William Wallace Denslog (1856-1915), was born in Philadelphia, and studied at National Academy of Design. In the 1880s, he came to Chicago for the World's Columbian Exposition, and stayed. Besides very well known titles like The Humpty Dumpty tales or The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Denslow also illustrated Baum's books By the Candelabra's Glare, Father Goose: His Book, and Dot and Tot of Merryland. The royalties from the print and stage versions of these classics were sufficient to allow Denslow to purchase Bluck's Island, Bermuda and crown himself King Denslow the first. However, he drank his money away, and died at the Knickerbocker Hospital in New York City in obscurity, of pneumonia. A sad story.
About the classic Humpty Dumpty, it has its origins as a nursery rhyme although it appears a lot in children literature for english-speaking world: Humpty appears in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1872), where he discusses semantics and pragmatics with Alice. Also in L. Frank Baum's Mother Goose in Prose (1901), where the rhyming riddle is devised by the daughter of the king, having witnessed Humpty's "death" and her father's soldiers efforts to save him. Robert Rankin used Humpty Dumpty character as one victim of a serial fairy-tale character murderer in The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse, and so on...
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| Other tales illustrated by WW Denslow and edited by Dillingham Company, NY |
