[left]: Segment from an illustration by Henry Holiday to Lewis Carroll's
The Hunting of the Snark depicting the
Broker (upper left corner). The object he is holding at his lips is the handle of a malacca walking cane, a gesture associated with dandies in the Victorian era.
[right]: Segment from anonymous:
Edward VI and the Pope, a Tudor anti-papal allegory of reformation (16th century).
Holidays Snark illustrations are conundrums. And the were constructed as conundrums. The pattern in the frame (2) on the left side is an allusion to a rather unobstrusive pattern on the right side. This shows that Holiday did not "copy" patterns just because of they would contribute to the impressiveness of his illustrations.
·
In 1922 (46 years after
The Hunting of the Snark was published), Henry Holiday (the illustrator) wrote to George Sutcliffe (Sangorski & Sutcliffe, bookbinders, London): "... you will notice that the Broker in [the proof of the illustration to
The Crew on Board] no. 5 is quite different to the one in [
the later proof] no. 2. I had intended to give a caricature a the vulgar specimen of the profession, but Lewis Carroll took exception to this and asked me to treat the head in a less aggressive manner, and no. 2 is the result. I consider that no. 5 has much more character, but I understood L. Carroll's objection and agreed to tone him down. ..."
Charles Mitchel called the first design of the broker's face in the lower right corner of the print "conspiciously antisemitic". The change of the printing blocks must have been very important to Carroll, as it took the wood cutter Swain quite some effort to implement that change (see p. 102,
Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, 1981 William Kaufmann edition).
As shown in the image above, the broker's face also appears in the upper left section of Holiday's
illustration to The Hunting. Rather than by a "Semitic" face, Holiday may have been inspired by what could be a cliché of the face of a roman catholic monk depicted in the 16th century anti-papal painting
Edward VI and the Pope.
1 comment
Götz Kluge said: