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The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

2016; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sdn.2016.0021

1934-1512

Sonya Sawyer Fritz,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Reviewed by: The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst Sonya Sawyer Fritz Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert. The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015. 488pp. $29.95 hardcover; $17.49 e-book. The year 2015 marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s iconic children’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and the occasion has been celebrated, as one might expect, with a variety of book releases. A number of new editions of the original work have been published, including a “deluxe” anniversary edition of The Annotated Alice and Macmillan’s The Complete Alice, which was published on Alice Day and boasts a foreword by renowned contemporary children’s author Philip Pullman. Reissues of scholarly works such as Karoline Leach’s In the Shadow of the Dream Child (1999) and Morton N. Cohen’s The Selected Letters of Lewis Carroll (1989) have also been released to commemorate the anniversary, as have multiple new resources on Carroll’s amateur photography, including the first-ever catalogue raisonné. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland, published by Harvard University Press’s Belknap imprint, was also timed perfectly to coincide with the anniversary, and it may be that this lends the book some needed relevance. The latest biography of Carroll (né Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), The Story of Alice identifies Carroll as a figure who “has remained strangely elusive” and “is unusually good at squirming out of the biographer’s grasp” (14); Douglas-Fairhurst thus lays out his project’s task as “assembling the individual fragments of a story into a living whole” (22), which largely involves revisiting the details of Carroll’s life from his childhood until his death in 1898, as well as the decades following his death during which the fictional figure of Alice began to resonate and evolve unchecked in popular culture. The book is thus divided into three sections, “Before Alice,” “Alice,” and “After Alice,” organizing Carroll’s life not only around the writing of his most famous books but also around the parameters of his complicated relationship with the real-life Alice Liddell Hargreaves. Each section blends biographical information with analysis of Carroll’s writing to unpack aspects of the author’s character and the nature of his work. Overall, it is difficult not to perceive Douglas-Fairhurst as covering well-worn territory: numerous biographical studies of Carroll have been published in the past twenty years, including Morton N. Cohen’s Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1995), Leach’s In the Shadow of the Dream Child, Jenny Woolf’s The Mystery of Lewis Carroll (2010), and Edward Wakeling’s Lewis Carroll: The Man and His Circle [End Page 248] (2014), as well as works that explore the true identity of Alice Liddell Hargreaves and her relationship with Carroll, such as Simon Winchester’s The Alice Behind Wonderland (2011). Researchers have analyzed Carroll’s relationships with children, adults, photography, philosophy, mathematics, the theatre, and God, striving to solve the numerous mysteries and debunk the various myths that surround Carroll and the origins of his most famous work. Unlike earlier biographies, The Story of Alice, while it professes to tell “the secret history” of Carroll’s life and work, does not identify a specific exigency of Carroll scholarship to which it responds or a particular new critical or theoretical angle that it takes. Rather, it maintains the more general—and less provocative—goal of tracing how the Alice books came into existence and the impact they have had on our culture. To accomplish this, Douglas-Fairhurst appears to have mined painstakingly for significance every available bit of the archival minutiae that remain of Carroll’s life and the lives of those connected to him in order to find anything more that we can know about him, and what he pieces together to reveal about Carroll and the impact of his work is primarily just that: not much that could be called new or even unfamiliar at this point, but simply a good deal more. The book...