The Story of Alice
Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
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- As many writers have pointed out, narrative provides an attractive set of models to follow when we want to make sense of life’s uncertainties. The narrator of Julian Barnes’s novel Flaubert’s Parrot explains why: ‘Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books.’ A story reflects life but also redeems it: assembled on the page, even unpredictable events can be plotted, their random scatter made part of a meaningful design.May 9 2023 10:11PM
- W. H. Auden once pointed out that we enjoy imagining new adventures for popular fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes because they do not seem altogether bound to their original stories. They are bigger than their plots, literary escapologists capable of wriggling free from the covers of any book in which we try to contain them.May 9 2023 10:12PM
- That certainly reflects one side of his personality: the fixed principles and steady routines by which he regulated each day, together with a pouncing eye for detail that he acknowledged as his ‘super-fastidiousness’. Even when describing something as simple as going for a walk, those who knew him best found themselves reaching for words such as ‘always’ and ‘never’. ‘His favourite form of exercise was always walking,’ recalled his niece Violet Dodgson, while Margaret Mayhew remembered him striding along poker-straight with his head held aloft, ‘never wearing a “dog-collar”, but always a very low turn-down collar with a white tie, his top-hat well at the back of his head – reminding me of Tenniel’s drawing of the Mad Hatter’.May 9 2023 10:14PM
- The idea of renewal held a particular appeal for Carroll, who spent most of his life being caught up in the rhythms of the academic year, and tended to be far better at carrying on with things than starting them afresh. That is probably why so much of his writing reveals what the critic Elizabeth Sewell has characterized as a ‘strong sense of unfinished business’.May 9 2023 10:15PM
- The Alice stories represent a different kind of heroism. They offer a triumph of wit over brawn, and playfulness over high seriousness, in which the leading character is not a muscular warrior or a mysterious god but an ordinary little girl, whose original adventures have proven themselves capable of producing endless supplements and offshoots – books, plays, films, toys, tablecloths, advertisements and more – in which she is always slightly different but always recognizably the same. Alice is a heroine with a thousand faces.May 9 2023 10:24PM