Dimensions
161 x 240 x 45mm
Drawing on previously unpublished material, The Story of Alice illuminates the tangled history of two lives and two books, examining the peculiar friendship between Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson u Lewis Carroll u and Alice Liddell, the child for whom he invented the Alice stories. It analyses how their relationship influenced the creation of Wonderland, how the two Alice books took on an unstoppable cultural momentum in the Victorian era, and why one hundred and fifty years later they continue to enthrall and delight us. The Story of Alice reveals Carroll as both innovator and traditionalist, entrenched in routine. He had a keen double interest in keeping things moving and keeping them as they are: just as in Looking-Glass Land, Alice runs faster and faster to stay in one place. Following the Alice books from their inception in 1865 to Alice's death in 1934, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst provides a keyhole through which to observe a larger, shifting cultural landscape: the birth of photography, changing definitions of childhood and murky questions about sex and sexuality. In the transition between the Victorian and modern worlds, he shows how, in Wonderland, the line between the actual and the possible could be repeatedly smudged.
