Game & graphic wonders of Alice in Wonderland exhibition

At the end of last year, I had the pleasure of seeing a wonderful exhibition at the British Library, which celebrates 150 years of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The exhibition contains an abundance of fascinating material to read and look at. We’ve got Lewis Carroll’s original handwritten manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, as well as his diaries where he wrote about the publication and success of the book. There’s an entry, which describes the “golden afternoon” of 4 July 1862 when he first told the story to Alice Liddell and her sisters, and the original woodblocks with illustrations by John Tenniel. In the “Alice Re-imagined” section of the exhibition, we are presented with numerous editions of the book, and a variety of visual interpretations of the story—from Arthur Rackham’s atmospheric drawings, William Andrew (“Willy”) Pogany’s “flapper” Alice, D.R. Sexton’s bobbed Alice, to Salvador Dali’ surrealist lithographs and Yayoi Kusama’s trippy, psychedelic pattern-based imaginings. While there is no shortage of styles, I kind of wished to see my favourite illustrations by Polish artist Olga Siemaszko (below), but this is hardly surprising given how many illustrators have interpreted the story since 1865. Still, and I’m not sure if it’s a childhood nostalgia bias, I consider her illustrations to be my favourite ones (below are scans from my excruciatingly battered copy of the book).