Take A Peake At The Twentieth Century's Optimum Alice

Mervyn Peake's 20th Century Update Of Alice.

(All Images Courtesy Of The Estate Of Mervyn Peake and The British Library.)

Is there anything more difficult for an artist than to reinvent, or even try to improve upon, a classic? Sensible creative types (and that's not necessarily an oxymoron) know better than to risk it. Daredevils who choose to attempt it will turn tail and run after watching one shockingly bad example: Gus Van Sant's inexplicable shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

But every once in a while a unique talent with a fresh point of view really can make something old new again. Such an artist strikes the perfect balance between reverence for his source and relevance to his audience. A new exhibit at Yorkshire's Sheffield University Library displays 22 pen and ink drawings and 5 rough sketches which prove that tweaking the traditional can, very rarely, result in a modern masterpiece.

Peake's Rough Sketch Of Alice
Graduating From Pawn To Queen.

The exhibit, Mervyn Peake's Alice, is one of the first to feature material from an archive acquired by the British Library in April of 2010. Author, illustrator, painter, and poet Mervyn Peake is perhaps best known as the creator of the three-volume Gothic-Fantasy tour-de-force, Gormenghast. But Peake also illustrated the work of authors he admired, such as Charles Dickens, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Louis Stevenson, and, of course, Lewis Carroll. A complete set of his original pen and ink drawings for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was part of the voluminous collection of letters, manuscripts, notebooks, sketches, and typescripts, obtained by the library from the Mervyn Peake Estate.

Alice Meets
Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Peake was already a successful painter when he was asked to illustrate Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark in 1941. As a student of fine art, he turned to the masterworks of other illustrators, including Hogarth, Cruickshank, Durer, Blake, Dore, Goya, to perfect his own technique. Peake's illustrative style is noted for its fluid lines, subtle plays of light and shadow, and exacting use of stippling and cross-hatching. There is nothing hackneyed , broad, or leaden in his work. And as a writer himself, he maintained complete respect for the text he had agreed to enhance. The illustrator, he said, should "subordinate [himself] totally to the book, and slide into another man's soul."

Tenniel's Alice Goes Through The Looking Glass.

When he set out to illustrate Alice's Adventures In Wonderland in 1945, Peake knew he had more to deal with than embellishing Lewis Carroll's prose. John Tenniel's wood-cut illustrations for the 1865 first edition of the book were created in close concert with the author. They were so integral to the text that all 2,000 copies of the first printing were recalled when Tenniel found their reproduction of his illustrations to be of inferior quality. A second print run was ordered, and the book became an instant best-seller. Peake was well aware that Tenniel's work was inextricable from Carroll's text for many readers: "He is inviolate, for he is embedded in the very fabric of childhood memories."

Peake's Alice Goes Through
The Mirror Crack'd.

But Peake had tremendous faith in his artistic talent. He was willing to gamble that his 20th century painter's eye could bring a fresh perspective to Carroll's Victorian text. Tenniel's view of Alice was colored by the manners and morals of his age, and by his background as a cartoonist. He was a master of the style of illustration favored by the 19th century upper crust, and his conservative political cartoons were a regular feature in Punch. His Alice is quite a proper, if unusually adventurous, young lady. Peake's Alice is very much a creation of the 20th century.

Peake's Rough Sketch
Of The Queen Of Hearts.

Mervyn Peake's artistic vision was shaped by his exposure to three distinct cultures. He grew up in a walled compound built for English missionaries in pre-revolutionary China. As a young man he returned to England, in the twilight of the empire between the two world wars. Finally, he was a post-war artist, acting as an illustrator for journalists documenting conditions in battle-scarred Europe. One of Peake's first post-war assignments was a 1945 stint in Germany. Here he witnessed first hand the bombed-out rubble which was all that remained of what had been the city of Bonn. As Peake observed in a letter to his wife: "Terrible as the bombing of London was, it is absolutely nothing – nothing compared with this unutterable desolation." But there was worse to come as he continued his travels through the ruined nation.

Mervyn Peake Sketches
Amidst The Ruins Of Germany. (1945)

In a heart wrenching letter home, Peake wrote of the Cologne Cathedral, the lone building left standing in a sea of wreckage and debris: "Bonn was nothing to Cologne from the point of view of destruction. It is incredible how the cathedral has remained, lifting itself high into the air so gloriously, while around it the city lies broken to pieces, and in the city I smelt for the first time in my life the sweet, pungent, musty smell of death. It is still in the air, thick, sweet, rotten and penetrating… But the cathedral arises like a dream – something quite new to me as an experience – a tall poem of stone with sudden, inspired flair of the lyric and yet with the staying power, mammoth qualities and abundance of the epic. Before it and beside me stood a German soldier, still in his war-worn, greeny-coloured uniform. His face betrayed nothing. Cologne lay about him like a shattered life – a memory torn out."

The Comsumptive, Belsen 1945.

But a final memory from Germany haunted Peake most of all. He was one of the first civilians to enter the just liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. His harrowing sketches of the victims who survived unimaginable horrors there are the human equivalent of the Cologne Cathedral. They are the last bastion of humanity left standing in a hell on earth where men, women, and children were routinely and relentlessly murdered; reduced to anonymous corpses dumped in mass graves, or incinerated into piles of ash. Like the cathedral, the survivors of this ultimate evil "arise like a dream" from a human wasteland rank with the "thick, sweet, rotten and penetrating" smell of death.

Peake's White Rabbit
In His Nightmarish Wonderland.

Peake's experiences in post-war Germany, along with witnessing the fall of the Imperial China as a child and the decline of the British Empire as an adult, had a profound effect on his art. This shows most notably in his own dark creations, but is no less omnipresent in his illustrations for the works of other authors. It is readily seen in the Alice In Wonderland illustrations now on show in Sheffield. Peake's Alice is a dewy-eyed gamine set adrift in a very dark and dangerous Wonderland.

The Duchess And Her Baby:
Two Of Wonderland's Grotesques.

Unlike Tenniel's Victorian lass, with a moral compass forever set to return her to the true North of proper society, Peake's Alice seems far more capable of succumbing to the topsy-turvy, dog-eat-dog anarchy that reigns in Wonderland. The reader feels a genuine fear for her safety in a sea filled with monstrous grotesques, where she may or may not be able to keep her head above water--or even attached to her shoulders. Mervyn Peake's Alice both enriches Carroll's text, and illuminates it in a way impossible for a 19th century artist. This Alice starts out as a naive English rose, but her exposure to the winds of Wonderland teaches her the necessity of growing thorns. She's a survivor of a trip to the netherworld, one of the lucky few who make it out alive but lose their innocence and illusions in the process. She returns from Wonderland a wised-up, clued-in sophisticate--impossible for a straitlaced gentleman like Tenniel to imagine, much less depict.

The Mad Tea Party:
Fiddling While Wonderland Burns.

Mervyn Peake was praised by Graham Greene as "the first artist since Tenniel to recast Alice in a contemporary mould." Later acclaimed author Will Self remarked that Peake's version of Carroll's fantasy world was "as valid a depiction of Wonderland as Tenniel's, and arguably the best one achieved since his." Peake's son Sebastian, who opened the exhibition and manages the Peake Estate, including two excellent official websites, said: "I'm sure that had my father been alive he would have been delighted to see his illustrations to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland displayed in such glorious surroundings. With ample space for each drawing to be seen as a separate work within the collection, each of the characters depicted can come to life, reminding the viewer that the basis of any interpretation is vision."

Readers are invited to examine Mervyn Peake's work in person at Sheffield University Library or online at the British Library, and to contemplate what the finest 21st Century artist's vision of Wonderland might look like.

__________

Previously On Booktryst:
200 Rabbit Holes Await At Canadian Library
Peake Archive Takes British Library To New Heights

200 Rabbit Holes Await At Canadian Library

Sir John Tenniel's Illustration of Alice And The Cheshire Cat, From Lewis Carroll's
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, 1865.
(Images Courtesy of University Of British Columbia's Alice 100 Collection.)

The release of Tim Burton's feature film version of Alice In Wonderland in March, 2010 has returned media focus to Lewis Carroll's 1865 classic tale once again. And this means that all eyes are also back on the many previous visualizations of the piece, including Sir John Tenniel's nonpareil original illustrations. For as the first sentence of the book concludes: "Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, and where is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations?" Certainly Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has always been loved by readers and viewers for the many illustrations and images that augment and enrich the words, as much as for Carroll's ingeniously inventive and complex text.

Surrealist Salvador Dali's Interpretation Of The Mad Tea Party, 1969.

Bob Nixon of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) was prompted by the release of Burton's film to visit one of the most outstanding library collections of "Wonderlandiana" in the world, held by the University of British Columbia's Rare Books and Special Collections Department (UBC RBSC.) This collection of nearly 500 books was amassed by Victoria rare book dealer and librarian, R.D. Hilton Smith. It features more than 200 editions of Alice, containing the work of over 80 illustrators (including a calf-bound first edition signed by Alice Liddell Hargreaves). The works were donated to the UBC RBSC in 1965 by the graduating class of 1925, to celebrate Alice's centennial, and their own 40th anniversary. Together they are known as "The Alice 100 Collection."

Australian Artist Charles Blackman's Painting Alice In The Boat, circa 1956.

Such a rich collection offers a unique opportunity to compare the many artistic interpretations of the land down the rabbit hole, well past the center of the earth. The place where Alice at first believes she'll "come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards," but that turns out to be far "curiouser and curiouser" than she could ever imagine.

One Of Lewis Carroll's Own Drawings Of Alice, Upon Which Tenniel Was Told To Base His Work.

The first illustrator of Alice's Adventure's In Wonderland was the author himself. But Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll's real name) was at least modest enough to know he was more talented as a writer than an artist. On the advice of a close friend, he hired noted cartoonist Sir John Tenniel to produce drawings for the published version of the book. Unfortunately for Tenniel, the fact that Dodgson already had a precise personal vision of how the characters should look meant that he insisted on giving the artist instruction for each and every picture down to the smallest of details. This nearly drove Tenniel mad, to the point where he initially refused to collaborate with Carroll on the sequel, Alice, Through The Looking Glass. Tenniel's illustrations remain the standard by which all subsequent visual imaginings of Alice are measured, as Tim Burton remarked:"If you go back to Tenniel, so much of his work is what stays in your mind about Alice and about Wonderland. Alice and the characters have been done so many times and in so many ways, but Tenniel's art really lasts there in your memory."

Sir John Tenniel's Original Illustration of The Mad Tea Party, 1865.

Nonetheless, many artists over the years have been tempted by the incredible imagination of Carroll's fantastic tale to attempt to make their own mark on the material Tenniel envisioned so brilliantly. Immediately upon expiration of the British copyright for Carroll and Tenniel's original work in 1907, illustrators lined up to take a crack at the book. (And the first film adaptation was made even earlier: a 12 minute silent version was directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow in 1903.) To date more than 50 artists have published illustrated versions of Alice, including Charles Blackman, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Arthur Rackham, and Ralph Steadman. A few examples of illustrations for the same scene, the last image of Wonderland at the end of Chapter 12, reveal the varied artistic takes on this passage: "'Who cares for you?' said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) 'You're nothing but a pack of cards!' At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger..."

A.E. Jackson, 1915.

Arthur Rackham, 1907.


Gwynedd M. Hudson, 1922.

A Pop-Up Book Based On Tenniel's Illustrations, From The Alice 100 Collection, Date Unknown.

The Image From An Actual Deck Of Cards.

Sir John Tenniel's Incomparable 1865 Original.

Any discussion of Alice's Adventure's In Wonderland is by definition bizarre, and here are two of the most far-out variants yet devised:

A book version of a 1939 radio play in which Alice's role is taken on by a spoiled child named Adolf Hitler:

Dyrenforth, James and Max Kester. Adolf In Bluderland, Illustrated By Norman Mansbridge. Lindon: Frederick Muller, 1939.

And finally some LSD (AKA Blotter Acid) promising a very different trip to Wonderland than Alice's:

(Anonymously Submitted Image, Courtesy of Erowid.Org)

The reproduction of the above image is in no way an endorsement of such an egregious misuse of Tenniel's magnificent illustrations...

Posted by Nancy Mattoon