Hidden Carrol

Photographic self portrait by Lewis Carroll, and its inclusion into an illustration by Henry Holiday to Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. In the drafts and in Holiday's drawing I didn't see that structure.

[top]: Henry Holiday: vectorized segment of an illustration (cut by Joseph Swain) to The Beaver's Lesson in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark (1876)
[left]: Original detail
[center]: Low pass filtered detail
[right]: Photographic self portrait by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll, May 1875) displayed in mirror view. (Credits for the photo: Watts Gallery, Compton, Guildford)

Perhaps Joseph Swain (the cutter) played a bigger role in this allusion&citation game. I think that C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) knew about Henry Holiday's allusions. There even may have been a cooperation in combining pictorial and textual allusions. But how can we be sure that Carroll/Dodgson knew about the "hidden Carroll" and the provoking simulacrum (based on a fold in the suit) in that picture?

This comparison also shows, how low pass filtering (blurring) can help. It removes unimportant details in a similar way as our eye/brain "removes" the single dots in a dithered image. In 2009 I initially used the illustrations in the Snark version of Ebooks Adelaide. Due to their low resolution they were blurred renderings of Holiday's illustrations already. Without the blurring I perhaps would not have noticed the first allusion which I found in December 2008.