Critical Introduction

Sir John Tenniel (1820–1914) was an English illustrator who worked closely with Lewis Carroll on both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and on its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. This image was originally planned as the frontispiece for the book, but was later replaced with an image of the White Knight because Carroll worried that “it is too terrible a monster, and likely to alarm nervous and imaginative children.” It is, indeed, an alarming image, a giant, winged, clawed, large-toothed, bug-eyed monster that dwarfs the small figure who seems barely able to raise his large “vorpal sword” to defend himself. The Jabberwock is a richly hybrid monster in the image, though the text gives only scant clues about its possible appearance. From Carroll's poem, we only learn that it has “jaws that bite” and “claws that catch,” as well as “eyes of flame”—a very common feature of monsters, as found also in Beowulf's description of Grendel. Much of the poem is comprised of nonsense words that sound dangerous and prickly but do not mean anything in particular.

Despite the clear horror of the Jabberwock, there is something prototypically Victorian about it: it is wearing a waistcoat. This was, for Tenniel and his contemporaries, a hallmark of Englishness and a form of domestication. There is, though, something deeply strange in seeing the same sort of costume we might associate with Mr. Toad and his friends from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) on this fierce and unknowable monster.

Viewing Questions

What familiar and ordinary animals seem to be visible in the Jabberwock's hybrid body? Do the fragments of the familiar and domestic render the Jabberwock more frightening or less so?