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| If you were a chess piece, which one would you be? asks Violet, a friend in China.
Violet admits that she'd like to be a bishop . . . the sly one . . . but thinks the pawn resembles her the most.
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Sir Isumbras at the Ford
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In John Tenniel's illustrations to Through the Looking-Glass there's a hint that the White Knight makes occasional trips into the real world, because he's collected a motley assortment of objects from everyday life which he keeps hanging around his saddle: fire tongs, bellows, a hearth brush, carrots and a string of onions; the kind of miscellaneous objects that you might grab in occasional forays into a Victorian house, if you were a magical chess piece that could break into reality. There seems to be a traditional basketwork bee-hive behind the saddle. A bee-hive is controlled by a queen, so perhaps that's the connection. Tenniel's White Knight appears to be based on this Pre-Raphaelite painting by Millais of an old knight taking two small children across a ford. It seems that the melancholy, kind old White Knight, with his ingenious
but impractical schemes, is a portrait of Lewis Carroll
(Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832 - 1898), the author of
the story, which gives the scene where he says goodbye to Alice,
who is shortly to become a queen herself, some added pathos.
Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk |
The
White Knight