Lewis Carroll and ‘Alice’ for the curious (and curiouser)

by Mark Johnstone Davies
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6 books
Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) and ‘Alice’ (real name Alice Hargreaves née Liddell) for the curious (and curiouser) - Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass have inspired countless biographies, spin-offs, and adaptations. Here are a few of my favourites.
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Lewis Carroll's Diaries: Complete index to the nine surviving volumes

Lewis Carroll, Edward Wakeling, 1993
Actually, it is ten books, covering 1855 to 1897 (with a reconstruction of Charles Dodgson’s missing journals of April 1858 to May 1862 – their disappearance being the cause of numerous conspiracy theories!). These diaries are the principal source of practically every piece of Lewis Carroll/Alice analysis that has ever been published, and provide a revealing chronology of the genesis of one of the world’s classic works of literature, and before and after. These volumes mean that the enigmatic genius of Lewis Carroll is not the sole preserve of academics or historians, but becomes accessible to us all. Transcribed, fully indexed, and cross-referenced by the late Edward Wakeling, a renowned world expert, whose extraordinarily detailed and insightful bibliographical and contextual notes provide an unparalleled insight into a multi-talented individual and his contemporaries.

The Looking Glass House

A Fascinating Victorian-Set Novel Featuring the Inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Children's Classic, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Vanessa Tait, 2016
This fictional interpretation of the creation of Alice’s Adventures is seen from the viewpoint of a constant, yet largely unremarked, fixture during these critical years: the Liddell family governess, Mary Prickett. The Oxford context of the time is convincingly depicted, and some of the burning issues of the day – Darwinism and Nonconformism, for instance – are interwoven with the more immediate tensions within the Liddell household, interpreted by an author who has more right than anyone to comment because Tait is the great-granddaughter of the real Alice Liddell herself. To sustain the pace she condenses the real events of 1857 to 1863 into a single fictionalised year, drawing on many well-known facts and suppositions – including Carroll’s rumoured amorous interest in Miss Prickett – and some lesser known details from her own family’s archives.

Lewis Carroll, Photographer

Helmut Gernsheim, 2013
Mention the name ‘Lewis Carroll’ and most people will immediately think of the two Alice books. Very few would equate the name to Charles Dodgson, photographer. This, however, is the aspect of the multi-talented Oxford don which Gernsheim, a professional photographer himself, appraised in 1949 for the very first time, concluding that Dodgson was ‘the most outstanding photographer of children in the nineteenth century’. Many of the black and white plates in this collection substantiate this claim, but equally, Dodgson’s mastery of this new invention of the camera enabled him to meet and photograph (sometimes uniquely) numerous famous individuals (usually writers and artists), as well as many of his Oxford contemporaries. As an aside, Edward Wakeling’s 2015 Catalogue Raisonné is a comprehensive listing of every one of Dodgson’s hundreds of known photographs.

After Such Kindness

Gaynor Arnold, 2012
A teasingly insightful glimpse of the Victorian Oxford of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, the two protagonists – and yet they aren’t! Yes, there is an Oxford University don with a penchant for photography, and yes his favourite subject is a ten-year-old local girl, and yes the text is scattered with subtle Wonderland and Looking-Glass references, but this is otherwise a quite different, very cleverly constructed, story. Structured as the inner thoughts of the main characters, After Such Kindness engagingly explores the dilemmas posed by the unusual friendship between a mature bachelor clergyman – Arnold convincingly captures Carroll’s playful sense of humour – and an inquisitive and trusting young girl, while sustaining a lurking sense of foreboding through to a thought-provoking finale.

Lewis Carroll's England

A Guide for the Literary Tourist
Charles C. Lovett, 1998
Although this guide to the many English towns and cities associated with Charles Dodgson, the author of Alice, is now more than 20 years old, it remains the most accessible and comprehensive Carrollian guide for the literary tourist. Lovett, a former President of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, provides admirably clear directions accompanied by over 200 illustrations and photographs, many coming from his own extensive collection. To quote from the cover text, Lovett takes the reader ‘from the tiny Cheshire village of Dodgson’s birth to the Surrey hillside that provides his final resting place … on a journey through Victorian Britain like no other’. True enough, and in between come locations in, most importantly, Yorkshire, Rugby, Oxford, London, the Isle of Wight and Eastbourne.

Mad Hatter Summer

A Lewis Carroll Nightmare
Donald Thomas, 2013
This is an imaginative mystery centred on the people who inhabited the world (Oxford and London) of Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) after the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. As an Oxford local historian myself, I think the author captures the atmosphere and detail of Victorian Oxford superbly well and sustains the suspense to the end, as Dodgson becomes embroiled in a series of events that involve him in being blackmailed and being treated as a murder suspect. Many familiar elements of Dodgson's life and many of his real associates are included, and there are numerous subtle nods to the text of Wonderland. And Dodgson's (to modern eyes) controversial friendships with and photographs of children are not swerved – indeed, they are central to the plot – but are astutely incorporated and believably explained, in a thought-provoking, instructive, and convincing way.