Several aspects
of Benjamin Disraeli and his life have been described in previous
articles. This one will cover some of
the artworks and fictional characters he inspired in two other eminent
Victorians.
Disraeli was
god’s gift to cartoonists. The famous illustrator John Tenniel depicted him
many times in the satirical magazine Punch. I like this one of him dressed as
an angel for a fancy dress ball:
Disraeli was
also the inspiration for some of Tenniel’s illustrations that Lewis Carroll
commissioned for the Alice books.
The Mad Hatter
in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland resembles Tenniel’s caricatures of Disraeli:
Tenniel also put
Disraeli into one of his illustrations for Alice Through the Looking Glass; the
man in the white paper suit in the railway carriage is Dizzy:
Lewis Carroll himself
made a reference to Disraeli - and his Reform Bill - with his character Bill
the Lizard, whose name is a play on Disraeli’s name:
Carroll also based
his Lion and Unicorn characters
on Disraeli and his rival and enemy William
Gladstone, the other man in the cartoon above. They fight each other for the
crown, just as Gladstone and Disraeli fought for power in Parliament. Gladstone
was seen as the Lion and Disraeli as the Unicorn.
Here they are in one of Tenniel’s original
illustrations:
The Bill and the
White Paper were just political in-jokes, but the pyramid, the lizard, the goat
and the beetle sitting next to the goat in the railway carriage make me think of Egypt and
David Icke’s references to lizard people.
Then there is
the Lion and the Unicorn connection. Lions and unicorns are associated with Leo
and Aquarius.
I wonder if
Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel were giving us some messages, consciously or
unconsciously.
Tenniel’s
depiction of Disraeli as the Sphinx:
