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Following his acclaimed life of Dickens, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst illuminates the tangled history of two lives and two books. Drawing on numerous unpublished sources, he examines in detail the peculiar friendship between the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the child for whom he invented the Alice stories, and analyzes how this relationship stirred Carroll's imagination and influenced the creation of Wonderland. It also explains why Alice in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), took on an unstoppable cultural momentum in the Victorian era and why, a century and a half later, they continue to enthrall and delight readers of all ages. The Story of Alice reveals Carroll as both an innovator and a stodgy traditionalist, entrenched in habits and routines. He had a keen double interest in keeping things moving and keeping them just as they are. (In Looking-Glass Land, Alice must run faster and faster just to stay in one place.) Tracing the development of the Alice books from their inception in 1862 to Liddell's death in 1934, Douglas-Fairhurst also provides a keyhole through which to observe a larger, shifting cultural landscape: the birth of photography, changing definitions of childhood, murky questions about sex and sexuality, and the relationship between Carroll's books and other works of Victorian literature. In the stormy transition from the Victorian to the modern era, Douglas-Fairhurst shows, Wonderland became a sheltered world apart, where the line between the actual and the possible was continually blurred.… (more)
User reviews
Timed to appear in the hundred and fiftieth anniversary year of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, it has a little bit of everything: a bit of biography of Charles Dodgson
It strikes me as a stretch on several counts. As far as the biographic aspects are concerned, it breaks little new ground, even though there is still new ground to be broken (if nothing else, there is a point that I keep harping on: that Dodgson was autistic, and that most of his strange behaviors can be understood by understanding autism, and that they cannot be understood if one ignores it). The biographical details on Alice are even more disappointing; there is little that cannot be found in the better biographies of Dodgson (she lived in Oxford, she probably fell in love with Queen Victoria's youngest son Leopold, she married rich-but-not-very-bright Reginald Hargreaves, she had three sons, two of whom died in World War I, she lost her husband, she was "rediscovered" when she sold the manuscript of Alice's Adventures, she died in her eighty-second year). Alice Liddell was an impressive woman in her own right, which probably helps explain why she inspired Dodgson, and that just doesn't come out here.
Still, this doesn't claim to be a biography of either of the two key characters. It's about "Wonderland." This is the part that somewhat bothers me. There were, in Dodgson's life and beyond, a great many "Alice" tie-ins -- but Douglas-Fairhurst often ignores these to concentrate on things with, at best, the most dubious connections with Wonderland. There is very little examinations of the translations of Alice, e.g., except for Vladimir Nabokov's. The stage versions are mentioned, but there is little discussion of what they were like. Instead, we get vague references to odd sorts of fantasies with characters named "Alice."
Don't get me wrong; this is a thoroughly readable book which will teach many people much that they did not know about Dodgson, Alice, and "Alice." But I'm truly not sure what it's trying to demonstrate, and I don't think a true Alice fan -- the kind who has already read Morton Cohen's and Anne Clark's biographies of Dodgson, and can quote whole stanzas of The Hunting of the Snark, and who knows what the "Liddell Riddle" is all about -- will find much here.