Curiouser
Benny Green
The Wasp in a Wig Lewis Carroll (Macmillan E1.95) Lewis Carroll Observed edited by Edward Giuliano (Hodder and Stoughton £8.50) It was the Duck who suggested it. After George Macdonald's children had announced that 'there ought to be sixty thousand volumes of it,' Canon Duckworth nominated John Tenniel as a likely illustrator of the Reverend Mr Dodgson's little book about a girl who falls down the rabbit-hole. Dodgson approved, as far as he could approve of any suggestion involving
an illustrator for Alice. For he was something of an illustrator himself, and had embellished the original manuscript copy of Alice's Adventures Underground with thirty7two drawings not altogether without merit, and of which at least one, showing Bill the Lizard flying out of the chimney, was clearly the model for the drawing of that incident which the world came to know. Fortunately, Dodgson possessed just enough artistic detachment to sense that his own draughtsmanship was not good enough, and that his tendency to the saccharine might wreck the whole enterprise. So he followed the Duck's advice and laid the foundation of the partnership which ranks with that between Gilbert and Sullivan as the most improbable reconciliation of opposites in the entire Victorian era.
When the Duck prevailed upon the Dodo to work with Tenniel, the artist was just about to come into his kingdom. It was 1864, the year that John Leech died and Tenniel succeeded him as first cartoonist for Punch. Tenniel, a one-eyed, self-taught, strong-minded character, held that post for exactly fifty years, during which time he gave the world a visual personification of the age by creating the British Lion; later he slipped his creation into Through the Looking Glass, in the episode of the Lion andthe Unicorn, imparting so Gladstonian an aspect to the creature as to draw down on Dodgson's innocent head the wrath of the Liberal conscience. Dodgson may be pardoned for assuming that the man who can draw Great Britain as a lion can draw anything. In this assumption he was spectacularly mistaken.
The collaboration between the two men proceeded in comically irascible style, Dodgson saying he liked the Humpty Dumpty drawing and nothing else, Tenniel confiding to a friend that 'Dodgson is impossible.' When Dodgson invites Tenniel to draw Alice from a photograph, Tenniel responds by asking Dodgson how he, Dodgson, would feel if someone offered him a copy of the multiplication tables. And
although seven years after Wonderland the partnership was resumed, by the end of the Looking-Glass affair Tenniel had had enough, achieving a masterpiece of tact and understatement by remarking, 'With Through the Looking Glass, the faculty of making book illustrations departed from me.' It had very nearly departed from him before then, while the work was still in the balance, because Tenniel had finally been pushed to the point where he had to tell Dodgson that the demands being made upon his artistic resources were too great.
Dodgson had written an episode for Through the Looking Glass, just after the encounter with the White Knight and just before Alice becomes a queen. (For those who prefer to work from the text, the expunged episode fits in immediately after the sentence 'A very few steps brought her to the edge of the brook'). In the published version, the narrative continues "'The Eighth Square at last!,' she cried,' but originally there had been a passage of around 1300 words beginning: However unhappy the wasp may have been, it was nothing to the misery experienced by Tenniel when he learned that he was expected to draw this wasp wearing a wig. Tenniel thought about it, reread the chapter and decided that even if it was wonderful prose, which it wasn't, the task of drawing a wasp in a yellow wig was too much to ask. 'Don't think me brutal', he writes to Dodgson, 'but the wasp chapter doesn't interest me in the least.' Dodgson received this communication with surprising equanimity, withdrew the episode and never mentioned the bewigged wasp again. The copies of the episode were long ago assumed to have been lost, until in 1974 the galley proofs turned up at a London sale room. They were purchased by the inevitable rare book dealer from Manhattan who subsequently allowed them to be published, hence this slim volume, ably edited by the master-Carrollian Martin Gardner. It seems to me that arguments as to the merits of this missing fragment are beside the point, which is that to anyone familiar with the Alice books, any fresh communication from Wonderland which comes to light, even a feeble one, will hold too much interest to be ignored. Not that The Wasp in a Wig is feeble. While not in the same street as the episode of genius it was meant to follow, featuring the White Knight, it remains an intriguing view of Looking-Glass Land we have never seenbefore. Which is something
that cannot, alas, be said for the ruminations of Carrollians who compile symposiums. As the figure of DodgSon recedes, so the speculations of the academics grow curiouser and curiouser, until in Lewis Carroll Observed, we get an essay entitled 'Laughing and Grief: What's so Funny About "Alice in Wonderland",' which appears to have been written by someone congenitally incapable of laughter.
Martin Gardner appears once more with a readable piece about Dodgson as a rhyming parodist, and some of the illustrations are superlative. But I cannot help thinking that when Mr Gardner published his Annotated Alice, he took rational scholarship on the subject as far as it can go without making quacking noises.
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