646. "Tenniel (Sir John) and Charles Lutwidge, “Lewis Carroll”." "Autograph letter signed from the artist & illustrator John Tenniel to Charles Lutwidge Dogdson," "3 pp. on a single sheet folded to make 4 pp., comprising 140 words with an original rough ink sketch at head of first page, 8vo, Portsdown Road, [London], June 1, 1870, the long-lost "Wasp in a Wig" letter, in which Sir John Tenniel discusses revision of an illustration for Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, and proposes the omission of the Wasp episode from the book. The letter was reproduced in facsimile in The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll [London, 1898; New York, 1899] by Dodgson's nephew Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, but the location of the original document has been a mystery for more than a century.
The contents of the episode itself were unknown until Dodgson's own galley proofs appeared at auction in 1974. In 1977 a scholarly edition of the narrative was published, containing a copy of the facsimile originally provided by Collingwood.
Despite the fact that Dodgson and Tenniel are immortally linked in literary history, it is well known that the relationship between author & artist was a prickly and difficult one. Tenniel found the Rev. Dodgson to be pedantic and overbearing in his direction of the project of illustrating Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and tried to evade the chore of illustrating its sequel. After the publication of Through the Looking Glass… Tenniel turned down later proposals from Dodgson, claiming that he had entirely abandoned book illustration. Tenniel himself was not always easy-going: it was at his insistence that the first printing of Alice… was suppressed, because the artist felt that the illustrations had been too faintly printed, and he was apparently quite hostile to the wasp passage; Collingwood quotes Tenniel as declaring that "a Wasp in a Wig is altogether beyond the appliances of art," a phrase that does not appear in this letter.
Both parts of this brief letter are important. Tenniel heads the letter with a rough but clear sketch of the nightmarish railway-carriage episode from Chapter Three: Alice is depicted seated across from a billy goat and a man dressed in white paper, while a station guard peers at her with opera glasses through the carriage window. In his first paragraph Tenniel suggests that when the train leaps the brook at the end of this passage, it would be preferable for the jarred Alice to seize the goat's whiskers than the hair of an old woman whom Dodgson had evidently originally written into the scene. Tenniel's proposal was clearly successful, as there is no old lady in the published text or illustration.
Then Tenniel goes on to confront his waspish adversary: "Don't think me brutal, but I am bound to say that the 'wasp' chapter does not interest me in the least, & [that (crossed out)] I can't see my way to a picture. If you want to shorten the book. I can't help thinking--with all submission--that there is your opportunity." Again Tenniel got his way, and the peevish wasp disappeared for more than a century.
It seems that little or none of the working correspondence between Dodgson & Tenniel has survived, so this note furnishes a unique glimpse of the process of developing and perfecting the Alice books. A fair quantity of Tenniel's sketches have been preserved, but this may well be the only spontaneous drawing of its type. The text of the letter and the drawing have been available since 1898, thanks to Collingwood; but this small sheet of paper is the irreplaceable original, creased and lightly soiled, with a couple of neat docketing numbers, but overall very good, housed in modern cloth drop-back box."
est. £15000 – £20000
"The legendary Long-Lost Wasp in a Wig letter
[Collingwood, Life and Letters, pp.146-148.; Gardner, editor, The Wasp in a Wig, passim.; Lewis Carroll Handbook" pp. 63-64, 232; Schiller, Census [of] Sir John Tenniel's original drawings to [the Alice books] contained in Alice's Adventure in Wonderland. An 1865 printing… ,pp. 54-106 (but not mentioning this sketch)]"