Lewis Carroll’s Illustrations for “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground” (1864)

Below you can browse all thirty-seven of Carroll’s manuscript illustrations, which carry bittersweet associations. On one hand, it is a joy that they have survived. It was treasured by Alice Liddell until she was forced to auction the text in 1928 to pay for her husband’s death duties. Thankfully, it was eventually purchased, after passing through the possession of several intermediary owners, by American benefactors, who donated the manuscript to the British Library as a symbol of a special, postwar relationship between the nations in 1948. On the other hand, these illustrations conjure an unfathomable depth of creative loss when we remember that the Alice stories were just a few of the many “original, funny, starling, and brilliant” tales that Carroll extemporized for children, most of which were never transcribed or drawn at all, only given over to the wind and river on idle summer afternoons.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/2Uu4MMf