The Alice Behind Wonderland

The Alice Behind Wonderland

by Simon Winchester

This book was given me as a birthday present by a very dear friend with whom I share a love of all things "Alice."  It makes me doubly sad, therefore, that the book does not quite fulfill its promise.  This is a slim book (only about 100 pages) that purports to be about Alice Liddell, and more specifically about the famous image of her below:

Given a title like The Alice Behind Wonderland one would expect to learn about Alice Liddell's life, or at least that part of her life in which Lewis Carroll/Charles Lutwidge Dodgson played a role.  Failing that, one might expect a visual analysis of the image above and the others Dodgson took of Alice.  The book is neither of those things.  The only image in the book is the one on the cover, stored in the Princeton Firestone rare books library.**  What the book does give us is a history of Dodgson's fascination with photography (with a bit of a detour on the history of photographic plate development), a glimpse of his relationship with the Liddell family, and an account of the social and personal factors which paved the way for the composition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  In this respect, it is a very fine book indeed.

The book is well written and a quick, fun read; I just think it should have been titled something else.  I do wonder, however, whether I'm fully participatory in Winchester's style.  For instance, he writes:

Writing from his Oxford rooms, he [Dodgson] promptly proposed a selection of possibilities [for pseudonyms].  The name Dares, perhaps--from the village of his birth, Daresbury.  Yates said no.  How about (for no apparent reason) Edgar Cuthwellis?  Yates again declined, as he did to the variant Edgar U.C. Westhill.

I deeply hope I'm just not reading Winchester's own irony in the parenthetical "for no apparent reason."  Because, honestly, if he did not realize that "Edgar Cuthwellis" was an anagram of "Charles Lutwidge," it would make me question any of his other conclusions.

Still, I learned a great deal from this slim volume, and once I re calibrated my expectations from the title, I really enjoyed the read.

**There is a particularly revealing bit in the "Acknowledgements" at the end of the text.  It reads 

"The famous picture that lies at the heart of this book has for the past decade been licked inside a basement vault at Princeton University's Firestone Library, some well-cemented feet below the Parrish Library in which it was initially shelved.  Though Steve Ferguson, the Curator of Rare Books, was more than happy to show me around the Parrish collection itself, his colleague Don Skemer, an authority on medieval textual amulets and the current Curator of Manuscripts, does not wish the Alice picture itself to be seen, ever."

I don't think I'm wrong in reading Winchester's glowing frustration in these lines, and I must say I agree with him, though I don't know that I'd have had the nerve to write such a thing in my book (the "authority on medieval textual amulets" seems a particular slight as I read it "doesn't have a damn thing to do with Victoriana").  I'm sure I've mentioned on this site before that I'm a scanner monkey at a rare books library; I've also had some classes in history of the book and rare books library management.  And I think that Mr. Skemer (as painted by Mr. Winchester) is the kind of librarian we were all taught to fear.  I hate that because most librarians (even the rare books and manuscript ones) are incredibly glad to show visitors and scholars the collections housed at their institutions.  It seems to me that in the quest for preservation, Mr. Skemer has abandoned the "reasonable use" policy that tends to guide rare materials librarianship.  Apparently Mr. Skemer argued that a pixel for pixel digital representation was available and would do just as well.  I understand this argument being applied to a casual visitor or one who was only interested in the Alice photo as part of Dodgson's oeuvre, but if the photograph is (nominally) the subject of a monograph, and the scholar is a respected (if popular) writer, refusal to grant access inches toward the absurd.  After all, there are things one can learn from original documents that one cannot learn from a computer screen.