an end?
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So after these...
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two most famous commissions.
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He also did further work for Lewis Cowell, but they are obviously his most famous ones.
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He lived a long, successful life.
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One fascinating thing about John Tenniel, which I had no idea about before I started reading up on him,
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was that he was the first illustrator to be made into a knight.
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So he ended his life as Sir John Tenniel.
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After that stage, it was quite rare for somebody in the arts to be knighted, but there was a change during the Victorian period with famous actors being knighted and the occasional author.
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But he was the first in the illustrators to be knighted for that reason.
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When he retired because of his failing eyesight, amongst other things, he had an amazing retirement banquet where on the guest list were Bram Stoker, he of Dracula, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he of Sherlock fame.
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So what an amazing...
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banquet.
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It was actually chaired by the then leader of the House of Commons.
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He did straddle this world between politics and literature, which makes him a very interesting figure.
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What has been his legacy?
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Well, I think his legacy is seen in later illustrators like Chris Riddell.
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The idea that you can be both a cartoonist and an illustrator seems to have a sound lineage.
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I think he also set up this idea that you could make a book
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almost like a visual experience.
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You knew exactly what it was.
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It was so distinct.
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And because it's never really gone out of fashion, why bother to re-illustrate Alice?
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And people have done, but all of us have in our minds those original images, unless you grew up on the Disney film, which I'm sorry if you did, but even the Disney film has the 10-year-old drawings underneath.
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And I think that this shows how when there's a really good, strong collaboration between an artist and the writer, as there is in this case, that this is something that no...
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commission that doesn't involve real people.
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So no sort of, it could be AI generated or just an illustrator doing drawings when they haven't read the book, which something does happen.
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You know, you often get front covers sent to you as authors where you think, have they read the book?
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When there is actually the knowledge of the material and understanding of the material, the illustrations really send it off into a much better way.
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they improve the artistic experience.
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And I think the other thing about Tenniel is that there's an understanding that fantasy can be serious, seriously funny, but also serious.
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I think the identity of the Alice books is adult.
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The philosophy of it is something which definitely you realize as you get older how clever they are.
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In fact, I've liked them more reading them as an adult than I probably did as a child because there's something very random and anarchic and unsafe about the Alice worlds, which as a child you were unsettled by.
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Whereas now as an adult, I think they're absolutely brilliant.
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So...
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I think the Tenniel drawings grow with that, a bit like Alice grows and shrinks.
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So here we are with Tenniel at the beginning of the most famous phase of Oxford fantasy.
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The artist who gave an eye equivalent for the reading experience of the Alice books.
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And it goes to show that illustrators come in all kinds of flavours.
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Here we've got a grand old man of political satire in Victorian period, able to turn his hand to these charming but challenging illustrations.
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If you have a favourite illustrator, do let us know.
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And we look to feature their work in a later episode.
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Thank you very much for listening.
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Thanks for listening to MythMakers Podcast.
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Brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
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Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.org to join in the fun.
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