John Tenniel’s name means little today, but everyone knows his work. Tenniel was the artist who illustrated Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, creating those unforgettable images of the little girl in the Alice band who shrinks and grows so alarmingly. The cartoons which Tenniel drew each week for Punch have survived as well. Thanks to Tenniel, we still think of a grim, hatchet-faced Gladstone chopping trees, or a jaunty but distinctly Semitic Disraeli in coronet and toga.
Political cartoonists like Tenniel wielded massive influence in the days before press photography. Tenniel trained as a history painter, but aged 30 he gave up the roller- coaster of high art and got a job on the staff of Punch. For over 50 years, starting in 1850, he churned out cartoons.
Mark Lemon, the founder and editor of Punch, introduced the institution of the Wednesday dinner, at which the subject of the weekly ‘cut’ was decided. This was a full-page cartoon engraving, which had considerably more impact than the cover of Private Eye today, and many were drawn by Tenniel. The finished drawing, traced onto woodblocks with super-hard 6H pencils, had to be ready for the engraver’s deadline on Friday evening, so Tenniel worked with incredible speed and accuracy.
Tenniel’s genius as a cartoonist lay in his ability to simplify and intensify an image. As Frankie Morris explains in this exemplary study, he was partially sighted — he lost the sight of one eye as a result of a fencing accident as a boy — and this led him to develop a photographic visual memory.
Punch was the comic voice of the Victorians, and what emerges most strikingly from Tenniel’s story is how clean- living its journalists were. Instead of boozing like today’s hacks, he and his friends such as John Leech preferred to go out hunting in the country or rehearse amateur theatricals.
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