Classics | Cotsen Children’s Library

Tigers hold a special place in the heart of Princeton.

Nassau Hall tigers – princetoniana.princeton.edu

A pair of tigers stands guard on both sides of the entrance to Nassau Hall, the historical and logistical center of Princeton. A more recent pair of statuary tigers prowls outside the main gate of Princeton Stadium — home of the Princeton Tigers — perhaps a warning to visiting lions, bears, and bruins to “abandon hope all ye [opponents] who enter here.” Princeton’s thirty-seven varsity teams — and others — are nicknamed (surprise!) “the Tigers” and they generally sport tiger colors of orange and black Tiger colors, tiger images, and tiger-related names abound all over campus, and indeed throughout the town of Princeton too.

Noveau tiger outside Princeton Stadium

Cotsen’s tiger: “My, what big paws you have…”

The Cotsen Library’s personal tiger, Sir Fortissimus T. Tigris, sits atop a section of Cotsen’s Wall of Books, welcoming visitors and standing silent guard over the collection and its visitors of all ages. Not far from him in Firestone Library is the Tiger Tea Room, a small den for tigers, and others, taking a break from hitting the books. Tigers and tea? Hmm… Where might I have heard that echo before?

The Tiger Who Came to Tea: cover. Somerville, Mass.: Candlewick Press, 2009. (Cotsen 151774)

The Tiger Who Came to Tea is, of course, the title of the classic children’s picture book by Judith Kerr, who created both the artwork and text in the tradition of great children’s book author-illustrators, such as Kate Greenaway, Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, and Ezra Jack Keats, whose The Snowy Day was recently named by the New York Public Library as its “most checked-out book” of all time (narrowly nosing out The Cat in the Hat with a total of some 485,583 check-outs compared to 469,650).

Originally published in 1968, The Tiger Who Came to Tea is one of the best-selling children’s books of all time, having been translated into 11 languages and having sold over five million copies by the time of its 40th anniversary in 2008. While Tiger is Kerr’s most well-known book, it was by no means her only one; she authored at least thirty-six books, and her series of books about Mog the cat — beginning with Mog the Forgetful Cat in 1970 and ending with Goodbye Mog in 2002 — were also best-sellers, much beloved by both children and cat aficionados, and a testament to Kerr’s interest in exploring the secret lives of cats of all sizes in her children’s books. The Mog series was based on the family cat, but Tiger, Kerr’s first published book, began as a bedtime story told to her daughter — and like many bedtime stories, it was apparently repeated over and over again, as any reading or story-improvising parent can attest. (But would that we all had Judith Kerr’s genius!)

Do you think I could have tea with you?

A little girl named Sophie and her “mummy” are having tea — a commonplace British activity in the 60s — when “suddenly there was a ring at the door” …. and things begin to get surreal. For the doorbell ringer is not the milkman, nor the grocer, nor a key-forgetting daddy, but rather “a big furry, stripy tiger,” who says that he’s “very hungry” and asks if he can have tea with Sophie and her mother. We’re not in Kansas anymore…

Think about it for a moment. A stranger unexpectedly rings the doorbell, a little girl opens the front door, and finds not only a stranger, but a full-grown tiger there! In another era or a fairy tale, this might have been the beginning of a cautionary tale, or at least a trip into the bizarre. (And why does a “hungry” tiger ask for some tea, anyway?) But this is where the genius of Kerr’s art comes into play, I think. Take a look at her portrayal of the scene: while the gigantic tiger already has a huge fore-paw inside the door, there’s no sense of menace in the scene. It might be a Halloween prank (if in the USA, of course) or a lark. The tiger has a big smile, which he somehow maintains throughout the story, even when he’s gobbling down everything in the kitchen, helping himself to everything on the stove and inside the refrigerator or the cupboard, and “drinking all the milk, and all the orange juice, and all Daddy’s beer.”

He looked around the kitchen to see what else he could find.

Most important of all, the little girl shows no sign whatsoever of being afraid in Kerr’s depictions of the scenes. Quite the contrary, she hugs him and pets his tail all the while. She somehow knows that there’s nothing to be afraid of. And so does a reader; it’s like a comedy where somehow we trust that all’s well and that all will end well too, no matter how topsy-turvy things may get for a while. And that comforting assurance really resides in the visuals here.

I can’t help thinking of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, where little Lucy the youngest of the children — and perhaps the most innocently virtuous — has no fear of Aslan the lion, who in turn treats her with particular kindness. (The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe and the other Narnia tales had been published in the 1950s, and would presumably have been familiar to a mother and a child by the 60s.)

I think I’d better go now…

Having eaten and drunk everything in the house and wrecked the kitchen in the process, the tiger suddenly decides, “I think I’d better go now.” “And he went.” Just like that! Who needs continuity or writerly preparation? It just happens that way, just as things happen go in a child’s imagination. Part of Kerr’s genius, I think, is not saying too much or writing too much description or dialog; her story just ebbs, flows, and jumps with a childlike sense of spontaneity. When all experience is new, who has expectation, much less anxiety?

The tiger leaves the kitchen in a complete mess; unlike the Cat in the Hat (another havok-weaking feline), the tiger doesn’t bother to clean up after his mayhem. And Sophie’s mummy wonders what to do; there’s nothing left for “daddy’s supper” either. The thirsty tiger has also “drunk all the water in the tap,” so Sophie can’t have a bath – thus, a doubly-happy kid is she! (But what happened to the water “in the tap”? Did the tiger somehow drink up all the water in London? Another piece of childlike — and child-delighting — magical realism! Only adults think of such logical complications in a children’s story — and maybe only critical bloggers as well!

Sophie’s daddy comes home “just then.” Either a long time has passed while the tiger has been feasting and drinking, or a magically foreshortened day. But no worries… The family just goes out to a cafe for dinner and has a very English dinner of “sausage and chips,” followed by a child-delighting dessert of ice cream On their way to the cafe, they pass a tiger-colored cat on the street, as Kerr depicts the scene. Is this some visual allusion to the tiger? Or perhaps a suggestion that he has magically changed size? After all, the street cat has the same smile as the tiger! Who knows? But maybe that’s something for a child to notice on a fiftieth rereading? And perhaps ask about as well?

And they walked down the road to a cafe… But what about that little, tiger-colored cat?

… a very big tin of Tiger Food, in case the tiger should come to tea again.

The next day, Sophie and her mother go shopping and “buy lots more things to eat,” including a “very big tin of tiger food in case the tiger should come to tea again.” (Doesn’t every neighborhood store stock tiger food by the can? It must be something like the “fish food” that used to be readily available at grocery stores and Woolworth’s?) They’d both be happy to have the tiger come back, mess and all, it seems. And just look how delighted Sophie is in Kerr’s visual presentation, as she hugs the “smiling tiger” tin! What parent wouldn’t want their child to be so happy? Only a Grinch.

Their shopping plans are for nought however. The tiger doesn’t return. “But he never did” — those are the last words in the story — suddenly and perhaps with a surprising sort of disappointment. Think of how many children’s stories end with the fun disrupter-of-everyday-banality promising, “I’ll be back,” so that children can await his/her return in eager anticipation? Not the tiger though.

Goodbye… goodbye… goodbye…

That’s one of the appealing things about Kerr’s story-telling, to me, anyway. There’s no forced sentimentality or easy prospect of another magic rainbow event. Sophie is left with a happy, one-of-a-kind joyous memory — as are the Tiger‘s child-readers. The midsummer day’s dream is over; now it’s time to return to everyday life, albeit one brightened by a very magical day.

Somehow it seems fitting that Kerr ends her story, not with Sophie and her mother, but with the tiger, which she chooses to depict as he seems to be heading away from us, while tooting on a magic, translating horn: “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.” You can almost hear the bedtime-story-telling Judith Kerr uttering that repeated word more and more softly, while wishing her daughter goodnight and gently shutting off the light, can’t you?

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 Children’s Library

Princeton University

Category Archives: Classics

Tigers Who Come to Tea, and other Cat Tales…

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