Review by Choice Review
This well-written book is not about Carroll's alleged pedophilia (for that, see Karoline Leach's In the Shadow of the Dreamchild, 1999), and it is far more than a study of popular culture (for that, see Will Brooker's Alice's Adventures, 2004). This is an informative biography revealing an idiosyncratic writer, his Victorian setting, and the popularity of his work in the Victorian period and in the present. Douglas-Fairhurst (Magdellan College, Univ. of Oxford, UK) did archival research on both Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, and he considers Carroll's Alice books, their production, reception, imitation, and adaptation, and provides accounts of their literary contexts and judicious interpretations of them. He debunks stories linking the Alice books to Jack the Ripper, psychedelic drugs, and Queen Victoria; shows "how Carroll's stories would permanently alter how readers thought about children both on and off the page"; and sorts through the factual records for what they do or do not reveal. He points out that "other writers treated the sheer strangeness of Carroll's stories as an invitation to put the whole of modern life into perspective." Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Terence Hoagwood, Texas A&M University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
LEWIS CARROLL LOVED PUNS, like those about the tortoise who taught us, or the lessons that lessen the need for any more of them. He especially loved puns that could be found hiding in one word, like wonderland: a place full of wonders and a place where you wonder what is happening to you. These meanings are not only different, they can be read as opposites, as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reminds us, quoting a Victorian evocation of a person "who, being in a chronic state of wonder, is surprised at nothing." Sentimental memories of the Alice books often stress the first, dazzled meaning, but a fresh reading of Carroll is likely to leave us much closer to the second, which Douglas-Fairhurst neatly formulates as "being puzzled at what we do not know." This is how the flowers talk in "Through the Looking-Glass": "I wonder how you do it," a rose says to Alice, referring to her odd human ability to move about. "You're always wondering," an irritated tiger-lily says. We are still wondering about Alice, where she came from and where she went, and Douglas-Fairhurst, the author of a well-regarded biography of Dickens, wants to inform our wonder rather than put it entirely to rest. His book doesn't explore a great deal of new material, but it does offer a thoughtful, far-reaching narrative, the story of three very different lives: those of Lewis Carroll, Alice Hargreaves, née Liddell, and the literary creation they both had a part in. Late in life, Carroll referred to Alice Liddell as one "without whose infant patronage I might possibly never have written at all." He is thinking of a trip he and a clerical friend took with the three Liddell girls - Alice was 10 at the time - up the river outside Oxford, and of Alice's begging him to write down the story he told them then. He wrote "Alice's Adventures Under Ground" for her, and gave her a handwritten, illustrated copy. Meanwhile he was expanding this text into what became "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865). Alice's role in the book's begetting was known to her and to family members, of course, but not to anyone else much, and in 1899 Isa Bowman was able to publish a book about Carroll "told for young people by the real Alice in Wonderland" - "real" here meaning the actual actress who had appeared in a stage version of the adventures. In 1932, when Alice Hargreaves received an honorary degree from Columbia University, it had been known for some time "that there had been a real Alice, and that she was still alive," but the news had not really sunk in, and the apparent revelation was so exciting that no one seemed to hesitate over - or wonder about - the notion of a person's getting a degree for being a fictional character, or for nagging a writer into fame. The Alice books are about many things, and identity is important among them. Alice worries a lot about who she is or has become, and there is much talk about growing in several senses: getting bigger, getting older, becoming an adult. "There ought to be a book written about me," Alice says to herself. "And when I grow up, I'll write one - but I'm grown up now." She is crushed inside a tiny house at this point. Did Charles Lutwidge Dodgson grow into Lewis Carroll, or was there some other sort of mutation? His gravestone calls him Dodgson and puts Lewis Carroll in parenthesis. The first biography, by his nephew, does the reverse. When Alice Hargreaves died, headlines in The Times of London called her both Mrs. Hargreaves and Alice in Wonderland. The Evening Standard settled for Alice. Douglas-Fairhurst says, "What nobody outside her immediate family seemed entirely sure about was whose life had just ended," and one might think the same of the other case. Douglas-Fairhurst's ability to make room for such doubts without giving in to them is one of his book's great attractions. Because this work is a history as well as a biography, it covers a large stretch of ground and time: from the myriad possible sources for the Alice books to all the adaptations made of them in print, onstage and on film, to say nothing of all the games and toys and tea towels. "By the end of the 19 th century," Douglas-Fairhurst says, Wonderland "had become something ... like a cultural multiverse, a loose network of real places and intangible ideas." He also suggests that his reconstruction of the lives of "two real people," along with a historical world caught up in myth, presents us with "a world we do not usually associate with the Victorians - one that is noisy, colorful, brimming with energy." This is half-true, I think, but the author has got a little carried away by the less troubling sense of wonder. THERE IS A LOT OF NOISE HERE: inventions, fairgrounds, freaks, superstition, scandal. But there is a lot of darkness too, a landscape of skilled and persistent repression and denial, especially in the lives of those "real people" outside fiction - precisely what we do associate with the Victorians. Perhaps we can't be too sorry for Alice Hargreaves in her well-off, adult married life, and indeed Douglas-Fairhurst can't resist a satirical tone here, especially when he describes her honeymoon in this way: "Alice picked mushrooms, and Reginald blazed away at the local wildlife." Still, we have other evidence for real dreariness at least. Dodgson was an ardent photographer, and his last picture of Alice, dating from 1870, when she was 18, looks like a study in depression. She is dressed in frills and has a tidy bow on her upswept hair; her head tilts slightly sideways and forward. Her eyes avoid the camera. Douglas-Fairhurst says this is Carroll's "worst" photograph of her, and it is certainly the saddest. In another light we might see it as a masterpiece. Perhaps her expression signifies a "desire to escape, to be elsewhere and live otherwise." What is more striking, though, is the steadiness of her gloom, the clear conviction that things are not going to get any better than this, and may get worse. Even if the mood was temporary, photographs don't treat time that way, and they could be right. And then there is the story of Carroll's celibate, fussy, child-loving life. He had friendships with hundreds of children, liked to sit them on his knee, and occasionally kiss them. Like Humbert Humbert, he wasn't interested in teenagers, only little girls. He got into trouble once in Oxford when he mistook a 17-year-old for someone younger, and indeed Alice's mother at one point decided, for some reason, that his relationship with her daughters had to come to an end. As Douglas-Fairhurst kindly puts it, "unless he was merely the victim of an unchecked rumor rippling around Oxford, Carroll certainly seems to have said or done something to disturb the Liddells." But then, in an age when children were routinely abused and sold into labor and also idealized as the only human forms of purity, no doubt almost anything seemed plausible, including the wildest degrees of self-deception about one's motives and desires. Douglas-Fairhurst very justly points out two errors we are likely to make. We shall give in to "our need to make" Carroll's "sexuality fit into established modern categories," a need that "cannot be satisfied by anything we know." And we shall "assume that Carroll understood his feelings,...even if he did not act on them." Douglas-Fairhurst says "the most probable conclusion is that Carroll's strongest feelings were sentimental rather than sexual," and this sounds right. Still, we are a long way from the noise and energy of the Victorians. We are cramped among defeated or deferred desires like Alice in that little house, and we may recall how often Wonderland looks not like an alternative world but a crazed, sardonic representation of our own. It is a place, for example, where they have schools that have replaced reading and writing with reeling and writhing, and also teach "the different branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision." I wonder how they do it. MICHAEL WOOD'S most recent book is "Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 22, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
As its title suggests, this is more than a biography of Lewis Carroll, the famous but enigmatic author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It is also the story of the books themselves, their inspiration, their writing, and their impact on the worlds of literature and popular culture. That culture worked both ways, though, for in its meticulous research this is also the story of how the Victorian culture of Carroll's day itself influenced the books, their creator, and their creation. Context, thus, is king in this work of sometimes overwhelming erudition and endless and sometimes superfluous? detail. As for Carroll himself, the quotidian details of his life are so well known that there is little new here, and the usual questions Why did he break off his relationship with the Liddell family? Why his fascination with little girls? Why his photographing of them in the nude? are acknowledged but not explicated. He remains, as the author puts it, a frustratingly elusive figure. Though not for the casual reader, Douglas-Fairhurst's story will be catnip for serious Carroll enthusiasts and academics.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Douglas-Fairhurst (English literature, Magdalen Coll., Univ. of Oxford; -Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist) offers readers a glimpse behind the curtain-the story of Lewis Caroll's Alice is told through the account of her creator's life (1832-98). This biographical approach delivers a unique perspective not only on the character but also on Carroll. The making of Alice in Wonderland had an enormous effect on its author as well as the literature of the period. -Douglas-Fairhurst places -Carroll, née Charles -Dodgson, firmly in his own age, a decision that helps to explain some of -Dodgson's more controversial-seeming behaviors, such as photographing nude children. Elucidating that Dodgson wasn't alone in his actions either justifies his deeds or allows him to share the guilt. -Douglas-Fairhurst details these events in a lighthearted, almost mocking tone that leaves the reader wondering about the culture of the Victorian Age. VERDICT The backstory of Alice in Wonderland is almost as enchanting as the tale Carroll wrote, and Douglas-Fairhurst skillfully presents it here. This engaging work will interest readers who enjoy literary history.-Keri Youngstrand, Dickinson State Univ. Lib., ND © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Douglas-Fairhurst (English Literature/Magdalen Coll., Oxford; Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, 2011, etc.) delivers a biography of Charles Dodgson (1832-1898), aka Lewis Carroll, that might be better described as a sociological study of Victorian England. As a stammering child who was first educated at home, Carroll developed his imagination inventing games for his siblings. Teaching mathematics at Christ Church in Oxford, he made friends with the daughters of the dean, and their friendship fed his creative fantasies and poetic missives. On a picnic in 1862, Carroll told them the story of a little girl's adventures in the underworld. He was closest to Alice Liddell, who pestered him to write it out for her. He published the work in 1865, although his relationship with the dean's children was suddenly curtailed, for no discernible reason. Carroll's fascination with the newly emerging science of photography fed his imagination. He enjoyed young girls' company, apparently with parental approval, and they posed for him in costume, and sometimes without. After a misplaced kiss, an angry mother put an end to his photography. Douglas-Fairhurst treats his subject's lifelong obsession with young girls, particularly those named Alice, as curious but in no way threatening. When he sticks to the joys of Carroll's Wonderland books and John Tenniel's enhancing illustrations, the subtlety of the lessons, the wonderful puns and word generation, the author is in his element as Carroll's greatest fan. Readers will rush to their childhood copies of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass to reread them. As Victorian society changed, Alice's influence grew, but Douglas-Fairhurst devotes too much space to it, even down to minute mentions, borrowed lines, allusions to, retellings of, satires, adaptations, copies, and Wonderlands anew everywhere. The magic of the work is well-served here but with just a bit too much extraneous information. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
