The Afterlife of In Exhibit

Contents:

• Exhibit Main • Exhibit Overview: Alice Ever After • 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 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 . 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 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 icons. Only 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 , the Cat, the Hatter (not titled “Mad” in Carroll), and the Mock . Characters from Through the Looking Glass are equally famous: the Red Queen, the , , Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum.

Carroll’s original texts are now encountered more often in the context of university courses on children’s or , 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 ’s Speaking Likenesses (1874) and ’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 their way to the silver screen. The first cinematic Alice was a 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 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 , 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 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 , 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 , 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 .

Carroll’s book gained popularity almost instantly; his parodies of well-known public figures and scholars (most notably Prime Minister and writer ) 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 ” (1874), and (1889). He is widely acknowledged as the father of the 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 . 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 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. Lewis Carroll : A Biography. : Heinemann, 1996. • Carpenter, Angelica Shirley. Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking Glass. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications Company, 2003. • Stoffel, Stephanie Lovett. Lewis Carroll in Wonderland: The Life and Times of Alice and her Creator. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1997.

Lewis Carroll as Photographer:

• Cohen, Morton N. Lewis Carroll: A Biography. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1995. • Cohen, Morton N. Lewis Carroll, Photographer of Children: Four Nude Studies. New York: C. N. Potter, 1979. • Gernsheim, Helmut. Lewis Carroll: Photographer. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1969

The “Carroll Myth”:

• Brooker, Will. Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004. • Leach, Karoline. In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding Of Lewis Carroll. Chester Springs: Dufour Editions, 1999.

• Early Editions

It was during a river boat excursion on July 4, 1862, that , aka Lewis Carroll, told the three young Liddell girls the story of Alice, a little girl who fell into a rabbit hole and arrived in a place where nothing quite made sense. The girls were so charmed with the story, they begged Carroll to write it down for them, and in the following months he did just that. The manuscript, illustrated with Carroll’s own drawings, was completed early in 1863 and Carroll began looking for a publisher and an illustrator. In April, 1864, John Tenniel agreed to illustrate Carroll’s text. Clarendon Press of Oxford University agreed to print the first edition with The Macmillan Company serving as publisher. Carroll himself underwrote the cost of the printing. On June 30, 1865, Clarendon Press sent Carroll 2,000 sets of unfolded sheets, which Carroll delivered to Macmillan, asking for 50 bound copies as soon as possible, to give away as presents, and one copy bound in white vellum for Alice. He sent Alice this copy on July 4, 1865, and distributed the other copies to friends in the following days. However, on July 19, Carroll received a letter from Tenniel, expressing dissatisfaction with the quality of the printing of his illustrations. Upon closer inspection, Carroll agreed that the printing was sub- standard and spoke to the publisher. Carroll and Macmillan decided to reprint the edition with a more commercial printer, Richard Clay of London, who reset the type and printed a second edition which, although post-dated 1866, was issued by Macmillan in December, 1865, in time for the Christmas trade. Another printing of 3,000 copies was announced by Macmillan in August, 1866.

It was originally agreed that the first unsatisfactory printing would be sold as waste paper, but when an offer came from D. Appleton, a publishing firm in New York, to buy up the original 2,000 copies, the printed sheets were folded and bound in red cloth bindings with a gold stamped vignette on the front cover. The Macmillan title page, with the imprint dated 1865, was removed from each book and a new title page with the Appleton imprint, dated 1866, was tipped in and the whole lot, minus the few books Carroll had distributed and not gotten back, was shipped to D. Appleton in New York. This first edition was issued in the United States in early 1866. The true first edition, thus, was issued in America several months after the second edition was issued in .

In 1886, Carroll arranged for his hand written manuscript with his illustrations to be printed and distributed under the title of Alice’s Adventures Underground. Twenty-five years after the original Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published, Carroll re-wrote his text in simpler language for younger children. This effort was published by The Macmillan Company in 1890 as The Nursery Alice. It included twenty of Tenniel’s original illustrations, enlarged and colored, and featured a cover by E. Gertrude Thomson, a friend of Carroll. ~ © 2007 Rita Smith

Sources:

• Muir, Percy. English Children’s Books, 1600-1900, London: B. T. Batsford, 1954. • Schiller, Justin. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: An 1865 Printing Re-described, Privately Printed for The Jabberwock, 1990. • Wikipedia, “The Nursery ‘Alice,’” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nursery_%22Alice%22

• Early Illustrators

Lewis Carroll died in 1898. During his lifetime, there seemed to be little desire or opportunity for artists to compete with John Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but after his death, publishers, first in the United States and then in Great Britain, rushed to produce editions with new illustrations. The first such book was illustrated by Blanche McManus and published in 1899 by M. F. Mansfield and A. Wessels of New York. This edition featured eleven full-page plates printed in black and white with green and red accents drawn in a flat style very different from Tenniel’s. Peter Newell was another early American illustrator of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with an edition published by Harper & Brothers in 1901. This book has an introduction by E. S. Martin and the text is placed within elegant green decorative borders drawn by Robert Mary Wright and interspersed with Newell’s black and white plates. His illustrations are filled with humor but drawn in a representational, though somewhat exaggerated, style rather than the comic style of his better known efforts, The Slant Book and Topsy & Turveys. Maria Louise Kirk also illustrated an early American edition, published in 1904 by Frederick Stokes of New York. Her color plates, which are interspersed with some of Tenniel’s original drawings, are less humorous and whimsical than Tenniel’s and present a very sturdy, if somewhat bland and unemotional Alice.

In 1907 the British copyright for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland expired, opening the door for a rush by London publishers to produce editions with new illustrations. At least eight were published in the fall of that year, with the first being an edition illustrated by Millicent Sowerby and published by Chatto and Windus. Her illustrations are formal and static and primarily still of interest because they accompanied the first British edition not illustrated by Tenniel. A more interesting and memorable version was illustrated by , published by William Heinemann, also in 1907. Rackham’s illustrations, especially the color plates with their soft color and animated line, evoke a magical world of mystery and eeriness. While Alice is portrayed realistically, she is surrounded by grotesque characters. This blend of realism and fantasy echoes the tensions of the text and foreshadows the surrealism evident in the 1969 portfolio edition illustrated by Salvador Dali which is displayed in the large case in the center of the exhibit area. ~ © 2007 Rita Smith

• Adaptations

There have been many adaptations and appropriations of Carroll’s story and Tenniel’s images of Alice, not only by a variety of writers and artists, but also by musicians, paper engineers, advertisers, gamers, playwrights, film producers, toy manufacturers and medical researchers. Yes, Alice has a syndrome named after her, the Alice In Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS) whose sufferers have a feeling that their entire body or parts of it have been altered in shape and size.

One early adaptation was written by Carroll himself, who, in 1890, wrote and published a version of the story in simple language entitled The Nursery Alice, intended for children “from ought to five.” In 1908 an edition with “words of one-syllable” appeared. This was achieved by simply dividing multiple syllable words up into individual syllables with dashes between them. When toy books became popular in the 1930’s many artists took on the challenge of creating movables for the Alice story, and more recently, James Roger Diaz and Robert Sabuda have produced intricate and stunning pop-up versions. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland has been published as a Big Little Book, a Little Golden Book, a comic book, a graphic novel, a video game and numerous picture books. In 1951, the Disney animated film established a new ubiquitous version of both text and characters for the post war generation.

All those efforts were pointed primarily toward the child audience, but many adaptations have also been created specifically for more mature audiences. The story has inspired numerous live performances, including plays, musicals, and operas. It was first made into a play as early as 1886, when Alice In Wonderland, a musical theater production by H. Saville Clark and Walter Slaughter, played at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. Eva LeGallienne and Florida Friebus wrote a version for the stage in 1932 adding many modern political and pop-culture references. The play was successfully performed on Broadway, with LeGallienne in the lead role. As the playbills in the exhibit case suggest, different versions of the play have been performed in a variety of venues from professional theater to the high school stage. It has inspired many composers, singers, and song writers, who have produced musical adaptations from a fully scored symphony to Jefferson Airplane’s “,” sung at the Woodstock Music Festival in 1969. The latter performance is included in this exhibit as a video clip.

Toy manufacturers and knick-knack producers have had a field day with the images of Alice, the , the Hatter, the and all the other characters that inhabit Alice’s fantasy world. Chess sets, mugs, beanie babies and other items scattered throughout the cases of the exhibit provide just a few examples of such appropriations.

And finally, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland has been translated into many different languages, including native languages throughout the world, and every translation is its own unique adaptation. ~ © 2007 Rita Smith

• Reincarnations

It is quite likely that every year since 1907, when the British copyright expired, at least one newly illustrated version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been published. Some of them are quite mundane and cheaply produced, printed on paper that is crumbling and images that are already fading. Some of them are quite memorable, with stunning illustrations by well-known artists, printed on high quality paper and bound in fine decorated or embossed covers creating limited deluxe editions. Three of the exhibit cases contain examples of books published since the early twentieth century, including both the ordinary and the exquisite.

The highlight of this exhibit is the portfolio edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland illustrated by the famous painter, Salvador Dalí. Dalí was born in Figueras, Spain, on May 11, 1904. He was a painter with a style that placed him in the Surrealist Movement, which also included writers and poets. According to poet and critic André Breton, the spokesman of the movement, Surrealism was a way to unite conscious and unconscious realms of experience so that the world of and fantasy is joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality." The Surrealists were influenced by the research and theories of on the unconscious, utilizing his methods of free association to explore and reveal the interior world of the , including . Their work “confused” the states of dreaming and reality by placing ordinary objects in unusual circumstances and landscapes, thus blurring the border between reality and dreams or imagination. With this definition in mind, it makes perfect sense that Dalí would bring his Surrealist sensibilities to bear on Carroll’s text in which a real little girl falls into a wonderland where rabbits talk, cats disappear and nothing seems quite right. A recurring and well-known image in Dalí’s work was the “melting clock,” which can be seen serving as the table in the illustration for the .

Dalí’s illustrated version was published in portfolio in 1969 by the Maecenas Press of New York as a limited edition. The Baldwin Library copy is Number 426 of 2500 issued. This particular portfolio was purchased by the Library in 2007 from the personal library of the estate of David Friedkin, a television series creator, writer, director and producer (I Spy, Dr. Kildare, The Most Deadly Game, among others) and movie screenwriter (The Pawnbroker). ~ © 2007 Rita Smith

• Alternative Alices

The Alice books, noted Alexander Wolcott in 1939, “have known no frontier.” They have been translated into nearly fifty languages. “If you poke about in the bookstalls in the Continent,” writes Wolcott, “you will stumble inevitably on Alice’s Abenteur in Wunderland. Or Le Aventure d’Alice del Paese Meraviglie (with illustrations, of course, by Giovanni Tenniel).” These are among the more faithful or literal translations of Alice; other “translations” also abound, in the form of imitations, “sequels,” parodies and satires, in which Carroll’s two-part masterpiece is reworked to various ends and effects. “Alice is always being imitated,” complained in 1895, and in 1932, in his foundational history of children’s literature, Harvey Darton described such imitations as “a permanent plague to all editors and publishers of literature for children.”

Carroll himself didn’t seem to mind these imitations and in fact collected some of them, including several displayed here. Carolyn Sigler likewise takes a more charitable view in her edited collection Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books. Nearly two hundred such Alternative Alices were published between 1869 and 1930, she observes, after which point variants shifted away from the themes and emphases of Carroll. Sigley divides these earlier texts into four categories: subversions, didactic spins, sentimental recreations, and political parodies. Some of the texts on display here are among those reprinted in Sigler’s collection. ’s Mopsa the Fairy (1869) and Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses (1874) are among the earliest and most devious alternatives to Carroll, challenging as they do the “little lady” persona of Alice. Tom Hood’s From Nowhere to the North Pole (1875) belongs to the didactic category, while Charles E. Carryl’s Davy and The Goblin, or What Followed Reading ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1885) is a sentimental recreation. Political parodies include Alice in Blunderland, An Iridescent Dream (1907), by John Kendrick Bangs, Alice and the Stork: A Fairy Tale for Workingmen’s Children (1915), by Henry T. Schnittkind, and Alice in the Delighted States (1928), by Edward Hope. The latter takes up such issues as Prohibition, immigration, and censorship. “’Oh,’ said Alice. ‘And does the Censor live on the Censor Ship?’ ‘Sometimes,’ replied the Ferret, ‘and sometimes he lives on the Ship of State.’”

Sigley observes that after 1930, Alternative Alices began to subside, and references to Alice became more diffuse and general. Sigley may overstate the case, as some early imitations left Carroll far behind while very recent British political caricature takes its cue from the Alice books. In any event, this detextualization of Alicecame as part of the academic and literary elevation of Carroll, championed by the likes of and Virginia Woolf as a forerunner of and a decidedly highbrow talent. His Alice books, writes Woolf in a 1939 appreciation, “are not books for children; they are the only books in which we become children . . . To become a child is to be very literal; to find everything so strange that nothing is surprising; to be heartless, to be ruthless, yet to be so passionate that a snub or a shadow drapes the world in gloom. It is so to be Alice in Wonderland.” The Alice industry hasn’t gone away – very obviously not – but the textual imitation and parody on display in this exhibit case has been eclipsed by other sorts of Alice productions. ~ © 2007 Kenneth Kidd

• Exhibit Gallery

Exhibit images include images featured in and of the exhibit, images from the Alice Digital Collection, and video from the exhibit. Images of the exhibit are available as a downloadable PowerPoint file and as a short film clip.

The film clips for the downloadable video are from these sources:

• Alice in Wonderland, director Cecil Hepworth (1903) Silent film starring May Clark. • Alice in Wonderland, director Norman Z. McLeod (1933) Film based on Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, starring • Alice in Wonderland (1951) Trailer to the Disney animated film version • Alice in Wonderland, director Kirk Browning (1983) Theatrical version starring Kate Burton and Richard Burton • Alice in Wonderland, director Harry Harris (1985) Film starring Natalie Gregory • Alice, director Jan Svankmajer (1988) Live and puppeteered film, starring Kristýna Kohoutová, Camilla Power • Alice in Wonderland, director Nick Willing (1999) Film starring Tina Marjorino and Whoopi Goldberg • Alice in Wonderland (1983) Animated film translated into many languages • Alice’s Wonderland, director Walt Disney (1923) Silent film by Walt Disney mixing live action and animation • Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit” (Woodstock 1969) • American McGee’s Alice (Computer game, 2000)

~ Video compilation created by Alexandria Schmitt

• Reception

An Exhibit Reception/Tea Party for The Afterlife of Alice in Wonderland was held November 7, 2007, in Room 1A of Smather’s Library. The program included a talk by Dr. Kenneth Kidd and a reading of Chapter 7 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Alice, the White Rabbit, the March Hare and .

Reception Photos

Reception Talk

The Afterlife of Alice Reception Talk Kenneth Kidd November 7, 2007

This semester I’m teaching a graduate seminar on “golden age” children’s literature -- primarily British fantasy classics published between about 1865 and 1920. The course explores the conceit of the “golden age” as well as the individual titles. We’ve also been considering how these classics live on in popular media and culture, albeit often in very different form. The phrase “golden age” is problematic to the extent that it glamorizes a period and a body of literature often imperialistic in emphasis.

Rita invited our class to come see the Aliceeditions and material and we spent the better part of an evening going through some of the materials you see here today in the exhibit -- in the poster images as well as the cases. We were particularly fascinated with the Salvador Dali edition, which Rita acquired for the Baldwin a couple of years ago, but also with other texts. We thought a bit about format and suggested, for instance, that one of the cases be alternative Alices. In my short talk today, I’ll emphasize three things: 1) the origins of Alice and the larger Alice ‘phenomenon”; (and then more briefly) 2) Alice in relation to children’s literature, and 3) Alice in relation to so-called adult literature.

Origins of Alice

Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Dodgson, a math don at Oxord composed the tale of Aliceto entertain the three daughters of the Dean of Christ Church, the college to which Carroll belonged as a faculty member. Three girls: Lorina Liddell (13), Alice (10), and Edith (8). The story was allegedly told during a mile leisurely boat trip down the River Thames in 1864. The story runs that the girls loved it and begged Carroll to write it down, which he did. He first presented Alice with a manuscript and in 1865 published an expanded version, on the advice of his friend George MacDonald. The Mad-Tea party was one of the episodes that was added.

Reviews were mixed at first and the overall reception lukewarm -- the success of Alicewas gradual rather than immediate. By the time Carroll died in 1898, 160,000 copies had been sold. The book has never been out of print. Some of its early admirers include and Oscar Wilde -- a fun pair to think about.

The book’s first appearance in America was 1865, the same year as the official British publication. The story was translated into Japanese in 1908 and into in 1964. In 1998, one of the few surviving copies of the 1865 first edition is sold at auction for US $1.5 million, becoming the most expensive children's book ever traded.

Carroll published a sequel in 1872 called Through the Looking Glass -- here we meet the Jabberwock and Humpty Dumpty, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.

What’s referred to as Alice in Wonderland is really a combination of Carroll’s two texts -- often with elements thrown in from subsequent Alice productions.

The Meaning(s) of Alice

When asked about the meaning of the Alice books, Lewis Carroll replied serenely that he was content for the meaning to be decided by the reader.

There are various interpretations/frames: Dreamscape, drug trip, social or social satire, literature, children’s fantasy, literature. There’s quite a cottage industry of Alice analysis and commentary.

What’s interesting about Alice is that just about everyone seems to know her or something of her story even if -- maybe especially if -- they haven’t read Carroll’s two books. This is largely thanks to mass visual as well as literary popularizations.

On the literary side, Carroll's two great fantasies inspired nearly two hundred imitations, responses, and parodies during the remainder of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth — so many that Carroll at one point began his own collection of Alice imitations. In 1887, one critic suggested that Carroll had plagiarized Tom Hood's From Nowhere to the North Pole (1875) when writing Alice — though the relationship was just the reverse: Hood's novel was one of the many Alice imitations. In 1895 Andrew Lang complained that “Alice is always being imitated,” and in 1932, in his foundational history of children’s literature, Harvey Darton described such imitations as “a permanent plague to all editors and publishers of literature for children.”

The best scholarly source on these texts is Carolyn Sigler’s collection by that name, Alternative Alices. Sigley divides these texts into four categories: subversions, didactic spins, sentimental recreations, and political parodies. Some of the texts on display here are among those reprinted in Sigler’s collection. Jean Ingelow’s Mopsa the Fairy (1869) and Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses (1874) are among the earliest and most devious alternatives to Carroll, challenging as they do the “little lady” persona of Alice. Hood’s From Nowhere to the North Pole (1875) belongs to the didactic category, while Charles E. Carryl’s Davy and The Goblin, or What Followed Reading ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1885) is a sentimental recreation. Political parodies include Alice in Blunderland, An Iridescent Dream (1907), by John Kendrick Bangs, Alice and the Stork: A Fairy Tale for Workingmen’s Children (1915), by Henry T. Schnittkind, and Alice in the Delighted States (1928), by Edward Hope -- the latter takes up such topics as censorship and Prohibition.

The primary wave of Alice-inspired works slackened after about 1920, though Carroll's influence on other writers has never fully waned; it can be seen in recent books like Maeve Kelly's Alice in Thunderland (1993) and Alison Haben's Dreamhouse (1995).

Some other contemporary novelizations include Go Ask Alice, The End of Alice, The Passion of Alice, One Pill Makes You Smaller. Some of these fit the category of “Alternative Alices” (as broadly construed) -- others are more generally inspired by Carroll or the figure of Alice.

But even before the first wave of Alice Alternatives began to slacken, film versions began to multiply. The story of Alice was made into a short film in 1903 by Cecil Hepworth; the first longer feature was 1933, and 1951 saw not one but two film versions-- the famous Disney animated version, and another by Lou Bunin which blended live action with stop-motion animated puppets -- a version apparently suppressed by Disney. Many other versions exist, including a very arty BBC 1966 version and apparently has a version in production, to appear in 2009. ’s wonderful 1985 film Dreamchild,a personal favorite, blends the story of a grown-up Alice (Mrs. Hargreaves) coming to America to receive an honory degree with the story of the book’s composition by Carroll in relation to Alice Liddell.

More recently video games have embraced and remade Alice, most notably the gothic American McGee’s Alice.

So, we know Alice not only through Carroll’s text but also -- and perhaps more so -- through American popular music and culture and visual media -- Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”, the Beatles “I am the ,” maybe Tom Petty’s Mad Hatter-esque video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More” (in constant rotation on MTV in the 80s), the recent graphic novel by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, which melds Alice with The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan (as do many “Alice” productions, in fact).

Virtually every form and space of American culture has been infiltrated by Alice -- operas, stage shows, etc., all kinds of merchandise. On Monday night my eBay search for the phrase “Alice in Wonderland” turned up 1948 items for sale.

There’s also a neurological condition called the Alice in Wonderland syndrome, in which objects are perceived to be substantially larger or smaller than in actuality.

There’s a separate Wikipedia site devoted to “works influenced by Alice in Wonderland.” I want to mention that a local Gainesville artist is soon to exhibit her own Alice Alternative. Maggie Taylor’s upcoming exhibit -- “: New Illustrations of Wonderland,” will run at the Harn Museum in Gainesville from July 15 to September 28. Maggie works primarily with digital scanning and photoshop and she often uses old photographs and daguerrotypes in her haunting compositions.

Alice and Children’s Literature

Alice is often cited as significant to children’s literature -- one of the first and most successful fantasies. Carroll and his contemporary are credited with sweeping away didactic literature and gloom-and-doom storytelling and introducing elements of the imagination, language play, nonsense, and so forth into the literary tradition. Carroll has great fun parodying didactic poems that everyday readers would have known.

This reading of Carroll as a breath of fresh air isn’t entirely true -- others were there before them, and the “didactic” tradition wasn’t so oppressive or monolithic as is sometimes asserted. Carroll’s books, while wacky and forward-looking, were in many ways the product of their time and place. Still, Carroll’s work was very innovative and was certainly influential on children’s fantasy -- it’s hard to imagine that , the Hundred Acre Wood, Oz, and other fantasy spaces of children’s literature would have come into being without Wonderland.

Alice and “Adult” Literature

Alice is also significant to “adult literature” and specifically to modernist writing. Juliet Dusinberre, in Alice in The Lighthouse, makes the case that modernist writers and especially Virginia Woolf drew from Carroll and the Alice books. In 1939, Woolf published an “appreciation of Carroll” that is now widely known and cited. But Dusinberre turns up many other references to Carroll in Woolf’s work and life and in that of the larger Bloomsbury group, most not so ponderous or severe. Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell, for instance, nicknamed Roger Fry “the White Knight,” and at Angelica Bell’s 11th birthday party, Fry dressed up as the Knight, Leonard Wolf as the Carpenter and Virginia herself as the March Hare “and mad at that.”

Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, notes Dusinberre, “gravitates towards Alice in Wonderland in many different ways, and her two best-known works, To the Lighthouse and The Waves “evoke and encapsulate childhood as she claimed Carroll did” -- she too turned adults into children.

There are all kinds of interesting echoes of Carroll in Woolf’s novels -- passages about looking-glasses and looking-glass worlds; meditations on “mad” assemblies at tea, breakfast and other dining occasions, and more diffuse scenes of play and language play.

More generally, Woolf and other modernists -- Proust, Stein -- were praised for staying close to the heart of childhood and to its fascination with language and rhythm. Fry, an eminent art critic, saw compared the vision of Alice to that of the Post-Impressionist painters, esp. Cezanne. For Fry, Carroll’s work, writes Dusinberre, “contains the germs of a radical redirection of Victorian culture.” All of this was bound up with a new interest in child psychology and progressive education.

There were different strains of the late nineteenth-century Cult of the Child with which Carroll was linked -- one nostalgic and regressive, the other more modern and edgier, and it’s with the latter that Dusinberre groups Carroll. Dusinberre sees “irreverence” as a hallmark both of Carroll and of the modernist -- a toying with and dismantling of tradition(s). Alice, then, comes to surrealism and postmodern narrative by way of modernist literature as well as popular literary and material culture.

Alice has a life not only in popular and serious literature but also critical theory -- she pops up at strange times to animate and give expression to key ideas and conceits. In his essay “Function and field of speech and language,” Jacques Lacan writes:

“But we analysts have to deal with slaves who think they are masters, and who find in a language whose mission is universal the support of their servitude, and the bonds of its ambiguity. So much so that, as one might humorously put it, our goal is to restore in them the sovereign freedom displayed by Humpty Dumpty when he reminds Alice that after all he is the master of the signifier, even if he isn’t master of the signified in which his being took on its form.” (“Function and field…” p. 81)

Most recently Alice is the poster child for anthology of critical essays called Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children.

The point is not that the Alice books are timeless, but rather that they adapt so easily to new times and to new contexts -- sometimes in the spirit of Carroll, sometimes not.

Alice has been called a dream-child, and I like the idea, for she tells us as much about our own dreams and hopes as about anything else.

Thank you for coming today, and enjoy the show!

©2007 Kenneth Kidd

• Thanks

Many people provided support for “The Afterlife of Alice In Wonderland” exhibit

My Thanks~

To the George A. Smathers Libraries and the Howe Society for financial support for the exhibit and the Tea Party Reception

To friends and colleagues who loaned items for the exhibit: Robena Cornwell, Dina Benson, Jim Liversidge, Carol Kem, Laura Nemmers, Pennie Delmond, Matthew Daley, Lee Jones, Jane Anne Carey, Terry Harpold, John Cech, Kenneth Kidd, and Stan Smith

To Laurie Taylor for scanning images, setting up the exhibit website, and helping to arrange the cases

To student interns, Rachel Scott for help with setting up the exhibit cases, and Alexandria Schmitt, for creating the video To Barbara Hood for help with the posters and with publicity To Bill Hanssen and Trish Ruwell for making the posters To Brad Hatch and Mil Willis for adding necessary hardware and hanging the posters

To John Freund for conservation advice and to Elaine Needelman who expedited the purchase of several editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

To Dr. Kenneth Kidd for writing two essays and for the ideas generated by his graduate seminar, The Golden Age of Children’s Literature

To the graduate seminar class members for their advice and input, especially to Cari Keebaugh who contributed an essay and arranged one of the cases

To Gail Crawford for arranging for the food and drinks at the Tea Party

Finally, thanks to Alice (aka Cari Keebaugh), the White Rabbit (aka John Ingram), and the Hatter (aka Jim Cusick) who took time from their busy schedules to promote the exhibit and attend the tea party.

Rita J. Smith, Curator The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature

© 2007 Rita Smith