{"id":31506,"date":"2015-05-31T03:00:53","date_gmt":"2015-05-31T07:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31506"},"modified":"2015-10-11T13:50:22","modified_gmt":"2015-10-11T17:50:22","slug":"alices-sesquicentennial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/05\/31\/alices-sesquicentennial\/","title":{"rendered":"Alice\u2019s sesquicentennial"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Maclean’s<\/em>, Brian Bethune<\/a> talks about the 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland<\/em>:<\/p>\n

On July 4, 1862, Rev. Charles Dodgson, an Oxford lecturer in mathematics better known now as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland<\/em> and Through the Looking-Glass<\/em>, rowed up the Thames to a picnic spot. He had with him four of his favourite people: his friend Robinson Duckworth and the three young Liddell girls \u2014 Lorina, 13, Edith, 8, and 10-year-old Alice. From the sparse evidence of Carroll\u2019s diary, it was hardly a memorable occasion; perhaps it was the weather that July day: cloudy and damp, with a high of 20\u00b0 C.<\/p>\n

The embellishments began 10 months later \u2014 when Carroll went back to the entry and added, \u201cOn which occasion, I told them the fairy tale of Alice\u2019s Adventures Under Ground<\/em>, which I undertook to write out for Alice\u201d \u2014 and didn\u2019t stop for decades. By the time 80-year-old Alice Hargreaves (nee Liddell) was telling the tale on her triumphant visit to New York \u2014 the \u201coriginal Alice\u201d was greeted at the dock by more than 30 reporters \u2014 her recollection of a \u201cblazing summer afternoon with heat haze shimmering over the meadows\u201d was already established fact.<\/p>\n

It is the perfect creation myth for a singular event in English literature \u2014 and yes: historians, recognizing it as such, have pored over the meteorological records. It\u2019s a story that involves Carroll\u2019s crucial place in a continuum stretching from the Victorian era to modernity, encompassing the earlier era\u2019s near-incomprehensible \u2014 to modern eyes \u2014 concepts of childhood and of sexuality, and the birth of photography. But whatever its particulars, when Carroll finally got his story down on paper 150 years ago and published it under its now familiar title, Wonderland<\/em> \u2014 a shape-shifting tale that is both a love letter to the English language and an extended metaphor for childhood \u2014 changed children\u2019s literature forever.<\/p>\n

Alice\u2019s sesquicentennial \u2014 how Lewis Carroll would have loved that word \u2014 will be marked globally by events large and small. She has been published in 7,600 editions in 174 languages, including Tajik and Esperanto; many will be on display in London and New York. The popular ballet will be staged around the world, a marionette theatre in Austria will recreate the story, Vancouver Playhouse promises Alice flamenco, and on and on.<\/p>\n

And there will be books, of course, including a catalogue raisonn\u00e9<\/em> of Carroll\u2019s 1,000 surviving photographs (out of 3,000 taken). With the notable exception of Canadian writer David Day\u2019s eagerly awaited Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland Decoded<\/em>, out in September, few are liable to be as compulsively readable as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst\u2019s The Story of Alice<\/em>. The latter is informative on what went into the making of Wonderland, from the Victorians\u2019 intense focus on the underground \u2014 both literal (the tube) and fantastic (Jules Verne\u2019s Journey to the Centre of the Earth<\/em>) \u2014 to Carroll\u2019s anxiety about rapid change (like the Red Queen, he always thought he had to run faster and faster, just to stay where he was). And it\u2019s brilliant in the way it mirrors Carroll\u2019s own protean nature, offering no overarching theme, except to establish that its subject was not a man to provide two possible meanings for all he did and said, not so long as he could stuff in three or more.<\/p>\n

Speaking from Oxford, where he is an English professor at Magdalen College, Douglas-Fairhurst makes it clear that was his aim. \u201cI\u2019m trying to restore a kind of innocence to biography. I don\u2019t have strong opinions about Carroll, a man whose details are fragmentary. There is no one story, or even genre, that can give us all the answers about Alice and him. What we have are the books, masterpieces in their complexity, serious and funny, with a playful surface lying over a desperate yearning for logic and order. For 150 years, Alice has been a blank screen onto which we project all we want to throw at her.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Maclean’s, Brian Bethune talks about the 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland: On July 4, 1862, Rev. Charles Dodgson, an Oxford lecturer in mathematics better known now as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, rowed up the Thames to a picnic spot. He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,4,7],"tags":[374],"class_list":["post-31506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-britain","category-history","tag-children"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8ca","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31506"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31507,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31506\/revisions\/31507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}