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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Collaboration of Lewis Carroll and Harry Furniss: illustrating the Sylvie and Bruno books

subject

description

The collaboration between Harry Furniss and Lewis Carroll did not stem from friendship, but from necessity: Carroll always illustrated his own texts as he wrote them, but his drawing skills were not good enough for publication. Yet it was impossible for him to write up the novel if the illustrating process did not take place simultaneously. To what extent is the collaborative creation of Sylvie and Bruno a real dialogue? Did Carroll only consider Furniss as an extension of himself? The correspondence between the two men allows us to analyse the complex relationship between the writer and the artist, but also acts as a prism that decomposes Carrollian creation into its graphic and textual components, which had been closely associated ever since his early texts. We will try and show to what extent the Carrollian creative process belongs to the linear mode of writing or to the global and simultaneous mode of graphic arts.