Alice's adventures in wonderland and through the looking glass
Alice's adventures in wonderland and through the looking glass
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
with all forty Two Illustrations
By Sir John Tenniel
Through the Looking Glass and
What Alice found there
with All Fifty Illustrations
By Sir John Tenniel
A distinguished scholar and mathematician is most well known for creating Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books. These deeply but gently satiric stories filled with wordplay, logic, and fantasy, are considered masterpieces of English Literature. In Lewis Carroll's childlike presentation of reality, adults are cruel, immature, irresponsible, impulsive, and self-indulgent.
Later in life summoning his mathematical abilities to issues related to electoral politics, he simultaneously made significant contributions both to political science with his proposals for selecting the most preferred candidates, promoting minority representation, and fair proportional representation, and to mathematics with ideas that half a century later became known as game theory.
A beacon in the late nineteenth-century world of illustration. Largely self-taught at the age of sixteen, he exhibited his first oil painting at the Society of British Artists. At the age of twenty a fencing accident caused him to lose sight in one eye. Undeterred by the partial loss of sight, Tenniel continued on his path as an artist. In 1850, Tenniel joined Punch Magazine as a cartoonist, a position he held until 1864 when he replaced his friend John Leech as the principal cartoonist after his death. He held this position until the age of 80 in 1900.
However, it was his illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that truly made him a household name. Here Tenniel found a text fully conducive to the nature of his genius, and there can be no doubt that his illustrations played an important role in ensuring both books' immediate and continued success. One of the distinctive characteristics of Tenniel’s artistic methods was that he would never draw from life. Tenniel worked best when he referred to the techniques and images in his visual memory and drew without observation. A diversion from his contemporaries who believed drawing from nature was the only way to truth in art. Carroll stated, “Mr. Tenniel is the only artist who has drawn for me who resolutely refused to use a model and declared he no more needed one than I should need a multiplication table to work a mathematical problem.” Dodgson and Tenniel being very different men, the collaboration was perhaps an unlikely one, and although undoubtedly successful, both seem to have come away from it to some extent dissatisfied. Although flattered by the fame that his illustrations for Carroll’s two books had gained him, Tenniel viewed the work on these classics as a disruption to his routine. Tenniel was granted a knighthood for his political cartoons at Punch, as well as for his illustrations in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
Did you notice how similar the white knight in “Through the Looking Glass” is to the good knight Sir John Tenniel? Could this be Alice’s white Knight?
