Again from The House of Illustrations current exhibition; John Vernon Lord illustrating Carroll and Joyce which is on until November 4th.
"I wanted to illustrate the books according to a notion of Alice's thoughts and views of the world, he says. You rarely see yourself in dreams, indeed you rarely see yourself at all! And I wanted Alice to be somewhat disembodied while she lay asleep among the field of daisies in her dream-like state. I thought doing without Alice would enable the reader to see the story with fresh eyes." John Vernon Lord
"There is hardly anything new to be said about Lewis Carroll’s two ‘Alice’ books. So much has been written about them. Their contents have been probed by the scalpels of psychoanalysts, literary theorists, annotators, enthusiasts and the journalists. Perhaps I should include illustrators among this group, for it is the illustrator’s duty to get to grips with the text and thus make a visual commentary upon it.
Readers of the text and viewers of the illustrations also make a book their own. Each one of us interprets stories and pictures in our own way and each one of us is unique. . . . [But] I think we have to be careful not to look for too many possible meanings that we might think may be lurking within the text of Carroll’s Alice books. It is very tempting to do so and many writers have done just that, sometimes disturbingly, often without evidence, and sometimes in a most delightfully illuminating way." John Vernon Lord
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