Lewis Carroll, preliminary sketches for 'Alice's Adventures under Ground', c. 1863
Detail of Alice with longer hair
Detail of Alice with shorter hair, among leaves
Photographic print by Lewis Carroll of a drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, taken in October 1863
Alice cramped into the White Rabbit's house, finished illustration in 'Alice's Adventures under Ground'
Arthur Hughes, 'The Lady with the Lilacs', 1863, commissioned by Lewis Carroll in the same year
Alice in the White Rabbit's house, finished illustration in 'Alice's Adventures under Ground'
I’ve uploaded a much better image of a sheet of little sketches by Lewis Carroll than the previous one (turns out my camera is clearer than my scanner). These preliminary drawings for the Alice’s Adventures under Ground manuscript are incredibly rare insights into Carroll’s formative visions of Wonderland. Some of these grotesques and human faces do not appear in the finished manuscript or the later published novel, so they feel like fleeting phantoms from Carroll’s private world of fantasy which tumbled momentarily onto the page, their identities and purposes now lost and unknown.
Of particular interest are the two sketches of Alice in the middle (see details beneath). At the time that Carroll drew these little figures he was frequenting the studio of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite artist, in October 1863. In Carroll’s own words: on October 6, ‘Went over to Mr. Rossetti’s […] looked through a huge volume of drawings, some of which I am to photograph — a great treat, as I had never seen such exquisite drawings before’; then, on October 8, ‘Was at work most of the day photographing drawings of Mr. Rossetti’s.’ One such drawing was a gorgeous portrait in soft pencil of the model Annie Miller from 1860. To my eyes, Rossetti’s treatment of the texture and pattern of Annie’s luxuriant wavy hair influenced Carroll’s rendering of Alice’s flowing locks in the preliminary drawings and completed illustrations for Alice’s Adventures under Ground — particularly the striking image of her cramped into the White Rabbit’s house.
Finally, within the very same week as visiting Rossetti and making prints of his work, Carroll acquired a painting he had commissioned from Arthur Hughes, another Pre-Raphaelite, earlier that year. The Lady with the Lilacs is a half-length picture of a beautiful young maiden with wavy red hair standing amid a cluster of lilacs, and it hung over Carroll’s mantlepiece in his study at Christ Church College until the end of his life. The similarity of Hughes’s lady and Carroll’s Alice is clear, especially in his drawing of Alice feeling the effects of the magic bottle in the White Rabbit’s house: they share the same head-tilted pose, soft, loose garment and wistful facial expression.
Carroll completed the drawings in the manuscript on 13 September 1864, and in November that year finally presented it to Alice Liddell. The story is, of course, dedicated to her, and yet the Alice we see drawn in the pictures above bears no resemblance to the girl with dark, short straight hair who is often labelled the ‘real Alice' — calling to question whether or not the fictional Alice and the 'real' one are indeed the same.