I think Alice is such an enduring story because it was the first modern children's book.
In a sense it defined the genre – a genre we are so familiar with now. Before Alice there were
improving texts for children, there were fables I suppose that come all the way from Aesop,
there were nursery rhymes, but the longer form narrative fiction I think Charles Dodgson defined
as Lewis Carroll. And I think that's why it endures, because it has become the touchstone,
it's a way to write a book for children that will engage them, not necessarily a book about
improving their morals or teaching them lessons, it's simply to divert and to delight. And when I
say simply that's the most complex and the most life-affirming and changing thing you can do
with a book – make it so engaging and beguiling that you remember it into adulthood and take that
with you. So we're formed by the books we read as children and Lewis Carroll did that first,
and it endures – each generation that reads Alice in Wonderland approaches it and delights
in it anew and I think that's an amazing thing. So when it came to me illustrating my version,
in my mind's eye was the new reader, someone who had never seen Alice in wonderland before
who was going to see this edition, the one I was illustrating, and respond to it afresh.
My first introduction to Alice in Wonderland was as a very small boy, I remember finding an edition
with the John Tenniel illustrations in it, and I was immediately captivated. And the one that
captivated me the most was the illustration at the very beginning, the frontispiece of the White
Rabbit in his waistcoat looking at his pocket watch, and I was just amazed at how realistic
this rabbit was – it was a real rabbit you could tell by its posture and its paws and the look in
its eyes, and yet at the same time it had this amazing character, the characterisation was spot
on and I thought how on earth do you do that using simple lines and shading? And so what I
did was I started to copy that illustration to see if I could find out how to do it.
And so now I can do some some drawing, so this is the
iconic White Rabbit that sort of haunts my
illustrative imagination and has done since i was a very small boy.
And i'm just drawing this in conte pastel pencil, I actually quite like the way the
pencil sounds when it's on the paper.
And this is the sort of alchemy that Tenniel managed to get into
his illustrations, it's the sort of
look in the eye, almost the sideways glance, the aspect of the head, the way the ears of the rabbit
sort of work that he's captured so beautifully. And I think it must just come from an incredible
visual memory because the characters that Tenniel draws do feel extraordinarily real.
When I approached some of the other characters for instance the Queen of Hearts,
I very consciously moved away from the playing card idea because playing cards have many designs
you know there are the classic almost Elizabethan style playing cards that we're so familiar with,
but there are many others and reimagining playing cards is almost as popular as reimagining Alice in
Wonderland. So I decided that my Queen of Hearts was going to be a femme fatale, quite literally,
given her propensity for cutting heads off and I decided that I wanted her to be rather glamorous
but a little bit intimidating – Lady Gaga with attitude possibly, with a touch of Bjork thrown
in – you know that was my sort of mindset. And she is always throughout the book I mean absolutely
furious whenever you meet her nothing is right, she's deeply deeply cross about everything.
And I think the dynamic between the Queen of Hearts and the King of Hearts is rather fun
you know because he is small and ineffectual and rather sort of brow beaten I think, and I
like that dynamic, i think it's got that sort of Victoria and Albert quality to it – the imperious
Queen who is not amused – so yes my Queen of Hearts is a little bit more
glamorous than Tenniel's I think. I also think of, you know the sort of Disney reference, the
Queen in Snow White, she has a Queen of Hearts quality to her.
With the Hatter, I needed to go somewhere else and I was doodling and I just drew a sort of blonde
haired almost Alice-like figure and put a top hat on her, a straw top hat, and I suddenly thought,
why couldn't the hatter be androgynous, why couldn't the hatter given his trade you know
actually be rather unusual and play counter to type? And so I drew this character and I thought
that is as far away from Tenniel's hatter as I can get, I think that's the way i'm going to go.
So with the Hatter you start off with the
top hat and I made the top hat that my Hatter wears a sort of straw hat, as if it's
almost the wicker underpinning of a top hat, again it makes it a little bit different from
the Tenniel version, but then of course you've got to include the iconic 10 and 6
in this style,
and again in the spirit of contrariness I wanted to introduce almost a flowerpot notion of
a garland of flowers or something poking out at the top of the hat. No real reason for it apart
from just to make it sort of a little bit mad, you know the hat needs to be slightly mad as a hat.
So my inspiration for Alice in Alice in Wonderland is Alice Liddell
who listened to the story all those years ago. Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) was a very keen
photographer and he took photographs of the children who he told the Alice stories to.
They were the Liddell sisters and Alice Liddell was the middle sister and is the Alice
in the Alice stories. And Charles Dodgson actually wrote the stories down because Alice
and her sisters asked him to. Alice Liddell in the photographs has a very distinctive
hairstyle, it's sort of a bobbed hairstyle and it's very different from her sisters,
so my Alice has dark hair in in a bob very similar to Alice Liddell's hair and she also has a sort of
rather direct gaze which I think comes across in the way that
Lewis Carroll writes
about Alice in the books. She's obviously a little girl with quite a distinct personality and
she's quite prepared to ask awkward questions. And being a very enquiring
little girl who's interested in the world around her, even if it is a sort of strange world at
the bottom of a rabbit hole, I imagine that she would have found the Victoria and Albert museum
a fascinating place to spend the afternoon. I think she would have loved wandering around
looking at the exhibits possibly in the company of a white rabbit
and I think she would have thoroughly enjoyed disappearing down the rabbit hole of the V&A.