The first published Alice was withdrawn because the pictures were not sharp enough.
In July 1865 Macmillan had copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from Oxford’s Clarendon Press: red cloth, gilt, forty-two wood engravings after John Tenniel, cut by the Dalziel brothers. Tenniel looked at the impressions and refused them. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who paid for the edition himself, cancelled the run. Recipients were asked to send books back. A new printer, Richard Clay, produced the edition that actually launched the book that winter. Most of the rejected sheets later went to D. Appleton in New York with an 1866 title page. About two dozen copies of the 1865 English issue are known to survive.
Wonderland entered the world as a printing argument. That is the right origin story. The boat trip of 4 July 1862 (Dodgson, Robinson Duckworth, and the Liddell sisters on the Thames toward Godstow) is real, and Alice Liddell’s request that the story be written down is real. Dodgson lettered a manuscript, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, with his own drawings, and gave it as a Christmas gift. Publication was a second, harsher making: a Punch cartoonist’s lines had to survive a press, or the book was not the book.
No Sermon, and Then the Logic Starts
Mid-century British children’s reading was often a moral machine. Isaac Watts taught the busy bee improving each shining hour. Carroll keeps the bounce and hands it to a crocodile pouring the Nile on his scales. Robert Southey’s old man offered pious comforts; Father William stands on his head, balances an eel, and eats a goose bones and all. The parodies do not sprinkle jokes on top of the sermon. They steal the meter so the sermon cannot get home.
Alice is allowed to be curious, rude, and unimproved. The Duchess’s peppery kitchen, with its howling baby and its advice to beat a child for sneezing, is funny because it sounds like a conduct book that has finally told the truth about how ugly adult rules can be. The book is not a psychedelic blur. It is a refusal to catechize.
The first room underground is built for the wrong-sized person. Alice can see a garden through a door too small for her body, and a key sits on a table at the useless height. “Drink Me” and “Eat Me” are not treats. They are tools for changing the occupant until she matches the aperture. Wonderland does not dissolve space. It keeps the furniture and resizes the guest, which is why growing too large under a ceiling is funny and frightening in the same breath: the hall is still a hall.
Dodgson taught mathematics at Christ Church and wrote on logic. Nonsense, in his practice, is what happens when you keep a rule and ignore the social purpose of the sentence. A door has a size. “More” is a comparison. At the tea table Alice objects that she cannot take more tea because she has had nothing. The Hatter’s correction is petty and exact: she can take more than nothing; she cannot take less. Time has stopped at six o’clock because the Hatter “murdered” it with a song, so the washing-up never comes. The Cheshire Cat vanishes in order, ending on a grin, which is a geometry problem dressed as a cat: can the expression remain when the face has clocked out?
In Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Humpty Dumpty claims that a word means what he chooses. Alice asks whether he can make words mean so many things. He answers that the question is which is to be master. Jabberwocky then demonstrates the other half of the joke. Slithy and mimsy are packed words (Carroll’s portmanteaus), but toves still behaves like a plural noun and gyre like a verb. Grammar holds. Vocabulary absconds. A child can parse the sentence without knowing a single invented animal.
Tenniel’s Job Was to Make the Joke Look Expensive
Tenniel’s day work was political satire on boxwood for Punch. He did not sweeten Wonderland. The Queen of Hearts looks like a person who might actually order a beheading. The White Rabbit is a clerk in a panic. The Mock Turtle is a visual pun on mock turtle soup: calf attached to shell, because that is what the cheap dish was.
Those drawings needed the Dalziel cuts and a printer who did not fill the fine hatching with mud. That is why Tenniel’s refusal of the first impressions is not fussiness. If the Queen looks soft, the satire dies. If the Mock Turtle’s joke is a blur, it is only a sad animal. Carroll’s language floats. The engravings nail it to a Victorian room.
When Alice finally says the court is a pack of cards, she is doing what the cancelled edition also did: refusing a badly printed authority. The dream ends on a riverbank. The argument about pictures, type, and who is master of a word does not. Tenniel’s Queen still looks as if she could appear in a newspaper that expected you to get the joke the same afternoon.