The Story of Alice review: The curious tale of author’s muse

ALAMY

Closer look at book’s creator for the 150th anniversary of the popular children’s classic

ALICE'S Adventures In Wonderland tunnelled themselves into the popular imagination 150 years ago and have remained there ever since.

4 / 5 stars
The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll And The Secret History Of Wonderland

The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll And The Secret History Of Wonderland

By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Harvill Secker, £25

The book and its sequel Through The Looking Glass have, as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst says, "a unique place in the heart of English literature".

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The two books have been translated into many languages and spawned hundreds of imitations.

Alice herself is as familiar a fictional character as Sherlock Holmes, a star of stage and screen.

Less well known is the figure of her creator the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll.

He was a stammering and reclusive mathematics don who went up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1851 and remained at the college until his death in 1898.

The Story of Alice by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst [PH]

He took holy orders - because that was essential then to be a don in an Oxford college - but was never made up to full priest.

Religion and teaching seem to have played a subsidiary role in his life compared with the rich inner and imaginary life Douglas-Fairhurst explores in depth.

Stories told to Alice Liddell and two of her sisters on a July afternoon were the inspiration for Carroll's book which originally described Alice's adventures as taking place "underground".

Soon, however, he chose instead the title Wonderland and Douglas-Fairhurst shows how the flexible concept of wonderland has been exploited ever since.

The book opens with the elderly Alice Hargreaves being feted in America in the 1930s, the wonderland she inspired being seen as an antidote to the grim Depression years.

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"Wonderland" has played its part, the author suggests, in psychic research (in which Carroll was interested) and has been used as a perennial symbol of childhood.

Readers hoping to find out whether Carroll was a paedophile may be disappointed

It also represents emotional escape and for Carroll Wonderland was often a means of dodging reality.

Douglas-fairhurst sets the book in the context of the age in which it was written, pointing out that by the time Carroll died, Alice's dresses in Tenniel's original illustrations looked restricting in comparison with later, looser fashions.

He discusses Carroll's fondness for photographing small girls (he dreaded their turning into women) against the background of shifting Victorian views on childhood.

The age of consent was 12 when the 10-year-old Alice Liddell was first told her story, it was only raised to 16 in 1885.

Readers hoping to find out whether Carroll was a paedophile may be disappointed, although they will see that his behaviour around young girls often bordered on inappropriate.

The author is a professor of English Literature at Oxford and this book, as much as anything else, celebrates Carroll's love of playing with language.

It is detailed and meticulously researched but not so much a biography as an extended literary essay, depending heavily on close textual analysis.

But it did for me what any good critical work should do: it sent me back to Alice for the first time in over 40 years.

  • To order the book, post free (UK only), please phone The Express Bookshop on 01872 562 310. You may also send a cheque made payable to The Express or postal order to: The Express Bookshop, PO BOX 200, Falmouth, Cornwall TR11 4WJ or you can order online at expressbookshop.com
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