A pence A picture

Throughout the children's book Alice and Wonderland children are bombarded with thwarts of nonsensical scenes written in beautiful and provocative pros, yet illustrated by John Tenniel in a monstrous and scary sort of way. From beginning to end Alice is tossed and tumbled further through Wonderland looking for a nonsensical way into the in-ordinary world of the Queen's garden. Along the way Alice is introduced to many enigmatic events that are accompanied by very descriptive, and often frighteningly dramatic illustrations. These pictures graphically define the way the actual very abstract nonsensical event begins to look like. After eating the cake Alice say's "Now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was" (16 Carroll), the paragraph is typeset next to an illustration of Alice stretched out, elongated, she's monstrously tall gross and scary. This is the first of a series of illustrations in the story that paint a very real portrait of an obscene world that is depicted horrifically. Images such as Tenniel's could stir up uncomfortable feelings for Lewis's strange characters and leave younger readers running for their mothers embrace in the middle of the night. Almost all the characters bearing animal attributes are drawn out in a very realistic and harsh fashion, possibly reeking havoc in the minds of children. Most young ones live in a world where a talking cat imagined in their own minds innocently might not look like it actually has a murderous grin. Martin Gardner probably fell asleep as a child thinking about the grotesque images embedded into his mind not by innocent Lewis Carroll by nasty and graphically inappropriate John Tenniel.

Work Cited

Carroll, Lewis. Alice and Wonderland. 1898.  New York: The Macmillan

Company, 1998. Print.