Wednesday 8 October 2008

A Handful of Further Searles

Just a quick one here, as life away from the internet is using up all of my energy at the moment. I've been trying to get hold of a copy of the newish NYRB edition of Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, which uses a Sir John Tenniel illustration of the White Knight from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.



However, my usual enablers have been unable to get me a copy of this version, so I was happy to come across an old Penguin edition, with a cover by old favourite Ronald Searle.



Searle also did another Wilson cover I'd not seen before...



..and I also found two more of his Penguin designs I missed in the research for my earlier big Searle post.


2 comments:

Ian Koviak said...

That fourth book down with the two penguins talking ("read any good books lately?") is classic.

Is that white knight illustration from Alice meant to allude to Don Quixote? I heard that somewhere once, but don't remember...

JRSM said...

I think it is: other suggestions from http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/school/alice1021.html ...

'There has been much conjecture as to Tenniel's model for his portrayal of this character: some of his contemporaries believed it to be his colleague, Horace (nicknamed Ponny) Mayhew, but Tenniel himself has also been recognised as a valid candidate, as hinted at in Linley Sambourne's 'Good Sir John!' design of 1893, not to mention Tenniel's own self-portrait of 1889. Pictorial parallels must not be forgotten, however: Millais' painting, Sir Isumbras at the Ford (1857), is convincingly suggested by Timothy Hilton, and would certainly have been seen by the author of Alice as well as by its illustrator; Cervantes' Don Quixote is another likely model, especially since a large number of illustrated editions appeared during the nineteenth century.'