Children as artists | Cotsen Children’s Library

This post was first run in 2016 to promote a Cotsen exhibition about the Alice in Wonderland industry. You can’t see the show, but you can enjoy the wonderful illustrations made by children of their favorite characters featured here.

Tenniel’s Alice and the playing cards from the end of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) Cotsen 657.

Alice in Wonderland has been delighting children and grown-ups for over 150 years now. In addition to Lewis Carroll’s text, the illustrations by John Tenniel and other, later illustrators have been a major source of readers’ delight.

Try to imagine Alice without any illustrations of the famous characters and scenes, either by Tenniel or other illustrators. Virtually impossible isn’t it? Carroll himself provided very, very little descriptive detail, if you actually look at his text. So our sense of how Alice and all the inhabitants of Wonderland look is strongly conditioned by illustration, when you stop to think about it. Textual and visual elements of Alice seem inseparably intertwined, with the illustrations shaping meaning, extending it, and sometimes commenting ironically on the text. Tenniel’s Queen of Hearts and Mad Hatter look comically absurd, rather than menacing or hostile, illustration leavening the tone of the words, which can be quite edgy, or even scary, all by themselves.

Professional illustrators have been reimagining Alice in new versions since the nineteenth century, including names like Arthur Rackham, Willy Pogány, Ralph Steadman, or Salvador Dali. (Yes, Dali did have a go at illustrating Alice, in his own distinctive style! More on that “curiosity” in a later posting.). The flood of the new illustrations shows no sign of abating in the twenty-first century either, based on recent editions.

“Cipher Alice” Cheshire Cat (detail) by Lesley Young (Cotsen 20836).

Another “Cipher Alice” Cheshire Cat (detail) by Lee MacArthur & David Dansey (Cotsen 20836).

But it’s worth remembering that adults haven’t been the only illustrators of Alice. Generations of children have reimagined Alice in their own pictures, mostly unpublished, but some have found their way into various publications. For instance, the Cipher Alice — a coded version of the story based on the Telegraph Cipher devised by Carroll — credits some twenty-six ten- and eleven-year old children as illustrators (in addition to twenty-nine named “code checkers” for the coder cipher text), all of whom were students at the Edward Peake Middle School in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, England in 1990, when the book was printed by L & T Press, Ltd.

Alice & the “Drink Me” bottle, by Louise Lawson.

The students’ graphic renderings vary in style and sophistication, but all display the obvious pleasure that children have taken in Alice since 1865. Louise Lawson, for instance, pictures Alice as a smiling little girl with huge bow on her hair, wearing a variation of Alice’s traditional pinafore emblazoned with a super-hero’s “W” (“Wonderland”) and the name “Alice” added on her apron, just for good measure. She chooses to depict Alice theatrically holding up the “Drink Me” bottle at the beginning of her Wonderland adventures.

The book’s Preface, by supervising grown-up, Edward Wakeling, notes that the Cipher Alice was produced for the Alice 125 Project of the Carroll Foundation, Australia, which attempted “to set a world record for the number of different languages version of the same book.” Interest in Alice was indeed world-wide in 1990, and if anything, it has become even more so in 2016 (Alice 150), with the book having been translated into more than 170 languages in countless editions!

But as in so many editions of Alice, I think the illustrations in the Cipher Alice are “the thing” (with apologies to Hamlet), so I’d like to share some others with you. It’s one my very favorite editions, since it shows how child-readers responded to Alice. I also like the way that different children sometimes imagined quite different depictions of the same scene — there’s no one, “right” way to depict Alice, as the many different versions over the last 150 years have shown us! The illustrations are simply terrific fun to see too! (Click on any thumbnail image to see a larger version.)

Down into Wonderland via a tunnel-like maelstrom… past curious things on the way.	Descending into Wonderland via a bucket in a well… Past dinosaur fossils on the way!	Alice and the White Rabbit “after the fall” — Alice looks distinctly unhappy (and wears a name-tag).
Alice (wearing a “Cool” tee-shirt) as she shrinks, becoming too small to reach the key on the table.	Tiny Alice after shrinking too small to reach the door key on the (now giant-sized) table.	The Mad Hatter (price tag in his hatband) with a hot-dog, a coke, and an earring!
Alice and a mustachioed caterpillar, who also wears a monocle and smokes a gentleman’s pipe.	Alice (with a name-tag), an unusual-looking White Rabbit, and the Court of the Queen of Hearts.	“You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” –Alice. (And how about the Hatter’s outfit shown here?)

How do these illustrations compare with how you visualize Alice, Wonderland, and its inhabitants?

If you’d like to see more illustrations of Alice, Wonderland, and all its inhabitants, come visit the exhibition now in the Cotsen Gallery: “Alice, after Alice: Adaptation, Illustration, and the ‘Alice Industry’!”

Alice after “Alice” Exhibition at the Cotsen Library:
April 15–July 15, 2016
Free & Open to the Public, Daily 9-5

Cotsen 1638.

Many copybooks do not look especially interesting, until you go through them carefully page by page. This one is tacked into a raggedly limp leather wrapper is a case in point. It was made by a David Kingsley of Rehoboth, Bristol County, Massachusetts between 1797 and 1799. Much of the contents consist of proverbs, precepts, and sets of words copied out doggedly line after line after line after line. David signed every single page, one, two, three, or four times, usually in different places, perhaps at his teacher’s bidding. An undated signature “Mary S.” was written in a different hand was in the upper right hand corner. Perhaps she was responsible for the great looping scribbles on top of David’s writing…

Cotsen 1638.

David’s copy book looks like a textbook demonstration of how rote instruction deadens children’s souls and stifles their curiosity except for the page he filled with an illustration of a two-story building with two doors and six windows. Snaking down the left-hand margin is “David Kingsley made this house.” David’s source of inspiration came from somewhere other than the facing text on the comparisons of measures and a practice word problem. Nor does the copy below it have anything about houses: “Wonce more the year is now begun David Kingsley This Second day of January 1799 the Shool Book of David Kinglsey of Rehoboth February 11 day 1799.” . Perhaps it was supposed to be the home of the “gallant female sailor” the subject of the ballad written on the back of the leaf… David’s drawing is undated so we cannot know when or where he drew it. At school, when he should have been concentrating on finishing his lesson? Or somewhere else when he was free to design a house in which he would like to live when a man grown.

To look through the entire copybook, click here

Cotsen 52980.

Seventeenth-century school master Edward Young’s The Compleat English Scholar in Spelling, Reading, and Writing (1726) was in a fifty-second edition by 1752. Cotsen has the only copy of the twenty-seventh edition of 1726 and it belonged to a Lumley Tannat, who may be the child baptized on the eleventh of July 1726 in Saint Dunstan’s in Stepney, London. He wrote his name multiple times on the book’s preliminary pages but without a date, a common but annoying habit of children centuries ago. Of course they had no idea that people nearly three hundred years later would want to be able to calculate their age when they used the book. On the final blank page Lumley put his name and doodles.

The sketches of boats seem to be preparatory drawings for his masterpiece on the rear board, which even with the book in hand is quite difficult to see unless the light is just right. Lumley’s ship has one mast, carved figurehead on the bow, gunports for the artillery, two flags. Was he intensely bored by the lessons, which were mostly drawn from Scripture? Would he have rather been reading Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)?Was he dreaming of going to sea in defiance of his father’s wishes to find his a place with a merchant?

Not all of the marks pupils put on bindings are legible, by the way, and they are far more common than drawings of ships of the line or houses. The front board on this book appears to have been poked decoratively with a pen knife, an essential part of a pupil’s academic tool kit in the days of quill pens. How exactly this binding got in this state I cannot guess, but scenarios with small boys, a handy sharp object, and a book bound in leather are easy to dream up. But then again maybe this is a girl’s handiwork.

Cotsen 362.

Children should not always be blamed for the marks on bindings. Booksellers’ marks can be distinguished easily enough from those children make. It’s not at all unusual for prices to be written at the head of the paper wrappers on pamphlets. It’s less common to find such marks on books bound in boards. The back board of Cotsen’s copy of the 1791 twentieth edition of James Greenwood’s London Vocabulary has both a paper label identifying it as a copy of the “London Vocabulary with Pictures” and note in ink on the canvas that it is in two languages.

Cotsen Children’s Library

Princeton University

Category Archives: Children as artists

Picturing Alice in Wonderland: How Do Child Readers Imagine It?

Marks in Books 9: Daydreaming Boys Draw in Their Schoolbooks