Overlooked Britain Lucinda Lambton
There are some entrancingly unexpected stained-glass windows of Alice in Wonderland to be found in All Saints’ Church at Daresbury in Cheshire. I write ‘unexpected’ but, considering the adventures Alice and her anthropomorphic pals got up to, it is no great surprise to find them here, above the altar of a late-19thcentury English parish church.
The creator of these characters, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, otherwise famed as Lewis Carroll – writer, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon, and photographer – was born in Daresbury’s Old Parsonage in 1832. His father, Charles Dodgson, was the vicar there for sixteen years and our hero-tobe lived at Daresbury for the first eleven years of his life (reading The Pilgrim’s
Progress when he was seven years old), along with nine of his ten siblings. One of the most beguiling aspects of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is catching glimpses of 19th-century life: of hatters by the score being driven mad by their use of poisonous mercury vapours on felt hats; of his invented turtle heralding the new and fashionable soup; of Victorian children keeping pet dormice in teapots – although another and even better theory about this little creature is that it was
based on a pet wombat belonging to the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who described his much-loved animal as ‘a joy, a triumph and a madness’. It slept a great deal and James Mcneill Whistler wrote of dining with Rossetti in Cheyne Walk with, among others, George Meredith and Algernon Swinburne, with the somnolent wombat curled up on the epergne throughout the evening. Ford Madox Brown always claimed that it was this singular sight that inspired Carroll to write it into the Mad Hatter’s tea party. It sleeps on in these windows, along with many other colourful characters.
Three illustrious Victorians were responsible for Daresbury’s glass. As well as Carroll himself, there was John Tenniel, the magnificently mustachioed kingpin illustrator and political cartoonist – no small requirement for drawing Alice and her companions’ shenanigans. Last, but by no means least, Geoffrey Webb steps into the spotlight: a stained-glass artist whose liberal use of brilliant white gives a particular vibrancy to his work. He had trained under the incomparable Charles Eamer Kempe, the stained-glass designer and manufacturer, who produced more than 4,000 windows from his highly successful firm in Marylebone, all of them glowing forth in particularly rich detail with instantly recognisable, beautiful and strangely modern – almost cutesy – faces.
Webb never reached such countrywide fame but his Alice in Wonderland windows were a singular triumph. Many have tried over the years to outdo Tenniel’s brilliant illustrations but all have failed – even Arthur Rackham, Mervyn Peake and Carroll himself.
Somewhat weak Alice windows look down on the dining hall at Christ Church, Oxford. The figures are not by Tenniel and the magic has therefore gone. There is, I fear, a largely repellent legacy throughout the world. Few sculptures are as disagreeable as the mishmash of grotesques that is the Mad Hatter’s tea party in New York’s Central Park. What, too, about the monstrous CITEC building in Germany’s University of Bielefeld, smothered with a faux surrealist scene of Alice meeting the rabbit? As for CIF Power and Shine Bathroom Cleaner, being advertised by the Mad Hatter cavorting with Alice ... the list is grimly endless.
In Daresbury’s parish church, however, we have perfection, with Tenniel’s genius surrounded by superb 19th century-looking ecclesiastical designs. Also included is Geoffrey Webb’s trademark – a spider with its web, framed here with Gothic trefoils. It is remarkable that these richly robust windows were dedicated as late as 1935.