Recently, impatient about my inability to travel to archives, I sought out and purchased a not-too-expensive first edition of Lord Alfred Douglas’s first book of nonsense, Tails with a Twist. I’m writing an article about Douglas’s nonsense, and I really wanted to see the original illustrations by Punch political cartoonist E. T. Reed. (My reprint edition includes illustrations that are not NEARLY as good.)
My opening gambit in what I affectionally call The Dougie Article relies on a brief reading of “The Antelope” from Tails with a Twist, so I was hoping that this particular poem would be illustrated — but alas, it is not. I was, however, absolutely delighted with Reed’s depiction of “The Rabbit”:
The poem itself is one of my favorites. It begins: “The Rabbit has an evil mind, / Although he looks so good and kind. / His life is a complete disgrace, / Although he has so soft a face.”
And Reed’s illustration makes me love the poem even more. I particularly appreciate the way the composition of the image chimes with John Tenniel’s illustration of the trial over the tarts from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
Douglas was a fan of Carroll’s nonsense, so the similarity is likely not coincidental. In my article, I explore not only the relationship between Douglas’s nonsense and the Victorian tradition of nonsense for children but also the ways Douglas acknowledges, and critiques, discourses about same-sex desire prevalent in fin-de-siècle writings in degeneration and sexology. I hope that I’ll soon be able to share where this article lands!
Victoria Ford Smith 