The Metropolis

Reviewed: Looking in Wonderland at Finchley artsdepot - remarkable illustrations of remarkable books

Mike Pollitt | Thursday 9 February, 2012 15:42

“The night is fine,” the Walrus said.
“Do you admire the view?”

These might well be the most magnificent lines in all of English poetry.

Having lured the young oysters across the beach, away from the safety of the lapping waves, Lewis Carroll’s Walrus intimates to them that it is time for food. Too late, they realise their mistake. The food is them. They are to die. They can only beg for a mercy they know will never come. In response, the Walrus does something extraordinary. He turns away from their sobbing prayers, looks out at the timeless sky and the boundless sea, and admires the view.

Is it not magnificent? Confronted with imminent oysterial death, his gaze turns to the eternal. Little oysters, he says, do not mourn yourselves. What are you compared with the sea, the air, the endless stretch of time which follows and precedes you? You are nothing. Now then, let’s have some tea.

This moment is now on display in an exhibition of Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations at the artsdepot, Finchley.

The exhibition is slight. It consists of prints from the two Alice books, taken from woodcuts based on Tenniel’s original illustrations. When I visited, a couple of labels lay scattered on the floor, their blu tack having failed. A carved woodblock hid behind some glass, almost out of view and impossible to study closely. There was some context on the walls, but only a handful of insights. The illustrations were left to speak for themselves.

But what illustrations they are.

There’s the Jabberwock, a monster in a waistcoat, which was deemed too scary for the frontispiece of the book.

There are slithy toves, gyring and gimbling in the wabe. Carroll invented the words, Tenniel invented the image to go with them. This is creativity squared.

There are March Hares and Cheshire Cats, the Queen of Hearts and a flightless, fat, ridiculous Dodo.

A Dodo which squats, extinct, between fiction and reality. The Dodo does not exist, just as the Jabberwock does not exist. What difference, Carroll asks, is there between them, now?

The illustrations are much finer on paper than in these grainy JPEGs taken from Wikipedia. Does that justify a trip to Finchley to see them, when they are all available just a click away? On balance, I’d say not unless you’re passing. The image quality aside, there’s little from this exhibition that you couldn’t get online or in an ebook. The magnificent Walrus is now public domain. He was right not to mourn the oysters. They live on forever, online.

Looking in Wonderland at the artsdepot, Finchley
Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations on Wikpedia
The Walrus and the Carpenter, by Lewis Carroll

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