A Nose Job in "The Hunting of the Snark"

goetz.kluge (25)in #thehuntingofthesnark • 6 years ago (edited)

Did you read Lewis Carroll's and Henry Holiday's The Hunting of the Snark (1876)? Read it again. And take a closer look at the illustrations. I think that Holiday's illustrations are as important as Carroll's tragicomical ballad. The image below might give you some idea about Henry Holiday's pictorial conundrums in his illustrations to The Hunting of the Snark.

Watch the noses for a while.

[left]: The Banker after his encounter with the Bandersnatch, depicted in Henry Holiday‘s illustration (woodcut by Joseph Swain for block printing) to the chapter The Banker’s Fate in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (scanned from an original 1876 1st edition of the book)
[right]: a slightly horizontally compressed rendering of The Imagebreakers (1566-1568) aka Allegory of Iconoclasm, an etching by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder (British Museum, Dept. of Print and Drawings, 1933.1.1.3. (See also Edward Hodnett: Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, Utrecht 1971, pp. 25-29.)
Henry Holiday flipped the “nose” of Gheeraert’s “head” before using it as the Banker’s nose in his pictorial allusion to Gheeraerts’ etching. Probably not intended by Gheeraets but discovered by Holiday: Flipping the nose yields a different nose with a different shape.