{"id":2180,"date":"2016-11-25T09:00:08","date_gmt":"2016-11-25T09:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/?p=2180"},"modified":"2018-08-03T13:13:14","modified_gmt":"2018-08-03T12:13:14","slug":"the-hatter-and-the-kings-messenger-by-nicholas-royle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/2016\/11\/25\/the-hatter-and-the-kings-messenger-by-nicholas-royle\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hatter and the King’s Messenger, by Nicholas Royle"},"content":{"rendered":"

In celebration of the publication of\u00a0<\/em>Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland\u00a0in November 1865, we have a special blog post by Nicholas Royle, Professor of English at the University of Sussex. In this piece he responds to the two images below, two different renderings of same illustration, known as \u2018Living Backward\u2019, or the \u2018Hatter in Prison\u2019. On the left is the first, rejected version. It appears in the album as a flap; if you lift the flap you see the final illustration, pictured on the right. Both these images feature in the Making Prints and Books<\/a> section of our online exhibition Alice to Alice: Dalziel 1865 – 1871<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The Hatter and the King’s Messenger<\/h4>\n

What does a picture keep under its hat? Thinking about these two engravings together might detain us at Alice<\/em>\u2019s leisure for some time. There are fascinating differences between these engravings but they also form a remarkable pair, a kind of twinning or doubling that, more perhaps than any other image in the Alice <\/em>books, speaks of the Alice <\/em>books, and tells a story about them and about the archive. Each in its singular manner \u2018keeps prisoner its own dream of a world\u2019, in Walter Pater\u2019s phrase, each is locked up, incarcerated, buried alive in its own moment, while also offering itself as a kind of unending pictorial performative. The engraving that doesn\u2019t appear in the book publication of Through the Looking-Glass<\/em> is, in conventional terms, the rejected image, but both engravings are images of rejection, about rejection, being rejected. In the so-called rejected image the figure looks up as if bereft, yearning, lost, puzzled, at the hat. In the other (what we might call the familiar) image, the figure looks down, also lost and puzzled, and perhaps more skewy-eyed and crazy-looking. In both cases it is the hatter, evidently, and all the madness of the books is encapsulated in this: the King\u2019s Messenger who is \u2018in prison, being punished\u2019, as the White Queen puts it in the \u2018Wool and Water\u2019 chapter of Through the Looking-Glass<\/em>, is the Hatter of \u2018A Mad Tea-Party\u2019 in the earlier book, Alice in Wonderland<\/em>. There is a bizarre transference or shuttling of characters between the two books, in an unprecedented kind of adventure underground that takes place across image and text. In the so-called rejected engraving, the sense of a prison is intimated through the bars in the wall above the man\u2019s head. In the more familiar engraving the bars are gone and the more explicit cruelty and brutality of the heavy chain around the man\u2019s left foot is the prison index. In the rejected image the rejected man has the makings of a tea party for one \u2013 the biscuits and cup and saucer on the ground beside him. The linkage back to the mad tea-party is more obvious, if no less strange. In the engraving that was published in Lewis Carroll\u2019s book there is no sign of sustenance besides a jug (perhaps of water). What is the hat? What is a hat in a picture? There\u2019s a sinister suggestion, perhaps, of the head that could be under it, as if the image is perpendicular to itself, cutting out, cutting in. There is weird hatching, hatching weirdness, in both works. In the so-called rejected version, it\u2019s as if the composition of the figure of the composite figure of Hatter and King\u2019s Messenger were tearing its hair out or having it cut, hair falling out, joining the hatching work of the wall behind him. In both engravings there are five feet \u2013 the three feet of the stool and the two, of the hatter, tip-toe, daintily crossed or pointing in to one another. Together they figure, each in a singular manner, the revolutionary idea of living backwards. To recall the Queen\u2019s words: \u2018That\u2019s the effect of living backwards\u2026 [T]here\u2019s the King\u2019s Messenger. He\u2019s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn\u2019t even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.\u2019 With the hat (\u2018In this style 10\/6\u2019) and with the recognizableness of the Hatter (more pronounced and therefore perhaps preferred in the originally published engraving), this double-picture opens up a cryptic new path or passageway between the books, concerning the thought of novels and pictures as embodiments of living backwards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In celebration of the publication of\u00a0Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland\u00a0in November 1865, we have a special blog post by Nicholas Royle, Professor of English at the University of Sussex. In this piece he responds to the two images below, two different renderings of same illustration, known as \u2018Living Backward\u2019, or the \u2018Hatter in Prison\u2019. On the… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3197,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2180"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2180"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3196,"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2180\/revisions\/3196"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sussex.ac.uk\/english\/dalziel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}