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Celebrating Fantasy Illustrators - John Tenniel · Mythmakers

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  Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy
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  creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for fantasy. Now my name is Julia Golding and
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  I'm the director of the Centre and also an author. One thing I'm not though is a professional
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  illustrator. 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. And in this era when there's
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  a lot of discussion about AI generated images and their value versus those produced by like real
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  people, I thought I would start dedicating a few of our MythMaker podcasts to the people behind
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  some of the most famous illustrations that we all have in our imaginations to help us understand
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  somebody's fantasy world. And thinking about this I knew exactly where I wanted to start. I wanted
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  to start by celebrating John Teniel who is associated very strongly. In fact he is the original
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  illustrator of Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the looking glass. Now the one thing about
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  John Teniel, which struck me when I began reading up about him, in fact going down my own kind of
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  rabbit hole following things about him, was that he himself saw the Alice commission as somewhat
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  of a side show to his main role, which was as a lead illustrator for the satirical magazine
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  Punch. 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 their era, you'll no doubt find elements of
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  punch you brought in to illustrate it. It's become synonymous with the periods. And he was one of
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  the lead illustrators. And so his weekly life was thinking about political cartoons.
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  But let's start at the very beginning. So he was one of a large family born at the beginning
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  of the 19th century. And he had actually a long life. He died either 92 or 93 because he died
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  around his birthday in 1914. So he basically lived the whole Victorian period and into the Edwardian
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  period before dying. His actual private life doesn't seem that tempestuous, but it is quite sad
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  in that there's quite a lot of deaths in the family and his own wife, whom he married in 1853,
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  only survived two and a half years. She had ill health. So she died in 1856. Her name was Julia
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  from an Italian family. And after that, his mother-in-law stayed with him in his house until her death
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  and then a sister. So he was a man without his own family, next generation family. So living quite
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  quietly. So a lot of the energy and his connections were through his work and his art from what I
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  can gather. He also does seem an incredibly kind man and desperate not to make other people
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  suffer. One of the strange things in his biography that came up in a number of sources talking about
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  him is that his father was a fencing and dance master. Sounds quite a decennan character.
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  The sort of person we 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 10 years' eye and course
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  and damage. And then increasingly over life, he lost the sight of that eye. But he never told his
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  father because he didn't want his father to worry about him, which I think that is sometimes it's
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  these small things about somebody. It's a big event in his life, but a habit or a trait like that
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  really says a lot about the innate kindness of someone. And actually, when you look at
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  the world of Alice's drawing, so there is a satirical feel to it and certainly a quirkiness
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  and a grotesqueness. There's also an element of his kindness, the right word. I always feel they
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  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. And the way he got into art was
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  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,
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  quick statues, that kind of thing and showed that you were a good craftsman. He was very
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  unimpressed by the education he then got at college. And it was other places that he drew his
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  inspiration, notably the theatre. He would go and sketch, sitting, watching performances.
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  He would appear in them himself. There's an article about him on the VNA website, the Victoria
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  and Albert Museum, when they had an exhibition of his work, which includes the absolute classic
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  photo of him because he's in the era when photography is just happening. He's in a production
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  which is a benefit performance, like a charity performance. And it's a kind of who's who of
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  luminaries at the time, including Arthur Sullivan, the Gilbert and Sullivan composer,
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  and Ellen Terry, who was the lead actress of her day. She was the most famous. And he's there
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  in the cast with his wonderful Warris moustache in the back row, well worth looking at.
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  So theatre was definitely an influence, but looking through where he got his
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  sort of artistic influence from. Many of the articles, books about him mentioned the Nazarene
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  movement of the early 19th century. Now this was new to me. My background is more in literature
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  rather than in the fine arts. So I hadn't really heard of this movement, which was a German romantic
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  movement of young artists who were revolting against the idea of the neoclassicism. They thought
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  that was cold and lacked spirituality. And they lived together in an experimental community.
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  They left Germany, went to Rome, and a group of them lived together for a few years until the
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  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. I expect many of you are,
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  which is the pre-Rafflight movement. And it was that the German version of this, the Nazarene
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  movement that influenced Teniel. And if you're thinking, well, what does that mean? Apparently it
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  means that you have a sort of shaded outline. And if you think of how the Alice illustrations
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  have produced, you have that. You've got the sort of outline, but you've got the shades and the
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  hatching to kind of give the sense of the character and the landscapes. It also leads to
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  and it's a good way of building up the basis of a fresco. There was in public buildings,
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  there was a fashion for the old idea of frescoes, which obviously you would have found in
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  many buildings in Greece and Rome, but also in Medieval periods. And Teniel was part of that
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  movement because he entered a competition before he was known to design a fresco for the newly
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  rebuilt houses of Parliament. The old houses of Parliamental parts of them had burnt down. And
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  the building that we know today, the one with big Ben, was built in the 1830s. And he entered
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  that competition and one and that became his sort of start in life. So competitions are obviously
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  he then became an illustrator for books. And his first commission in that way was the 1842
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  book of British Ballads. 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
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  demanded a lot of drawings each week. So how did they actually go about
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  doing their art? Now we're used to the idea of people designing on computers and iPads and what
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  have you. What was the equivalent then? Well, he would draw his illustrations and then it would
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  be transferred to wood blocks. And one of the reason 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. That was what the publisher
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  used. So there's like a three-stage process. You've got the drawing. So there's Teniel doing his
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  drawing, but he has to bear in mind that it's going to become a wood block. So he can only use
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  techniques that transfer to wood. They're engraved from the wood block and then become
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  electrolyte copies. So he had this long and successful career. And during that,
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  he met many people in the Victorian establishment. 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.
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  But he understood that there was something particularly suited the world of the caricature
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  cartoon that suited the zany world of Alice in Wonderland. And there were a number of strings,
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  I think, that drew him to Teniel. One is this ability to have something that could well-produce
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  in the book. He's got the craft and he's got the craft. But there's a sense of
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  something specific about the faces. He's very good at individual characters. And even his settings,
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  there are just little details which really do root it. And another part, which is
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  pushing the grotesque button, not to the point where it becomes
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  to act against the words. There's a very important relationship between the words and the illustrations
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  in the Alice books. If you've looked at one that reproduces the original pages,
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  you'll see that the words fit where the illustrations are in vice versa. It's not a situation
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  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 as a shape poem like the mouse's
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  tail has to be set in a certain way. So it is very much a collaboration. Probably the words
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  came first, you know, it's that thing. The words came first, but then once they were putting it
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  in the book, the illustrations were very much meant to enhance the the experience of reading.
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  So how did it come to an end? So after these two most famous commissions, he also did
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  further work for Lewis Carroll, but they are obviously his most famous ones. He lived a long,
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  successful life, one fascinating thing about John Teniel, which I have no idea about before I
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  started reading up on him 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 Teniel. After that stage, it was quite rare for somebody in
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  the arts to be knighted, but there was a change during the Victorian period with famous actors
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  being knighted and the occasional author, but he was the first in the illustrators to be knighted
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  for that reason. When he retired, because of his failing eyesight amongst other things,
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  he had an amazing retirement banquet where on the guest list were Bram Stoker,
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  he of Dracula, and Arthur Conan Doyle, he of Sherlock fame. So what an amazing banquet. And it was
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  actually held or chaired by the then leader of the House of Commons. So he did struggle this
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  well between politics and literature, which makes him a very interesting figure.
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  What has been his legacy? Well, I think his legacy is seen in later illustrators like Chris
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  Rudel, the idea that you can be a both a cartoon, a cartoonist, and an illustrator seems to have
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  a sound lineage. I think he also set up this idea that you could make a book, almost like a visual
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  experience. You knew exactly what it was. It was so distinct. And because it's never really
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  gone out of fashion, why bother to re-illustrate Alice? And people have done, but all of us have in
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  our minds, those original images, unless you grew up on the Disney film, which I'm sorry if you
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  did, but even the Disney film has the tenual drawings underneath. And I think that this shows how
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  when there's a really good strong collaboration between an artist and the writer, as there is in
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  this case, that this is something that no commission that doesn't involve real people, so no sort of,
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  it could be AI generated or just an illustrator doing drawings when they haven't read the book,
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  which something does happen. You know, you often get front covers sent to your authors where you
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  think, have they read the book? Where there is actually the knowledge of the material and understanding
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  of the material, the illustrations really send it off into a much better, they improve the art
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  artistic experience. And I think the other thing about tenual is that there's an understanding
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  that fantasy can be serious, seriously funny, but also serious. I think there's an
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  the identity of the Alice books is adult. The philosophy of it is something which definitely
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  you realize as you get older, how clever they are. In fact, I'd like them more reading them as an
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  adult than I probably did as a child because there's something very random and anarchic and unsafe
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  about the Alice worlds, which as a child, you were unsettled by, whereas now as an adult, I think
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  they're absolutely brilliant. So I think the tenual drawings grow with that, a bit like Alice
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  grows and shrinks. So here we are with Teniel at the beginning of the most famous phase of
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  Oxford fantasy. The artist who gave a eye equivalent for the reading experience of the Alice books.
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  And it goes to show that illustrators come in all kind of flavours. Here we've got a grand old man
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  of political satire in Victorian period able to turn his hand to these charming but challenging
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  illustrations. If you have a favourite illustrator, do let us know and we look to feature their
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  work in a later episode. Thank you very much for listening.
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