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The Alice Behind Wonderland

Name: The Alice Behind Wonderland
Author: Simon Winchester
ISBN: 9780195396195

by Simon Winchester

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Overview

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

About the Author, Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester is the author of Atlantic, The Professor and the Madman, The Map that Changed the World, and A Crack in the Edge of the World, all of which have been New York Times bestsellers. In recognition of his accomplished body of work, Winchester was made Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2006. He lives in Manhattan and western Massachusetts.

Biography

One of the leading practitioners of the offbeat, narrative nonfiction genre The New York Times affectionately calls "cocktail-party science," Simon Winchester studied geology at Oxford, worked on offshore oil rigs, and traveled extensively before settling into a writing career. For twenty years, he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian, augmenting his income by writing articles and well-written but little-read travel books. Then, an obscure footnote in a book he was reading for sheer recreation sparked the idea of a lifetime.

The book in question was Jonathon Green's Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made, and the footnote read, "Readers will of course be familiar with the story of W.C. Minor, the convicted, deranged, American lunatic murderer, contributor to the OED." Immediately, Winchester knew he had stumbled on a real story, one filled with drama, intrigue, and human interest. Published in 1998, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Oxford English Dictionary was an overnight success, garnering rave reviews on both sides of the pond, and remained on The New York Times hardcover bestseller list for more than a year.

Fueled by curiosity, passion, and a journalist's instinct for what makes "good copy," Winchester has gone on to explore the obscure, arcane, and idiosyncratic in blockbusters like The Map that Changed the World, Krakatoa, and The Man Who Loved China. Coincidentally, his subjects have placed him squarely in the forefront of the new wave of nonfiction so popular at the start of the 21st century. In an interview with Atlantic Monthly, Winchester explained the phenomenon thusly: ""It shows, I think, that there is deep, deep down -- but underserved for a long time -- an eagerness for real stories, real narratives, about rich and interesting things. We -- writers, editors -- just ignored this, by passed this. Now we are tapping into it again."

Good To Know

Winchester once spent three months looking at whirlpools on assignment for Smithsonian magazine.

He once wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times to correct a factual error in an article about where the millennium would first hit land on the morning of Jan. 1, 2000. (It was the island of Tafahi, not the coral atoll Kirabati.)

He reportedly loves the words "butterfly" and "dawn."

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

The girl peering at us from the photograph on this book's cover is curiously timeless, perhaps doubly so because many of us recognize that she is little Alice Liddell, the fetchingly inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Taken in 1858, this "Beggar Maid" picture serves as the springboard in this new book by polymath Simon Winchester (Atlantic; The Map That Changed the World). The Alice Behind Wonderland shows that looking through a lens enabled Carroll (a.k.a. Reverend Charles Dodgson) to approach a universe that the shy, half-deaf mathematician might have otherwise found deeply forbidding. Reading Winchester's warm, unpretentious narrative, one can imagine Lewis Carroll himself entering the portals of Alice's world through the photograph that he took on that warm summer day.

Publishers Weekly

Winchester (The Professor and the Madman) explores the story behind Alice in Wonderland by focusing on an 1858 portrait taken by the eccentric Charles Dodgson-best known by his pen-name, Lewis Carroll. The subject of the photo is six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean of Oxford's Christ Church College who, encouraged by Dodgson, is dressed as a ragged beggar-maid-a costume inspired by a Tennyson poem. The dean's daughter provided Dodgson with not only the name and inspiration for the main character of his now infamous book but she also asked him to write it as a gift for her. Winchester's overall tone is unfortunately self-indulgent, and his take that Alice is seductive and coquettish in the 1858 photo is questionable. He stretches his brief essay with the differences between daguerreotype and calotype photographic images while skimping on Dodgson's relationship with Alice's mother. Readers will more likely be interested in Winchester's benign interpretation of Dodgson's character than his preoccupation with one particular photograph.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Library Journal

Winchester (The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary) makes photography the focus for this small biography, in particular the famous photo Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll made of the probable model for Alice in Wonderland when she was six in 1858. Alice Liddell, daughter of a family friend, posed as a beggar girl, looking seductive in rags and revealing one small nipple. This photograph, as well as Dodgson's interest in the company of children and in photographing them, has led to accusations of pedophilia. Winchester points out, though, that Dodgson's attitude of idealizing children was no different from that of his Victorian contemporaries; in fact, he took hundreds of other photos that were well received. Also, no evidence exists of Dodgson's being accused of any sexual improprieties. Describing the early development of photography and Dodgson's growing expertise, Winchester provides a new perspective on the shy bachelor who wrote one of the world's most famous children's stories, while questioning the most recent scholarship that neglects the role of photography in Dodgson's life. VERDICT An important addition to the burgeoning collection of Dodgson scholarship, this book will appeal to scholars and general readers and is recommended to all.—Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo

Kirkus Reviews

Winchester (Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, 2010, etc.) offers his take on the relationship between author/amateur photographer Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) and Alice Pleasance Liddell—the "Alice" in his Wonderland and the subject of a certain unsettling photograph.

To fill in the background, the author retraces Dodgson's early schooling from years at the Rugby School to his arrival at Oxford (that "forcing-house for flaneurs") and three formative "epiphanies": the beginning of his side career as Lewis Carroll, a developing friendship with the children of his college's new dean, Henry George Liddell, and his discovery of the pleasures of the recently developed camera. Dodgson shot albums of photographs, but one image of Alice comes in for particular attention: a portrait of the 7-year-old dressed in rags, bare of shoulder and bearing "an expression of impish, secret knowledge, a winsome look that manages to be both confident and disturbing." This and other provocative child portraits—along with pages tantalizingly razored from Dodgson's diaries of the period—fueled modern accusations that have gone so pervasively viral that any random passerby will "know" more about Dodgson's pedophilia than his literary works. Not so fast, cautions Winchester, making connections and offering counter-interpretations as he goes. The author judiciously considers the evidence, suggesting credible alternative views before finishing off with a quick pass through Alice's later life and role as unwilling celebrity.

Quite a slender volume—the actual narrative runs under 100 pages—but, as usual with Winchester, well-founded, witty and perceptive.