Sir John Tenniel was born in Bayswater, London, England. He was an illustrator, humourist and political cartoonist who featured prominently among the Golden Age of Illustration.
Tenniel was a quiet and introverted person, both as a boy and as an adult. He was content to remain firmly out of the limelight and seemed unaffected by competition or change.
Early on, Tenniel became a student of the Royal Academy of Arts, but found their teaching unsatisfactory and largely educated himself for the rest of his career.
Tenniel’s first book illustration was for Samuel Carter Hall’s The Book of British Ballads, in 1842. During the 1840s, Tenniel worked on a number of collections, the best-received of which was his hundred drawings for an 1848 edition of Aesop’s Fables (1848). In 1850, aged just thirty, he became joint cartoon artist for Punch magazine – then one of the most influential publications in Britain. For the next five decades, Tenniel remained the country’s foremost political and satirical cartoonist, proving himself as a skilled artistic conduit for the public mood.
Aside from his employment with Punch, Tenniel was also extremely well-known for his work as the illustrator of the Alice series, penning a total of ninety-two drawings for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, published in 1865 and 1871 respectively. Both works were instant best-sellers and now rank amongst the most famous literary illustrations of all time.
Despite the enormous success of the ‘Alice’ project, after 1872, Tenniel largely abandoned literary illustration.
In 1893 he received his knighthood from Queen Victoria – the first time any illustrator or cartoonist had been honoured in such a fashion.
(source: https://www.pookpress.co.uk/project/john-tenniel-biography/)