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Articles
Churchill as a Character from the Works of Lewis Carroll
- By GARY L. STILES
- | September 21, 2023
- Category: Explore The Literary Churchill
Lewis Carroll wrote of Wonderland; Winston Churchill was a wonder. He ensured that he was in the public spotlight from the earliest days of his career. The spotlight focused shortly after his commission as a second lieutenant in the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars following his graduation from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in 1895.
Young Winston popularized his activities by acting as a war correspondent and writing books about his adventures. He traveled to every armed conflict he could, much to the chagrin of superior officers. His media drive would continue throughout a career of more than sixty years. It made good sense to him, for he always believed he was special and had crucial role in the world. As he wrote to Violet Bonham Carter in 1906: “We are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow-worm.”1
To pursue his goals, Churchill planned early to move from the military to politics. Elected a Conservative Member Parliament for Oldham on 1 October 1900, he took his seat in February 1901. His coverage in the press increased, since even as a neophyte MP, he clearly punched above his weight.
One of the fascinating mechanisms by which politicians issue statements and policies is the use of published satire, caricature and parody, which are frequently interwoven. Early on, Churchill used, and was used by, this busy little industry.
The long reach of Lewis Carroll
More than 200 imitations, satires and parodies are based on Lewis Carroll’s monumentally influential and long-lasting Alive’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.2 The half century from 1870 to 1930 was the golden age of Carroll’s influence on popular literature.
Such works not only utilized characters created by Carroll. They also wove Alice’s complex themes and personal responses into their message. The storylines frequently related to contemporary social, political or societal issues that interested authors. They ranged in tone from the hilarious to the angry or subversive. Carolyn Sigler published a robust discussion of this genre in 1977.3
Another mechanism for conveying opinions to the public is the cartoon, a time-honored tool for praising or critiquing people or policies. Cartoons based on the works of Carroll are numerous. Churchill was widely reported upon and analyzed; so were cartoon references to and depictions of him as a Carroll character.
It is not surprising that a body of work exists at the intersection of Carroll’s books and Churchill’s career. Yet until now, no studies have been made of it. It is fascinating how Carroll characters were used to parody, satirize, or generally comment upon Churchill. In each example below, I discuss Churchill’s actual role (but not the fuller Carroll story), along with the humorous guise of Carroll characters.
Caterpillar contrarian
The first Carroll-Churchill parody, Clara in Blunderland, was published in 1902.4 It criticized Britain’s involvement in the Boer War, which Churchill favored winning, and then bestowing an equable peace.
Several supporters of the war are lampooned in the story. Arthur Balfour, Leader of the House of Commons, is Clara (Alice). Joseph Chamberlain is the Red Queen, Robert Cecil the Duchess. Churchill appears as “The Mushroom Caterpillar” (Chapter 2)—a war reporter (which he was), a combatant and escaped prisoner. The caterpillar sends dispatches telling everyone they are all wrong—something young Winston was occasionally wont to do.
In one scene the Red Queen guides Clara over a desolate plain covered with newspapers forming black and white squares like a chessboard. Arriving at a chestnut-tree, she notices a tall mushroom. Seated on it is a green Caterpillar, writing at a great pace while imbibing smoke through the tube of a hookah. Picking up a signed article, Clara learns that the insect is the species Winstoniensis vulgaris. No words are exchanged for some hours. Then, as Clara moves to leave, the Caterpillar removes his pipe and remarks acidly: “You’re wrong!”
“But I haven’t said anything,” Clara replies.
“I know you haven’t, and that is wrong, and when you do say something, that is wrong, too.”5
“But you can’t think what a lot of advice I’ve had today, and I don’t think it’s done me one bit of good.”
“That’s because it wasn’t mine,” the Caterpillar says. “I shall now read you the leading article I am cabling home.”6 “It is long, but it’s very, very clever. It has been written entirely for your improvement.”7
Free Trade Guardsman
The next parody was John Bull’s Adventures in the Fiscal Wonderland, a pro-Free Trade satire published in 1904.8 John Bull, iconic symbol of the British Establishment, is attempting to understand Protectionism (Imperial Preference, or tariffs on imports from outside the Empire). Balfour and Chamberlain favor it; Lord Hugh Cecil and Churchill, now a Liberal, are Free Traders.
Joseph Chamberlain appears here as the “Prefferwense” (taken from his campaign for Imperial Preference), the Cheshire Cat, the Knave of Hearts and the Mad Hatter. A great crowd of weird creatures spans the whole pack of cards. In a drawing entitled “The Trial,” the presiding judges are a British working couple, the King and Queen of Spades. The Mad Hatter is the accused.
A sign on Chamberlain’s hat reads “Preferential Tariff Style,” a reference to his scheme of preferring goods made in the Empire. The loaves of bread are a reference to a famous 1903 speech in Birmingham, where he held up two loaves of bread, arguing that their price would be unaffected by tariffs: “I don’t know if your eyes are better than mine, but when I first saw these two loaves, I was unable to tell which one was the bigger one.”
After much discourse, “the Hatter was back into the dock, where he was taken charge of by the two soldiers (whose names were Winston and Hugh).” He is marched off to prison, foolish Protectionist that he is.9 Free Trade triumphs!
Winnie versus the Lords
Winnie’s Adventure in Wastemonster was published in 1908, a parody of Alice Through the Looking Glass.10 It features a little girl named Winnie (Churchill) and her visit to the Houses of Parliament. At issue was the Liberal government’s effort to remove the ability of House of Lords to block financial bills (finally accomplished in 1911). “Winnie” Churchill had denounced the Lords as “one-sided, hereditary, unpurged, unrepresentative, irresponsible, absentee.”11
In the parody, Winnie meets her Uncle [Lloyd] George, who takes her on a tour of the House of Lords. There she meets “Lawd Chance-the-Law or the Url of Do-No-More” (Robert Reid, 1st Earl of Loreburn)—the radical Liberal Lord High Chancellor.
Winnie is educated by both Lloyd George and a character known as “Big Ben” in the incompetent ways of the Peers. She is presented with issues: Free Trade, veto power over financial bills, “People versus Peers,” laziness of the aristocracy. The House of Lords does not fare well. The images are certainly worth viewing. On the title page, the young Churchill contemplates a bust of the protagonist “Winnie.”
“Queller of Tonypandy”
Loris Carlew’s Alice in Plunderland 12 documented the continuing struggle against the House of Lords. Herein the Welsh Rabbit (Lloyd George), shows Alice around Parliament. Churchill appears as the Mad Hatter, of whom the Welsh Rabbit approves:
The only one who really sticks with me is the Mad Hatter, who was kind enough to say my Finance Bill didn’t want altering by a single comma…. By the by, he was expected this afternoon—and sure enough, there he is, coming towards us—the Scourge of the Suffragettes and the Queller of Tonypandy.
The last line alludes to an accusation that Churchill sent troops against striking miners in the Welsh village of Tonypandy. It was a slander he never lived down, but the image is accurate:
Alice’s eyes fell upon a rather short, confident, yet self-conscious, and stoutly built young gentleman, wearing a small and unobtrusive headgear, in whom she didn’t recognize the least trace of superficial resemblance to her old acquaintance, the Mad Hatter of Wonderland. “It can’t be him,” she said. “My friend was very thin, and wore a very large hat, and this is quite the opposite, and doesn’t look really mad.” “It is he, all the same,” said the Cabinet Minister, “but he’s grown out of all his old tricks, and become very important indeed. In fact, he thinks he’s indispensable and the world wouldn’t go round the right way without him.13
Here is humor based on myth and politics, though one aspect of the image is true: Churchill once wore, and was thereafter often portrayed in, hats too small for his head.14
White Knight and Promised Land
Three Churchill cartoons in the famous humor magazine Punch portray Churchill as a character from Lewis Carroll. The first of these appeared on 12 July 1922 in A.W. Lloyd’s “The Last of the Crusaders.” In February 1922 Churchill and Alfred Mond had spoken at Oxford University on creating a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Both were ardent Zionists, then and throughout their lives. Churchill, as Colonial Secretary, addressed objections from Arab leaders.15
The cartoon includes a basket carrying red paint and “Dead Sea Apples” reading, “A Present for Rutenberg.” Phinas Rutenberg was a Russian Jewish engineer, businessman, and political activist who had emigrated to Palestine. In defending Rutenberg’s proposed Jordan River power plant, Churchill made a key speech that saved the Balfour Declaration from rejection. One of his great orations, it turned the Commons vote on its end—a powerful pro-Zionist declaration. (See Ronald I. Cohen, “Churchill the Jews and Israel,” Part 1, 2016.)
Tweedle-dum and Brendan
The Carroll characters Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee appeared in an A.W. Lloyd Punch cartoon in 1926. Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer and Ronald McNeill was Financial Secretary to the Treasury. The cartoon relates to the ongoing fights in the House over the budget and proposed amendments. Even with a significant Conservative majority, they weren’t sure they had enough votes for all the amendments. The characters are from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. They are historically shown as twins who never contradict one another and usually get little done.
A third Carroll-Churchill cartoon was “Brendan in Bloomsbury,” by E.H. Shepard in 1941.
Churchill and Brendan Bracken are the Duchess and Alice, from Alice in Wonderland. Churchill passes a crying baby—the Ministry of Information—to Bracken. It proved a wise choice: Bracken handled the job well. The Duchess is usually portrayed as an ugly women with volatile personality, but she appears benign in this illustration.
Churchill was represented as a character from Lewis Carroll eight times, each time as a distinct individual. He was made to represent a wide range, from the innocent Alice to the bizarre Mad Hatter to the supercilious Caterpillar. Whatever their politics, the cartoons were devoid of viciousness, suggesting the affection in which he was held, often by those who utterly disagreed with him. They are artefacts of a vanished political age.
Endnotes
1 Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill As I knew Him (London, Eyre & Spottiswoode and Collins, 1965), 16.
2 Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London: Macmillan, 1865); Through the Looking-Glass (London: Macmillan, 1871).
3 Carolyn Sigler, Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books (Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1977).
4 Caroline Lewis [Harold Begbie, Henry Temple and Stanford Ransome], Clara in Blunderland (London: William Heinemann, 1902).
5 Ibid, 15-16.
6 Ibid, 16.
7 Ibid, 18.
8 Charles Geake and Francis Carruthers Gould, John Bull’s Adventures in the Fiscal Wonderland (London: Methuen & Co., 1904).
9 Ibid, 131-42.
10 Arthur Waghorne, Through a Peer Glass: Winnie’s Adventure in Wastemonster, drawings by David Wilson (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1908).
11 Winston S. Churchill, House of Commons, 29 June 1907, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta, 2016), 103.
12 Loris Carlew, Alice in Plunderland (London: Evelyn Nash, 1910).
13 Ibid, 80.
14 Gary L. Stiles, Churchill in Punch and “Winston Churchill and His Magnificent Hats” (Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 2022).
15 See The Jewish National Home and Its Critics The Oxford Speeches by Sir Alfred Mond and Dr. Ch. Weizmann: A Reply by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to the Arab Delegation (London: The Zionist Organization, 1922).
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank Punch/Topfoto (Topham Partners LLP) for the use of the images of the Punch cartoons in this article.
The author
Gary Stiles is a physician, medical researcher and corporate executive, a student of history and art with a 40-year interest in Churchill and his writings. He is the Ursula Geller Distinguished Professor of Cardiovascular Research (Emeritus) at Duke University and is widely published in the medical and scientific literature. His first non-medical book was William Hart: Catalogue Raisonne and Artistic Biography (2020). His book, Churchill in Punch, was published in 2022.
Further reading
“Gary Stiles Offers a Brilliant Catalogue of Mr. Punch’s Churchill,” 2022.
“Churchill in Punch: His Fanciful Hats Helped Fashion His Image,” 2022.