The Shard, Bermondsey, and Alice

Wednesday, 17 January, 2018

Today we went to see an exhibition of Alice in Wonderland prints at the Eames Fine Art Gallery on Bermondsey Street.  These prints are from the original woodblocks on which Tenniel made his drawings and the  Brothers Dalziel, master engravers, engraved.  You can read more about this and about John Tenniel at the bottom of this blog post.

We arrived at London Bridge and decided to walk through the newer part of the station entrance, which landed us right at the Shard. It was an incredibly windy day. I could hardly stand against it. Seems the wind was mostly in some corridors since it wasn’t like that everywhere.

I then promptly got lost trying to find the gallery. Going a different way threw me completely off. I’m a terrible map reader!

After one false start, we found Bermondsey Street, and the gallery was pretty close to the corner. The walls were covered in framed prints so we went right in. I absolutely loved looking at them and reading the bits and pieces that were around. At one point the gallery guide came up and talked to me and explained how much detail was in each engraving, and showed me a couple of her favourites.  She also suggested I use a magnifying glass to see them properly. I have a lot of trouble focussing with a magnifying glass but what I did manage was quite incredible.

Above is the gallery guide’s favourite. I really like it too. The white marks in the circle at the front of the picture are apparently scratches that appeared mysteriously and no one knows how they got there.

I’ve never looked at those illlustrations so closely, close enough to notice Tenniel’s signature and that of the Dalzeil brothers. Amazing how beloved these pictures are.

Bermondsey Street is a great little route through Bermondsey. It’s really evolved into something interesting and creative.

 

We walked a bit along and then popped into Mercato Metropolitano – not a hit with Krish – so off towards home.

With just a small detour to buy buns for burgers!  Below is the complex that’s been built on part of the Pembury Estate. This is how Hackney is evolving.

And home.

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Sir John Tenniel’s Illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

An edition printed for the first time from the original woodblocks

Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872) are considered to be his finest and most enduring achievement. They must also rank among the world’s best-known chldren’s illustrations.

The Brothers Dalziel, master engravers, were commissioned to engrave the boxwood blocks on which Tenniel had made his drawings. However the engraved blocks could not withstand commercial printing of the volume of books required, and so instead they served as the masters from which electrotype copies were made. It was from these electrotypes that all illustrations in the Alice books were printed. Inevitably, the electrotype process sufered from a loss of definition in comparison to the original woodblocks and indeed Carroll withdrew the first print run of Wonderland on Tenniel’s insistence due to the poor quality of the printing. No edition was printed from the original wooden blocks at the time.

In 1985 the original woodblocks were discovered in a bank vault where they had been stored in deed boxes belonging to Macmillan, the original publishers. Jonathan Stephenson at the Rocket Press was given the presigious job of printing from the blocks for the first time for worldwide distribution. They were published in 1988 in an edition of 250 and are highly prized by collectors. The blocks are now held by the British Library and no further sets will be printed.

Out of the ninety-two original blocks only one has disappeared – ‘Alice and the Dodo‘. How it came to be missing or when it vanished remains a mystery. The illustration in this collection has been printed from the electrotype copy. If any block had to go missing it is not inappropriate that the Dodo should have disappeared once more!

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Sir John Tenniel

Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914), prominent political cartoonist for the magazine ‘Punch,’ created the definitive visual accompaniment to Lewis Carroll’s writing with his illustrations for both Alice in Wonderland books. Sir Noel Paton, the Victorian painter and illustrator was the first to recognise the uniqueness of Tenniel’s interpretation of Carrolls stories. In a letter declining the commission to draw what would become Through the Looking-Glass he wondered why the author should think ‘anybody under the sun save only John Tenniel should be entrusted with the work’. On receipt of Paton’s message, Carroll confided in his diary that the painter had urged ‘that Tenniel is the man’. History has emphatically endorsed that view.

For many of the illustrations, Tenniel was given precise instructions from Carroll, but many of these interventions apparently infuriated Tenniel who almost turned down the request to illustrate Through the Looking-Glass because of this constant interference. The two men even argued about the look of Alice herself: Carroll envisaged Alice as a brunette with short hair but Tenniel preferred to draw her with long blonde hair In fact, the only illustration that Carroll accepted without comment was that of Humpty Dumpty.

One of their most heated conflicts was over the frontispiece for Through the Looking Glass – the image of the White Knight – who, with his long moustache looked remarkably like John Tenniel himself. Carroll urged Tenniel not to include what was essentially a self-portrait and to remove the moustache from the drawing at the very least, but Tenniel remained firm on this point.