The Alice Behind Wonderland
Simon Winchester
Language: English
Pages: 128
ISBN: 0195396197
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
On a summer's day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church College in Oxford, Charles Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera, recently purchased in London.
Simon Winchester deftly uses the resulting image--as unsettling as it is famous, and the subject of bottomless speculation--as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of English literature. Dodgson's love of photography framed his view of the world and was partly responsible for transforming a shy and half-deaf mathematician into one of the world's best-loved observers of childhood. Little wonder that there is more to "Alice Liddell as the Beggar Maid" than meets the eye. Using Dodgson's published writings, private diaries, and of course his photographic portraits, Winchester gently exposes the development of Lewis Carroll and the making of his Alice.
Acclaim for Simon Winchester
"An exceptionally engaging guide at home everywhere, ready for anything, full of gusto and seemingly omnivorous curiosity."
--Pico Iyer, The New York Times Book Review
"A master at telling a complex story compellingly and lucidly."
--USA Today
"Extraordinarily graceful."
--Time
"Winchester is an exquisite writer and a deft anecdoteur."
--Christopher Buckley
"A lyrical writer and an indefatigable researcher."
--Newsweek
the time he died in 1944, Parrish’s formal Victorian library amounted to approximately sixty-five hundred volumes, representing the careers-in-full of the authors he most favored—Thackeray, Carlyle, Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, and Froude among them—and most comprehensively, almost the entire oeuvre of the Christ Church, Oxford, mathematics lecturer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, now more familiarly known as Lewis Carroll. (The first manuscript of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
in strong sunlight, and are crisp and beautiful and memorably fine. They begin with the remains of a brown kiwi, then move on to an anteater, a tuna, the head and shoulders of a cod (so described in his caption, though this was a jest derived from a colloquial saying of the time that a fool was a person with a cod’s head and shoulders), a stupendous sunfish, and a group of students carefully examining the tiny skeleton of a sea creature. They finish with a grand flourish: a tableau semi-vivant
parted in a line directly above her slightly retroussé nose. The condition of her hair perhaps undermines her playing with complete success the role for which Dodgson has selected her. He had wanted her to portray for his camera a beggar-girl, a slumchild from some pestilential home, a girl compelled by poverty or parental order to induce passersby to drop funds into her upturned palm. But the skeptical would instantly see through this ruse: the girl’s hair is just too neat and clean, her face
Southey, Reginald albums of, 8–9 and camera purchase, 48 and deanery garden, 33–34 early results of, 55–56 and Liddell family, 33 and skeleton series, 72–73 and wet-plate collodion process, 43, 51 stammer of Dodgson, 13, 16, 23, 72 studio of Dodgson, 74, 75 summertime, 71–72 T Tait, Archibald, 17–18 Talbot, William Fox, 41–42, 44, 63 Tenniel, John, 89 Tennyson, Alfred “The Beggar Maid,” 9–10, 82 portraits of, 73, 82, 83 Thomas, R. W., 48 Thomas Ottewill
lectures exactly on time. At five o’clock dinner in the immense hall, he was known for keeping his own counsel, such that later memoirists confessed they never suspected that this quiet young man, known in his early months in college for his air of polite studiousness, would, in time, unleash upon the world works of great wit and imagination. His prompt return from the misery of Yorkshire to a regime of high-octane study back at Oxford was duly rewarded just a year later, when he took his Honour