Alice Behind Wonderland
Category: Books,Literature & Fiction,History & Criticism,Regional & Cultural,European,British & Irish
Alice Behind Wonderland Details
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.
Reviews
Nonfiction writer Simon Winchester, who has given us so many noteworthy historical books, focuses here on how Charles Dodgson's times with the Liddell family, and young Alice in particular, led to the creation of literary and photographic art. Indeed, Winchester writes much more about Dodgson's pursuit of photography than on his writing as Lewis Carroll. The book gives a fairly detailed summary of the early development of the camera, photo processing, and several of Dodgson's contemporaries in the world of mid-19th c. photography.