Alice Ever After • Lewis Carroll

The Afterlife of Alice In Wonderland Exhibit Contents: • Exhibit Main • Exhibit Overview: Alice Ever After • Lewis Carroll Biography • Early Editions • Early Illustrators • Adaptations • Reincarnations • Alternative Alices • Exhibit Gallery • Reception • Thanks • Main The Afterlife of Alice in Wonderland was an exhibit of various editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and other Alice-related material. The exhibit included the first American edition of the text (D. Appleton, 1866) and other editions of the original text, including a facsimile edition of the original manuscript, Adventures Underground, which includes Lewis Carroll's own illustrations. Other items on display included later editions and illustrated versions of the book, texts that reference Alice, and material, such as an Alice chess set, teacups, album covers, play scripts and dolls, from popular culture. This classic of children's literature shows the popularity of the Alice story as it reverberates through American culture and as it contributes to ideas of American childhood. The exhibit ran from October 15 - December 15, 2007, in the Special Collections exhibit area on the second floor of the Smathers Library. A tea party reception for the exhibit was held on November 7, 2007 at 3:30pm. • Exhibit Overview: Alice Ever After “Well! What are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see you’re trying to invent something. “I – I’m a little girl,” said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day. “A likely story indeed!” said the Pigeon, in a tone of the deepest contempt. Likely or not, Lewis Carroll’s story of Alice – first told in two volumes, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) – has delighted readers across centuries and continents. Lewis Carroll is said to be the most quoted author after Shakespeare, and Alice his best-known creation and indeed one of our most cherished child icons. Only Peter Pan rivals Alice in popularity and cultural diffusion. Like J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland (a title never used by Carroll) is known by all, even by – perhaps especially by – those who have never read the original texts. Most people recognize not only Alice but also the larger Wonderland menagerie: the caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Hatter (not titled “Mad” in Carroll), and the Mock Turtle. Characters from Through the Looking Glass are equally famous: the Red Queen, the Jabberwocky, Humpty Dumpty, Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum. Carroll’s original texts are now encountered more often in the context of university courses on children’s or Victorian literature, while many of us know Alice primarily through picturebook retellings, or the animated Disney film, or other variations or revisitations. As early as 1869, other authors tried their hand at Alice stories, sometimes challenging Carroll’s themes and attitudes, sometimes confirming them. Among the more famous and subversive “Alternative Alices” are Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses (1874) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Behind the White Brick (1879). Several hundred such texts were written by the early twentieth- century; Carroll himself owned a number of them, including From Nowhere to the North Pole (1875) and Mabel in Rhymeland (1885). As for Carroll, Alice was translated into Japanese as early as 1908 and is now available in over 125 languages, including Esperanto. The Alice stories also quickly found their way to the silver screen. The first cinematic Alice was a Cecil Hepworth short made in 1903, just five years after Carroll’s death, and by 1933 five other films had been made. Alice has been embraced by the French Surrealists and by the Bloomsbury group, by Walt Disney and Salvador Dali; the character Alice has found herself starring in advertisements for “Holidayland” (the North-East Railway), “New Wonderland” (Yellowstone National Park), and for Guinness Beer and Wonder Bread. Wherever we go, Alice and/or Carroll are there: in popular music (the Beatles, Grace Slick), in adult films and video games (American Magee’s Alice), in television, graphic novels, in musicals, ballets, operas, plays, and realist theatre. Try an Alice search on eBay. Put simply, the Alice of Lewis Carroll has at once been preserved intact and transformed dramatically. And unless we seek out Carroll first, we’re likely to encounter Alice in alternative or revisionary dress. If Alice isn’t sure of herself in Carroll’s story, just imagine her confusion today. Who is this dreamchild, and why do we chase her still? In her study The Case of Peter Pan, Jacqueline Rose proposes that children’s literature is something of a misnomer, since adults write for and otherwise act on behalf of children. Like Peter Pan, Alice confuses as much as clarifies our expectations about childhood and children’s literature. Ostensibly “for” children, and originally for a particular child, Alice refuses to settle down sensibly in the realm of children’s literature. Carroll’s Alice books are at least partly adult in tone and concern, containing as they do mathematical puzzles, educational satires, and not a little narratorial joking at Alice’s expense. Is Alice really a classic of children’s literature? Are these various “alternatives” to Alice simply adulterations – or is there something already adult about Carroll’s original tales? What might The Case of Alice suggest? If Alice the character and Alice the narrative are elusive and ever-proliferating, so too is Lewis Carroll. In a 1939 appreciation of Carroll, inspired by the appearance of Carroll’s “complete works,” Virginia Woolf had this to say: “We ought to be able to grasp him whole and entire. But we fail – once more we fail. We think we have caught Lewis Carroll; we look again and see an Oxford clergyman. We think we have caught the Reverend C. L. Dodgson – we look again and see a fairy elf. The book breaks in two in our hands.” More recently, Will Brooker has sorted through the many Carroll biographies in an effort to clarify our picture of him and to contextualize ongoing suspicion about his attachment to little girls. Brooker persuasively shows that “Lewis Carroll” is many men in the popular imagination, at once “a national treasure and a vaguely suspect enigma.” We may fail to know Lewis Carroll and Alice, but such failure is what this exhibit is about. We are Alice ever after. ~ © 2007 Kenneth Kidd • Lewis Carroll Biography Lewis Carroll, born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on January 27, 1832, is best known for his nonsensical work of whimsy, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The shy clergyman, a student of mathematics and photography, was attracted to literature even as a child; family documents show a young Carroll reading Pilgrim’s Progress at the age of 7. Though intellectually gifted, Carroll would suffer from a stammer all his life. His stammer has recently been offered as evidence of Carroll’s pedophilia (popular myth holds that when in the presence of children, the stutter vanished), but of course this myth – known as the “Carroll Myth” – cannot be satisfactorily substantiated. Carroll is most noted for his relationship with Alice Liddell, whom he befriended in her childhood. One “golden afternoon” (July 4, 1862) Carroll and his friend, Robinson Duckworth, were rowing the Liddell sisters Loraine, Edith, and Alice, down the river Isis at Oxford. To pass the time, Carroll began telling them a story; thus, Alice’s adventures were born. Heeding the urgings of close friend (and noted fantasy writer) George MacDonald, Carroll finally plunged into the rabbit hole and published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in time for Christmas 1865, although the imprint carries the date of 1866. This edition included illustrations by the celebrated illustrator Sir John Tenniel. Carroll’s book gained popularity almost instantly; his parodies of well-known public figures and scholars (most notably Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and writer Isaac Watts) and his intertextual references delighted audiences from the first. Many popular stories would follow, including Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), “The Hunting of the Snark” (1874), and Sylvie and Bruno (1889). He is widely acknowledged as the father of the portmanteau and inventor of the term, itself. Carroll wrote that in a portmanteau “there are two meanings packed up into one word” (Through the Looking-Glass). For example, the word “chortle” (also coined by Carroll) comes from “chuckle” and “snort.” From 1855-1881, Carroll was a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford University. In 1881, however, Carroll resigned from the position in order to pursue a career as an author. He admitted in his diary that the lectureship position bored him, and though he had a natural ability for mathematics, he had a propensity for writing that outweighed his skill with numbers. Besides being a popular children’s book author and reluctant mathematician, Carroll was an accomplished photographer. Beginning in 1856, Carroll would become fascinated with the art. He took pictures of all the Liddell children, as well as many of their friends. He also took portraits of such notable persons as Lord Tennyson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Recently, several controversial pictures by Carroll of nude children have been unearthed and published, giving new fuel to the “Carroll Myth” fire. But considering the predominance of nude female paintings in Carroll’s era, perhaps his pictures are not such a scandal, after all. From his first publication of Alice in 1865 to his death in 1898 from pneumonia, Carroll charmed and delighted his readers. Even now, 142 years after its first public debut, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland still enjoys a key position in popular culture and the literary imagination. In fact, Wonderland is never as far away as it may seem… ~ © 2007 Cari Keebaugh For Further Reading: Lewis Carroll’s biography: • The Lewis Carroll Society • Bakewell, Michael.

Load more