Britannia’s Victorian War Artist

The Indian Mutiny of 1857-58 was a bloody wake-up call for the British Empire. Coming so soon after the Crimean War against Russia, the Sepoy Rebellion, as it was also known, exposed the cracks that eventually led to the loss of the ‘Jewel in the Crown’ and the break-up of the Empire itself a century later. It also made the reputation of one of Britain’s most distinguished political cartoonists. Despite being blind in one eye he became the leading artist of Punch for nearly half a century, was the first ever cartoonist to be knighted for his work and later achieved wider fame as the illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. His drawings of Britannia, Liberty, John Bull and other statuesque images of nationalism and the virtues were reprinted in countless school history books and came to define how we see the Victorian era. But his first big success was ‘The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger’ (1857) which summed up British anger over the Indian Mutiny and was reissued as a popular print. His name was Sir John Tenniel.