The diagnosis of art: Alice, the Duchess, Sir John Tenniel, foxgloves, and roses
Authors: Jeffrey K Aronson, Manoj Ramachandran
Journal: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2007)

In two of Sir John Tenniel's illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in the chapter entitled ‘Pig and Pepper’, Alice is shown standing near a foxglove. Tenniel's original illustrations were in monochrome, but in The Nursery ‘Alice’ (1889), the shortened version that Carroll prepared for readers ‘from Nought to Five’, they were coloured, and the flower is clearly a purple foxglove. In the first illustration Alice holds in her arms the Duchess's baby, which has just metamorphosed into a pig (Figure 1). In the second she stands talking to the Cheshire cat, who is sitting on the bough of a tree.



Figure 1

One of Tenniel's illustrations for Chapter VI of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland





The presence of foxgloves in these two illustrations is confusing, since Alice is about the same height as the flowers. However, purple foxgloves are on average about three feet in height, while we have just read that Alice has used the caterpillar's mushroom to adjust her height to nine inches. Of course, we don't know what height purple foxgloves are in Wonderland, but in another illustration, in Chapter IV, in which Alice is, according to the text, three inches high she is shown dwarfed by a thistle of about the expected height.

Even stranger is the fact that Tenniel was not an artist who often included flowers in his drawings. In vain will you search for floral art in his Punch cartoons or his illustrations for works such as the Ingoldsby Legends.1,2 His woodland and garden scenes are dominated by shrubs and trees and his riversides by grasses. They do not, with a few exceptions, contain flowers. But in the Alice books flowers abound. In Wonderland, in addition to the foxglove and thistle mentioned above, there are the roses in the Queen's croquet-ground (Chapter VIII) and what looks like a scarlet-flowered epacris near the mushroom on which the caterpillar sits (Chapter IV). Tenniel also illustrated the garden of live flowers for Chapter II in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), in which Carroll parodied the garden in Tennyson's Maud, with its roses and lilies, larkspurs, daisies, and violets. We know that Carroll made many suggestions to Tenniel about the types of illustrations that he wanted,3 and he may have asked him to include all of these flowers, particularly the foxgloves. This suggestion is supported by the fact that in The Nursery ‘Alice’ Carroll drew attention specifically to the foxglove: ‘Do you see that Fox-Glove growing close to the tree? And do you know why it's called a Fox-Glove? Perhaps you think it's got something to do with a Fox? No indeed! Foxes never wear gloves! The right word is “Folk's-Gloves”. Did you ever hear that Fairies used to be called “the good Folk”?’ In The Story of Lewis Carroll (1899), Isa Bowman related how, although Carroll did not like flowers, he once showed her a foxglove and told her the story of how it came by its name. On the other hand, in three of his more than a hundred illustrations for Thomas James's edition of Aesop's fables of 1852, none depicting any other flowers whatsoever, Tenniel included foxgloves, and although they are small (indeed, as small as they are in Wonderland; Figure 2) they are nevertheless there. So perhaps it was Tenniel's initiative after all.



Figure 2

One of Tenniel's illustrations for Thomas James's edition of Aesop's fables (1852). Fable 104—The Country Maid and her Milk-can



Why are foxgloves illustrated in the ‘Pig and Pepper’ chapter? Carroll's love of a good pun4 provides a possible answer.

Foxgloves belong to the family of plants known as the Scrophulariaceae, a family of sympetalous dicotyledons that also includes eyebright, mullein, speedwell and toadflax. None is as instantly recognizable as the foxglove, which is the obvious choice to represent the family. And the Scrophulariaceae were so called because they were supposed to cure scrofula, which is not irrelevant to pigs.

Scrofa is the Latin for a sow and scrofula is its diminutive. Pigs were supposed to be susceptible to swellings of the lymph nodes, so when tuberculous swellings occurred in man they were called scrofula. The Greeks had a similar idea, but were more manly about it all—they called scrofula khoirades, the plural of the adjective khoiras, from the word for a hog, khoiros.



Scrofula was not the only form of the word. Scroffles was an Old English alternative and so, by metathesis, was scurffyls (which was not, however, connected with scurf, scurfy, or scurvy). Since in French the lettere often replaces the s at the start of a Latin word (for example, ecrire from scribere, echelle from scala, andetable from stabulum), scrofula in French became ecrouelles, from which, via the Auld Alliance, the Scots derived their word for scrofula, crewels or cruels. A scrophulous tumour was also called a struma, perhaps from struere, to pile up, but this term is now applied to thyroid tissue, as in struma ovarii, a tumour in which thyroid tissue appears in the ovary, and two forms of thyroiditis called struma lymphomatosa and Riedel's struma.

So perhaps the scrophulous foxglove echoes the scrofulous pig in Alice's arms? We cannot see enough of the pig to determine whether it has any scrofulous swellings, but another clue comes from the Cheshire cat:


‘ “By-the-bye, what became of the baby?” “It turned into a pig,” Alice answered “Did you say ‘pig’ or ‘fig’?” said the cat.’


Nothing happens in Carroll's dream world without good reason. The cat has not merely misheard Alice—her mention of a pig has clearly put the Scrophulariaceae into its mind and it immediately thinks of another member of the family, the figwort, so called because it was thought to cure haemorrhoids, also called figs.

Now the pig that Alice is holding is a royal pig—the son of the Duchess. And the Scrophulariaceae have several royal connections. In classical times regius morbus, the King's disease, referred to jaundice, but after the eleventh century scrofula was known in England as the King's (or Queen's) evil, since it was thought that it could be cured by the monarch's touch. The custom of touching in this way was introduced from France by Edward the Confessor and reached the height of its popularity in the reign of King Charles II, who touched nearly 100,000 people. According to Boswell, Samuel Johnson suffered from scrofula as a child and was probably the last person, at the age of two, to be touched for it by a reigning monarch, in his case Queen Anne, who failed to cure him thus in 1712.5 Not unconnectedly, it has been suggested that foxglove, used to treat his dropsy, may have hastened Johnson's death in 1784.6 According to herbalists such as Parkinson, Culpeper and Salmon, foxglove was used from at least the 17th century for the treatment of tuberculosis.7

Other royal associations with the Scrophulariaceae come from their alternative names, King's Ellwand for the purple foxglove (because of its height, an ellwand being a yardstick) and King's Taper for the great mullein, because of a fancied resemblance to a candle.

Which duchess's son was connected with pigs? In The Life and Death of Richard III, Richard is repeatedly referred to as a boar, and Queen Margaret calls him ‘thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog’ (Act 1, Scene 3). Richard's heraldic device was a white boar, and it is said that after the Lancastrian victory at the battle of Bosworth in 1485 many inn signs showing a white boar were hurriedly painted blue, the blue boar being the sign of Richard's Lancastrian enemy, John de Vere, thirteenth Earl of Oxford. Many Blue Boar inns survive today, but there is still at least one White Boar, in Bury, Lancashire, and the fact that it is in the wrong county argues against this story. All this suggests that Alice's pig is Richard of Gloucester, the son of Richard the third Duke of York.8 To cap the connection, what better proof is needed than Richard's exclamation in the play, ‘Off with his head’, addressed to Lord Hastings (Act 3, Scene 4), and his later ejaculation, ‘Off with his son George's head!’ (Act 5, Scene 6).

This evidence sets Alice's dream in late 1452, in the October of which Richard of Gloucester was born, or early 1453, when Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou were on the throne. The Dictionary of National Biography describes Margaret as ‘a hard-headed, ruthless, cruel, vengeful power-seeker’, an excellent model indeed on which to base the Queen of Hearts. And Henry's mental breakdown in 1453 is clearly foreshadowed by the King of Hearts' absentmindedness.

This means that the Duchess is Cecily Neville, the so-called White Rose of Raby [Castle], who was born in 1415, the eighteenth child of Ralph Neville, first earl of Westmorland, and the tenth from his marriage to Joan Beaufort, his second wife. She became the child bride of Richard, Duke of York, in 1429 and bore 12 children, of whom Richard of Gloucester was the last, when she was 37. The fact that she was a Yorkist and Margaret a Lancastrian explains the enmity between the Duchess and the Queen of Hearts. And it also explains the fact that the Queen's gardeners, having mistakenly planted Yorkist white roses, are in a rush to paint them Lancastrian red. We can only conclude that it was to make this point that Carroll persuaded Tenniel to illustrate that event.