The Lion and the Unicorn -- William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli through William Empson's Looking-Glass

Abstract

In 2006 when Richard Aldous published his new history of the rivalry between the British statesman William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898) and Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), it seemed entirely appropriate that it be titled 'The Lion and the Unicorn'. After all, while detailed knowledge of these politicians and their three-decades-long antagonism may have faded from popular memory, some notion of their political battle remains fresh in the minds of millions of children and adults alike who have read Lewis Carroll's 'Through the Looking Glass,' and 'What Alice Found There', and admired the original illustrations. But Aldous, unfortunately, has helped to prolong a "mythunderstanding" of a most famous work of comic art. It has become a commonplace notion that Carroll's illustrator - the masterly 'Punch' cartoonist Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914) - either intended his drawing of 'the Lion and the Unicorn' to represent the two statesmen, locked in seemingly endless combat (Lennon, 194: 220; Hibbert, 1978: 98); or that even if there was no such intent on Tenniel's part, Victorian readers nevertheless interpreted the illustration in such political terms (Gardner, 1960: 288; Haughton, 1998: 347, n.14).