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The Lewis Carroll Society of North America

Winter 2009

Volume II Issue 13

Number 83

Knight Letter is the official magazine of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America.
It is published twice a year and is distributed free to all members.

ISSN 0193-886X

Mark Burstein, Editor in Chief, pro tern

Mahendra Singh, Editor, The Rectory Umbrella

Sarah Adams-Kiddy & Ray Kiddy, Editors, Mischmasch

James Welsch 6^ Rachel Eley, Editors, From Our Far-Flung Correspondents

Andrew H. Ogus, Designer

Annual membership dues are U.S. $35 (regular),
(international), and $100 (sustaining).

CONTACTS

Editorial correspondence should be sent to Sarah Adams-Kiddy,
the new Editor in Chief, at sarah@voraciousreader.com.

The Rectory Umbrella: mahendra373@hotmail.com

Mischmasch: sarah@voraciousreader.com or ray@ganymede.org

All Must Have Pnz^5; joelbirenbaum@comcast.net

From Our Far-Rung Correspondents: farflungknight@gmail.com

Subscriptions, correspondence, and inquiries should be addressed

to LCSNA Secretary Clare Imholtz via email (below) or at

11935 Beltsville Dr.

Beltsville, Maryland 20705

THE LEWIS CARROLL SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA

President:

Andrew Sellon, andrewsellon@optonline.net

Vice President:

Cindy Walter, hedgehogccw@sbcglobal.net

Secretary:

Clare Imholtz, imholtz99@atlantech.net

www.LewisCarroll.org

http://twitter.com/AliceAmerica

http://lcsna.blogspot.com

ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE

Ruth Berman, Angelica Carpenter, Blossom Norman, Byron Sewell, Cindy Watter

On the cover: The newly discovered oil portrait of Frances Jane Lutwidge Dodgson,
mother of C. L. Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll. © Estate of Philip Dodgson Jaques.

See article on page 1 .

(jofttents^

THS RSCTORY UMBRGLLA

The Lutwidge Sisters: Newly Discovered Portraits

MARK BURSTEIN, JONATHAN
DIXON & EDWARD WAKELING

Alice in Fort Lee

AUGUST A. IMHOLTZ JR.

Alice-Dress Optional

ERIN HUTCHINSON

Off With Their Heads:
Those Awful Alice Movies

DANIEL SINGER
lO

A Tale of Two Tweedles

JON A. LINDSETH

MISCHMASCH

JABBBRING AND JAM
21

RAVINGS
22

ALL MUST HAVe PRIZBS
24

IN MeMORlAM

Kitty Minehart

Virginia Davis McGhee

Rosella S. Howe

Alan White
26

CARROLLIAN NOTBS
28

Alice's Adventures on the Woodpecker Ranch

ADRIANA PELIANO

Ola, Brazil
Faman Studios

The Hunting of the Quark

WILLIAM HARTSTON

SIC. SIC. SIC
SeReNDIPlTY

OF BOOKS AND THINGS

The Logic of Alice: Clear Thinking in Wonderland

RAY KIDDY

End of the Century

RAY KIDDY

A Strange Evenki History

CINDY CLAYMORE WATTER

Demurova's Pictures and Conversations

AUGUST A. IMHOLTZ JR.

Wonderland: The Zen of Alice

MARK BURSTEIN

Two New Illustrated Wonderlands

ANDREW OGUS

Explorations: Three Academic Studies

CLARE IMHOLTZ

Eat Me
Special Offer

FROM OUR FAR-FLUNG
CORReSPONDeNTS

4«

Art & Illustration — Articles ^Academia

Books — Cyberspace — Events, Exhibits, isf Places

Movies ^ Television — Music — Performing Arts — Tilings

"It was the White Rabbit, trotting slowly back again, and look-
ing anxiously about as it went, as if it had lost something . . .'

Yes, Oryctolagus cuniculus albus is back in town.
Well, I am, at any rate. For one issue, anyway.
Having spearheaded the Knight Letter from
issues 49 (Spring 1995) through 77 (Fall 2006) and
having been hanging around as production editor
since then, I was asked to take the reins once more
from our iiber-busy president, Andrew Sellon, until
a new editor in chief could be found. And she has.
The brilliant and wondrous Sarah Adams-Kiddy,
who has served as associate editor since 75 (Summer
2005) and Mischmasch editor — or co-editor with her
husband, Ray Kiddy — since 78 (Spring 2007), and is
an editor in real life, has graciously accepted the title
and all that goes with it. Bless her. I will let her intro-
duce herself in greater depth when she takes over this
column in the next issue.

Supreme thanks are also due to the renowned
August and Clare Imholtz for the splendid job they
have done serving as editors of the "Rectory Um-
brella" section for the past five issues, beginning with
78 (Summer, 2007). This job has now fallen on the
willing and able shoulders of Libya-born resident of
Montreal Mahendra Singh, making this truly a North
American publication. Mahendra is known, among
other things, for his superb illustrations to the Snark,
which graced the cover and several pages of KL 81,
and for his witty talk at our Fall 2008 meeting in New
York (AX 81:1-4). His blog atjusttheplaceforasnark.
blogspot.com is a source of constant delight.

We also welcome two new associates as editors of
the "From Our Far-Flung Correspondents" column.
James Welsch, a witty young man, has attended several
of our conferences in the company of his mother. Sue
Welsch, who has been an active Society member for a
long time. He has been editing an art-&:-literary blog,
wvvw.itwaslost.org, for three years, and writes non-
sense poetry himself, collected in Prophecy &' Doggerel

"under the nom de guerre S. Sandrigon" (available
on his site). His first act as co-FF-editor was to create
a Twitter stream at http://twitter.com/AliceAmerica
as an alternate way to follow our blog at http://lcsna.
blogspot.com.

James spent a year at Oxford, where he met his
Far-Flung colleague-to-be — and present neighbor —
Rachel Eley. She has a degree in English Literature
from Oxford, where she did her research on "another
strange nineteenth-century English poet, Thomas
Lovell Beddoes (the suicidal Romantic neo-Jacobean
tragicomedian and a distant ancestor)." She is, in
fact, the U.S. secretary for the Thomas Lovell Bed-
does Society. Welcome aboard!

Once upon a time the Knight Letter was the re-
sponsibility of an otherwise busy Society president,
making its "staff exactly one-half a person. When I
took over, that went up to one, but I also served as its
designer until the talented Andrew Ogus took over
that spot in issue 71 (Spring 2003). That's two! But
presently our magazine is a substantive and respected
(and I hope, fun) journal, and I "rejoice" that our
masthead now boasts a staff of seven. (A shout out
to Joel Birenbaum of "All Must Have Prizes," not to
mention our many contributors and advisors.)

1 would particularly like to give a bouquet of
kudos and props to Andrew Sellon for his glorious
leadership over the past five issues, doing at least six
impossible things before breakfast. And to all our
present intrepid band, assembled on the bank, and
heading into a radiant future.

"Still she went on growing, and, as a last resource,
she put one arm out of the window, and one foot up
the chimney, and said to herself 'Now I can do no
more, whatever happens. What ■will become of me?'"

MARK BURSTEIN

THe ReCTORY UMBRSLLA

MARK BURSTEIN, JONATHAN DIXON, 6^ EDWARD WAKELING

I. Prelude

Mark Burstein

"For instance, the pictures on the wall next
the fire seemed to be all alive ..."

— Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter One

Sitting next to Jonathan Dixon at our recent meeting
in Santa Fe was unexpectedly, and grandly, fortunate.
Glancing over at the production "study book" that
he had put together, I happened to see a photocopy
of a painting of a lovely young woman. "Who's the
beauty?" I queried, only to be told, without fanfare,
"Oh, that's Lewis Carroll's mom." I sat for a moment
absorbing this; other than a silhouette or two, there
were no known likenesses of her in any of the dozen
or so biographies I had seen. I kept my excitement
down for the moment, quietly asking Jonathan where
he had managed to obtain it, a story that is told below.
On the next page in his binder was another portrait,
of her sister Lucy.

As soon as I got back home I e-mailed Edward
Wakeling to ask if I should get excited, or if this was
somehow already known to the entire Carrollian
world save me, or if some mistake had been made. He
wrote back, "I think it's time to get excited — I've never
seen these images before," and got me in touch with
Caroline Luke, daughter of Philip Jaques and one of

two executors of the Dodgson estate, via e-mail. She
most kindly gave her consent to printing the images
and also volunteered to find a hitherto unpublished
letter between the two sisters (below). Having been
around the portraits all her life, she was somewhat
startled to find me categorizing them as "unknown,"
but I explained exactly what I had meant by "hidden
in plain sight for two hundred years."

So, ladies and gentlemen, herewith debuts what
is considered to be the only known image of Lewis
Carroll's beloved mother, Fanny, and a matching one
of her sister Lucy, the woman who took over the reins
of the Dodgson family after Fanny's death, when
Charles was but eighteen. Caroline explains that
although it has been a long held family belief that
these two portraits are indeed of Fanny and Lucy,
there is no concrete proof that this is the case. Four
of the six Lutwidge daughters are known to have had
their portraits painted and all four paintings remain
in family collections but do not bear any individual
identification. And now, the story of the portraits'
discovery.

II. A Golden Afternoon

Jonathan Dixon

In the early months of 1992 I had just completed,
and handed over for publication, my illustrations for

the LCSNA's edition of The Hunting of the Snark, and
being in a transitional period in my life, decided to
travel to England (something I had always longed to
do) to take a time-out to "find myself." Without know-
ing a soul there, I packed up two bags, flew to Lon-
don, and promptly went native.

As I traveled the country purely by intuition, fol-
lowing whatever leads came to me, I discovered that
being a Snark illustrator opened up a whole new world
of friends and acquaintances. Using that credential as
a calling card, and quickly mastering the fine art of
name-dropping, I was able to meet and spend time
with many Carrollians (as well as mooch free meals
and accommodations from them), including
some whom I had previously known only as
names on my Snark research materials.

Among these was the illustrious
and courteous Edward Wakeling.
Edward in turn told me about
his friend Philip Dodgson
Jaques (pronounced "Jakes"),
the senior trustee of the
C. L. Dodgson estate and
grandson of Lewis Carroll's
brother Skeffington. I was
told that Mr. Jaques was very
pleasant, but quite quiet
and reserved; after hearing
this I was undecided about
whether to approach him in
my travels.

On June 29th, however, I
found myself in the southwest-
ern town of Dartmouth. My main
purpose in the region was to visit
the Arthurian sites in Cornwall, as
well as the home town and bookstore of
Christopher Milne (the original "Chris-
topher Robin"). I realized, however, that
I wasn't too far from Mr. Jaques' home,
so I rather impulsively decided to ring him up. I ex-
plained to Mr. Jaques who I was and asked if I might
stop by to meet him for a quick visit. He said he was
having family over, but could spare "one or two min-
utes."

Mr. Jaques picked me up at the bus station and
drove me to his home . . . and "one or two minutes"
somehow became three hours. I had worried that the
conversation might be awkward, given what I had
been told of his reserved nature, but sitting outside
in his back garden, Mr. Jaques talked and talked, very
openly. I was relieved to find that he liked my Snark
illustrations very much, and I gave him the copy I
had brought with me, at which he wandered inside
to fetch something to show me: a first edition of The
Hunting of the Snark, signed by the author himself for
his sister Frances.

Fanny

Among other highlights of the visit (I am writing
this article from the journal notes I wrote that eve-
ning):

• I noted to myself that Mr. Jaques very much re-
sembled Harry Furniss' drawings of Lewis Carroll
in later life — albeit with fuller hair!

• Mr. Jaques emphasized that the Dodgsons were
a very close family, and that this closeness must
have had a great influence on Lewis Carroll, but
he felt that no one (at that time anyway) had as
yet really gone into those intrafamilial relation-
ships in depth.

• And, finally, as I was preparing to leave, Mr.
Jaques pointed out two rather large portrait

paintings hanging on his wall. He said that
he was pretty certain they were of Lewis
Carroll's mother, Frances, and his Aunt
Lucy at the ages of about eighteen and
sixteen, respectively (ca. 1821). I was
surprised to hear that, for (as our
editor notes above), I too had read
that, apart from a silhouette I had
seen in a biography, there were
no known likenesses of Frances
Jane Dodgson. I mentioned to
Mr. Jaques, however, that the por-
trait he named as Lucy Lutwidge
did indeed bear a definite resem-
blance to the photos Carroll took
of "Aunt Lucy" later in her life.

Sensing the potential importance of
this — and worrying that there might
be no other record of those images on
the whole planet — I asked Mr. Jaques
if I might take some slide photos of the
paintings. He agreed — and those are the im-
ages you see here. (Even now I am immensely
grateful to the universe and the fates that the
photos turned out as well as they did, given the
less-than-perfect lighting and the fact that I had only
one chance to take them, and very quickly at that.)

Over the years I have shown prints of these pho-
tos to a few Carrollians, to try to get a sense of their
potential importance, but never really got much
more than an "oh, that's interesting" in response.
It was for the same reason that I took the images to
the LCSNA meeting held here in Santa Fe in May.
As noted above, before I even had a chance to men-
tion them to anyone, during our presentation on La
Guida di Bragia Mark glanced at them sitting among a
stack of my visual aids, and made inquiries.

The rest is the history you now hold in your hands
. . . and I am pleased to have had a hand in bringing
young Frances and Lucy Lutwidge to those who will
most appreciate meeting them face to face after all
these years.

I would also like to dedicate my part in this issue
to Mr. Philip Dodgson Jaques, for taking a strange
American wanderer into his home, and for the mem-
ory of our pleasant, golden, white-stone afternoon
together.

III. The Lutwidge
Sisters

Edward Wakeling

Lewis Carroll's maternal grandfather, Charles Lut-
widge (1768-1848), was educated at St. John's Col-
lege, Cambridge, and resided in Hull from 1805. He
was a collector (agent) of H. M. Customs at Hull
for 35 years. In 1798, he served as Major
in the First Regiment of the Royal Lan-
cashire Militia in the rebellion in Ire-
land, and afterwards as Command-
ing Officer of that regiment at
Dungeness from 1803 to 1804.
He was one of the founders of
the Botanic Gardens at Hull in
1812, president of the Liter-
ary and Philosophical Society,
member of the Committee of
the Hull Subscription Library
from 1806 to 1837, Water
Bailiff of the Hull Corpora-
tion, and Receiver of Buoyage
of the Hull Trinity House.

On January 15, 1798, he
married Elizabeth Anne Dodg-
son (1770-1836), daughter of
the Right Rev. Charles Dodgson,
Bishop of Elphin. They had nine
children: Skeffington (who appears
to have died young); Elizabeth Frances
(1798-1883), who married Thomas Raikes ^

(as his second wife) in 1825; Charles
Henry (1800-1843), who married Anne
Louisa Raikes in 1831; Robert Wilfred Skeffington
(Carroll's beloved "Uncle Skeffington," 1802-1873);
Frances Jane (1803-1851), who married her first
cousin Charles Dodgson (1800-1868) in 1827; Lucy
(1805-1880); Charlotte Menella (1807-1857); Mar-
garet Anne (1809-1869); and Henrietta Mary (1811-
1872). Hence, the children were born into a well-re-
spected upper-middle-class family.

As mentioned above, although there is no ab-
solute proof that these two portraits are Fanny and
Lucy, readers are welcome to note the similitude of
Fanny's nose to her silhouette on the following page,
and her eyes to those of her children; photographs of
Lucy are noted above, and one can also be seen on
the following page.

The second daughter, born Frances Jane but
known as Fanny, became Lewis Carroll's mother.

Sadly, she died at the comparatively early age of 47,
leaving a family of eleven children, of whom the
youngest, Edwin, was only four-and-a-half years old.
Her younger sister Lucy immediately took on the role
of surrogate mother to the family, remaining with
them until her death, aged 75. There was clearly a
strong bond between Fanny and Lucy, as testified by a
number of letters between the two sisters that survive
in the Dodgson family. One of them, unpublished
until now, annotated by the present writer, and cour-
tesy of Caroline Luke, follows.

IV. A Letter

Annotations by Edward Wakeling

Croft Rectory

Darlington

Saturday Evening Nov 1 3"*

[1847]!

Dearest Lucy,

I begin my letter this evening by
telling you what I am sure you
will be pleased to hear — dear-
est Charlie's mumps deafness
has quite gone. I really felt
quite thankful when this good
news arrived this morning.
Charles received a nice let-
ter from him written in good
spirits. Now I am commissioned
by Skeff and all the children to
thank you very much for the nice
presents you have so kindly sent
them tho' they say they are going to
write to you themselves. You are quite
right in supposing that we should not
like the little book, kindly sent by your well
meaning friend tho' we do not admire her
taste — we think it almost profane.'^ Now
for brevity — ^your "Technological Diction-
ary" ^ has come and I think will be very useful
to us — it shall be used, but I hope that we shall
also keep it in good preservation for you. We
do not remember receiving the Hull paper
containing the new Dean of Ripon's Sermon,
nor can I find it, but I should like to see it if it
chooses to come out of its hiding place — we
have only got the paper with Mr Gregory's let-
ter to the Dean."^ We rejoice in the continued
good account of dearest Papa. I intended to
have treated you handsomely this evening, but I
have had so many things to attend to — you must
take the will for the deed — Good night — best
love from us all to dearest Papa^ and you all —
Your sincerely affectionate and attached sister,

F J Dodgson

V. Final Thoughts

Mark Burstein

These two family portraits continue to be passed down,
appreciated, and enjoyed by one of the branches of
the Dodgson family. We are most grateful that they
have consented to their being debuted in the Knight
Letter, and would be delighted to see them in future
biographies or revised editions of existing ones — sub-
ject to permission being sought and granted by the
executors of Philip Jaques' estate, of course.

I am sure that the date is 1847: Dodgson had mumps

at Rugby School in October of that year. However,

Dodgson's deafness did indeed continue, despite the

comments in this letter.

I have no idea what the book was that Mrs. Dodgson

thought was "profane," but we do know that she

exercised her judgment on all of Dodgson's reading

material (notebook to this effect in the Dodgson Family

Collection, Woking).

A Technological Dictionary, explaining the terms of the

arts, sciences, literature, professions and trades, by W. M.

Buchanan, was published in 1846.

The new Dean of Ripon was Henry David Erskine (1786-

1859), appointed in 1847. Dodgson was well acquainted

with his children throughout his life, and photographed

most of them. Mr. Gregory is unknown to me.

Papa was, of course, Charles Lutwidge (1768-1848).

He had not been in the best of health and died on

September 8, 1848.

Frances Jane Dodgson in silhouette

Aunt Lucy in later life

Alice in fort Lee

AUGUST A. IMHOLTZ, JR.

-1^1

^f\

We heard them faintly, for we had just

About completed our design
To keep the George Washington Bridge from rust

By filming it this time . . .

Or maybe that was all our imagining — sens-
ing Lewis Carroll among us with the ghosts
of the silent film and early talkie movie ac-
tors and actresses on the New Jersey Palisades above
the Hudson River and in sight of the magnificent
George Washington Bridge — as we, some seventy or
so members and guests and Fort Lee residents, spent
a delightful afternoon on Saturday, October 17, 2009,
at the fall LCSNA meeting at the film museum in New
Jersey's Fort Lee Historic Park Visitor Center. Fort
Lee, like its looking-glass image (Fort Washington in
lower Manhattan) was built by General George Wash-
ington to control the Hudson during the Revolution-
ary War. The plan failed, as did Fort Lee's movie fame
more than a century and a quarter later. But before
we get ahead of ourselves, let's rewind this reel to the
day before.

On an overcast Friday afternoon, 68 fourth-grade
girls and boys, accompanied by their teachers and the
school principal, assembled in the library of Fort Lee
Elementary School No. 4 for the semi-annual Maxine
Schaefer Memorial Reading. Ellie Schaefer-Salins ex-
plained who we were and, more importantly, who her
mother, Maxine Schaefer, had been, and why we were
at School No. 4. Patt Griffin and Andrew Sellon then
once again gave a wonderful dramatic reading, which
is always a litde different, of the Mad Tea Party chapter
to a quiet and clearly attentive audience of children.
Andrew Sellon asked a few questions to spark discus-
sion— though really the spark was already there — start-
ing off with when Wonderland wsls first published. A lit-
tle girl piped up immediately with the correct — surely
for their cohorts correct enough — 1866.

Most of them had read the book and were ex-
tremely well prepared for our visit. Of course many
had seen the Disney film, about which some were
troubled by textual confladon — not their words but
certainly their idea. The youngsters asked a lot of
good questions, such as what did the book mean, if it
meant (or means) anything at all? Some thought Car-
roll was sending a message of how Alice (and every

child) needs to act in a grown-up and sometimes
crazy world, as she did as the Mad Tea Party. And the
message ranged from "act bravely" to "speak up for
yourself." A much bemused boy asked why anyone
would have paid more than a million dollars for an
1865 Alicel

David Schaefer asked them whether they knew
of any connection between Alice and Fort Lee. None
did, so Mr. Meyers from the Fort Lee Film Commis-
sion gave a concise and good explanation of that for
the students and perhaps even some of their teachers.
The kids enjoyed getting their copies of the Books
of Wonder edition with the Maxine Schaefer Memo-
rial Outreach Program bookplate in each one. The
school's principal, Mr Peter R. Emr, and the teachers
have good cause to be proud of their students and
the environment they have created for them.

And now, roll 'em! A little after noon on Saturday,
LCSNA president Andrew Sellon began our formal
meeting by thanking Fort Lee Film Commission Chair-
man Nelson Page and Tom Meyers, the Commission's
Executive Director, for hosting us in their splendidly
equipped auditorium in Fort Lee Historic Park, and
David Schaefer, a founding member and erstwhile
president of our Society, for planning and organizing
this meeting. Andrew then handed the proceedings
over to David, who gave a very brief account of Alice in
films, starting with the 1903 Cecil Hepworth produc-
tion at Walton-on-Thames in England, through the
1910 Edison company film, and so on.

David then introduced our first speaker, Prof.
Richard Koszarski of Rutgers University, a highly
regarded film historian and author of a number of
books on Fort Lee and America's early years behind
the movie lens {Hollywood on the Hudson), editor of
the: Journal of Film History, and a member of the Fort
Lee Film Commission. The title of his talk was "Fort
Lee Wonderland: Why Was the First Alice in Wonder-
/anc? Talkie Made in New Jersey?".

Prof Koszarski did a brilliant job of sketching for
us the interrelated social, cultural, economic, and, of
course, artistic history that had made Fort Lee, New
Jersey, the first American movie capital. The great
cliffs, the Palisades, overlooking the Hudson River;
its proximity to New York City, though a world away;
and the economic affordability of the open fields

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a hundred films in Fort Lee, including his 1911 Civil
War epic, The Battle.

By 1918, Fort Lee suffered a number of setbacks
from which, with but one interlude more than a de-
cade later, it would never really recover. A serious coal
shortage during the winter of 1918, labor problems
with unions, fires and explosions, and finally a change
of attitude of the townspeople led the major studios
to move across the country to Hollywood, which was
sunny, anti-union, and welcoming. With the coming
of the talking pictures, the Fort Lee movie indus-
try revived a little as independent film operations
moved into the largely abandoned studios. African-
American films like The Exile were made by Oscar Mi-
cheaux in 1931, Italian films were produced in Fort
Lee (Italy's film industry lagged behind that of the
United States), Yiddish films were shot there, as well
as the first Mormon talkie film, Corianton (a still for
the movie showed actors on a set mildly reminiscent
of Babylon, perhaps with a touch of the Mayan for

and small "downtown," which through artful camera
placement and angling could be made to look like
New York tenements or cowboy Western towns or
whatever, all made Fort Lee an attractive site. Movie
companies Fox, Peerless, Champion, Paramount, and
the French firm Eclaire built huge studios, like giant
greenhouses really, at Fort Lee, while the movie mo-
guls' headquarters remained in Manhattan or Paris.
Lillian Gish, the Barrymores, and many other early
film stars often stayed at Rambo's Hotel, which itself
doubled as a real domicile or a movie saloon or what-
ever was demanded of it. Producers like William Fox,
Carl Laemmle (who founded Universal Studios) , and
the Warner brothers all were active at Fort Lee. The
famous American director D. W. Griffith made over

Magic lantern slides and projectors

good measure) . Among all of these niche films a pro-
ducer named "Bud" Pollard produced, in addition to
The Horror and other films (see below) , one film that
was hardly of the niche market kind in 1931: the first
talkie Alice in Wonderland, starring the young Ruth Gil-
bert, our feature film of the day and one about which
we shall say more below.

Alan Tannenbaum, past president of our so-
ciety and a major collector of all things Carrollian,
spoke next, on the topic — which needs some expla-
nation— "Alice 'Strips' for the Screen." The "strips"
in question refer to film strips and other forms of
pre- and post-motion-picture pictures actually mov-
ing or in a sequence. In addition to the silent, and
later talking, motion pictures, there were from the
late nineteenth century almost until today alterna-
tive image formats for adults and children to enjoy,
in public events like musical stage recitals, and later
in their home parlors, nurseries, or, much later, rum-

"Animated" paper strip from the 1930s

pus rooms (for those of you who grew up during the
1950s, as this writer did).

The magic lantern projectors were quite popu-
lar in late Victorian England and in North America
as well. There were many models, some candle-pow-
ered and some with little chimneys. As he sat on the
stage, Alan drew from his copious bag of niche Car-
roll collecting treasures a sample of some Alice lan-
tern slides — he has a set of 24. Later magic lantern
projectors abandoned limelight for electricity. Often
with slides — of the PowerPoint sort — he showed sam-
ples of these antique video toys and more modern, if
sometimes more primitive, ones.

Abandoning strict chronology, Alan then leapt
ahead to the stereo-cards and finally the Viewmasters
many of us remember, though perhaps far fewer of
us old-timers remember the Tru-Vue Color Stereo-
chromes from 1952. In between the slow fading of
the magic lantern and the spread of 35mm shorts,
there were a number of paper and "film" gadgets like

Greg Bowers

the "Movie Jektor" and the "Talkie Jecktor" — devices
through which you threaded and then saw Alice and
an assortment of Wonderland characters move and,
with the "Talkie," heard them speak. Uncle Sam's
Movie Projector was ajecktor competitor, again aimed
at the child market, unlike the Magic Lanterns, which
appealed as much to the adult as to the child, per-
haps more. Alan explained how they worked by show-
ing a minute-long film complete with background
ragtime music, and finally concluded his fascinating
and quick-paced show-and-see-and-tell presentation
with a set of Disney Educational Productions 35mm
films in little blue tins from 1988.

After a brief intermission, during which many
members, guests, and local residents came to the
front of the auditorium to talk with Alan and look
at his gadgets, we reassembled for the second half of
the afternoon's program. David Schaefer introduced
Dr. Greg Bowers, our third presentation and the last
flesh-and-blood one. In addition to being an assistant
professor of theory and composition in the music
department of William and Mary College, Greg has
just composed a musical, Lewis Carroll and Alice, for
the Children's Educational Theatre of Salem, Or-
egon. The title of his multimedia talk was "Timid and
Tremulous Sounds: What Film Scores Should Like to
Explain about Alice's Adventures."

Greg began with a quotation from Aaron Cop-
land, "By itself the screen is a pretty cold proposition.
Music is like a small flame put under the screen to
keep it warm." To demonstrate how that happens,
Greg proceeded to analyze the music composed by
Stanley Myers for Gavin Millar's 1985 film Dreamchild;
by Dmitri Tiomkin for Norman McLeod's 1933 Para-
mount Alice in Wonderland movie; and by John Barry
for the 1972 William Sterling Alice film. Film music

cognition is something few of us have probably ever
pondered, even though our minds often unwittingly
engage in simultaneous processing of the images on
the screen and the accompanying music. Whether
image and music are processed as a unit depends on
the factor of congruence. Bowers distinguished be-
tween "semantic congruence," in which emotional
cues work together, or underscore or reinforce each
other — for example, soaring romantic melodies in a
love scene — and on the other hand "temporal congru-
ence," for example the way "fast cuts during a chase
scene or a loud punctuated chord to underscore a
crash enhances the sense of imminence in film."

And after commenting on the particular difficul-
ties of staging, filming, and scoring a work as episodic
as Alice, he turned his analysis first to the film Dream-
child. Here and below we can give only a single ex-
ample or two of the points Dr. Bowers made — a task
made more difficult by the lack of pictures and music.
The theme of Dreamchild is Mrs. Hargreaves's recol-
lection of and meditation on the nature of her rela-
tionship with Mr. Dodgson, and "the opening scene,
with plodding low strings and minor pitch clusters,
accented by bursts of thunder, sets the stage." This
somewhat nightmarish music offers a counterpoint
to the question, the mystery, of Dodgson's real in-
tentions toward Alice as Mrs. Hargreaves reminisces.
And to follow this just a little further, Dr. Bowers ob-
served that the tense music returns in the scene of
the photo session with Alice in Dodgson's studio at
Christ Church and "a holding pattern emerges based
on an unresolved chord that will not move forward;
the music remains in stasis." The music and the myth
need resolution; whether it is achieved is a final ques-
tion of the film and beyond.

Dmitri Tiomkin's A/zc^ composition came at the
time of the transition from silent movies to talkies.
Again one example: "Image and meaning do come to-
gether at many points in the score. A key congruent
moment comes as Charlotte Henry's Alice ascends

Ruth Gilbert in the 1931 film.

to the looking-glass. Here, the tactile becomes emo-
tional. Alice's ascent is echoed by an impassioned
upward sweep of the orchestra. Notice that it is not
Alice's travel through the looking-glass, but rather her
anticipation of adventure that is emphasized." And in
Alice's prolonged fall, falls being of some importance
in McLeod's representation of the story, one senses
some of the same kind of stasis one sensed in parts of
Dreamchild SLud an actual echo of the familiar "There's
no place like home" with Alice even commenting on
the music she hears.

The composer John Barry, perhaps best remem-
bered for the soundtracks he created for almost a
dozen James Bond films, wrote a grandiose score to
the high textual fidelity of Sterling's film to the Alice
books. In his Wonderland score, Barry bases "many
melodies around the third scale degree and, more
broadly, the interval of the third. The third scale
degree defines major and minor keys and therefore
sets tone. The third is also a less directed relationship
than tonic/dominant. Harmonically speaking, a third
may go anywhere, just like Fiona Fullerton's Alice."
There are a number of examples of incongruence
in Barry's music. For example after falling down the
rabbit hole and landing, "Alice chases after the White
Rabbit accompanied by hypnotic thirds. The calm
pleasance of this 'chase' is a temporal mismatch. The
music has the effect of a lullaby, reminding us we are
in a dream."

Dr. Bowers concluded with the belief that Alice
has endured because of her fluidity, and "music has
the capacity then, to continually reinvent Alice for
new and diverse audiences." This brilliant talk greatly
helped this writer to just begin to see what he had
been hearing, consciously or not, and hear what he
had been seeing. We look forward to hearing Greg
Bowers's own reinvention of Alice.

And now for our feature film, "Bud" Pollard's
1931 Alice in Wonderland, starring Ruth Gilbert, the first
talking Alice film. David Schaefer said that not much is
known about "Bud" Pollard except that he operated
strictly on the fringes of the motion picture industry,
directing films with titles like The Danger Man; an Ital-
ian film, Ofestino a la legge; The Horror; and a film tided
The Black King, based on Marcus Garvey's life, with ele-
ments from The Emperor Jones thrown in.

So why an Alice in 1931? Possibly the occasion
and cause were the upcoming centenary of the birth
of Lewis Carroll, which was much in the news, with
major exhibitions planned in Britain and the United
States. The famous auction of Carroll's original man-
uscript, Alice's Adventures under Ground, in 1928 had
brought to the world's attention that Alice had been
a real girl. In any event, the film was shot at the Met-
ropolitan Studio, formerly the Peerless Studio, in Fort
Lee. The screen adaptation, which, though not the
complete text, hewed quite well to Carroll's dialogue.

was credited to John E. Godson and Ashley Miller,
who seem to have vanished away after this film.

David introduced Ruth Gilbert's daughter and
her family, who knew of the film but had never seen
it. Young Ruth Gilbert, who is said to have been 19
years old when she played Alice (her family claims
she may have exaggerated her age and never to their
recollection said when she was born), had recently
graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic
Arts. She was later discovered by Eugene O'Neill and
cast in several Broadway roles. She continued working
in the legitimate theatre until the early 1950s, when
she played the role of Max, Milton Berle's secretary,
on his television show, for which she was nominated
for an Emmy. Ruth Gilbert died in 1993.

The film begins with a full orchestra rendition
of Irving Berlin's "Come Along with Alice" — a song
written for the 1916 musical Century Girl. Alice's first
words, after falling down the rabbit hole, are a very
American "How funny" and she did indeed have
some funny-looking eyebrow lining. Her slight New
Jersey accent would have perhaps horrified audi-
ences accustomed to Oxbridge English, even though
Ruth gave a perky performance as Alice. Some liber-
ties are taken with the book. For example, a love rela-
tionship between the Duchess and the White Rabbit
is introduced, which could not have occurred even

in Wonderland! Chapter III is omitted, Chapter V is
out of sequence, and other changes follow — some
of which are quite amusing, such as when Alice in
the Chapter XI scene sees the tarts and remarks, "I
suppose these must be the refreshments." The story
concludes with Alice saying, again in her American
patois, "Come on all of you, who's afraid of a paltry
deck of cards?" The other characters, except for a
convincingly mad Hatter and a Jerry Colonna-like
Cheshire Cat, were not exceptional.

Mordaunt Hall, the first New York Times regular
movie critic, commented condescendingly on De-
cember 28, 1931: "There is an earnestness about the
direction and acting that elicits sympathy, for poor
little Alice had to go through the ordeal of com-
ing to shadow life in an old studio in Fort Lee, N.J.,
instead of enjoying the manifold advantages of a
well-equipped Hollywood studio." The only known
16mm copy of the film is in the Schaefer collection,
though UCLA holds three partial 35mm versions.
We certainly enjoyed seeing it 78 years later. And
that's a wrap.

[Thanks are due to Greg Bowers and David Schaefer for
providing notes for this account, but they are not responsible
for any misrepresentations.]

^^,
^^^

Alice-Dress Optional

ERIN HUTCHINSON

^^^

i^^^sr

Do we have to dress up? The idea struck me
three weeks before my first meeting. I had
been busy reading all the Knight Letters
and re-reading Alice's Adventures, but I never stopped
to think if I should show up in a skirt or as the Mad
Hatter. Is this a costume party meeting and, more im-
portantly, are there pop quizzes? If I forget the year
Though the Looking-Glass was published, will Clare Im-
holtz stand up and yell, "Off with your head!"?

The meeting date approached and I had no idea
what to expect. (Though I had decided that I was,
under no circumstances, going in costume.) I came
in, got my nametag and sat down to listen to Rich-
ard Koszarski, the first speaker. By the third speaker,
I had calmed down. There were no obscure Snark

references and the people didn't speak in long, com-
plex sentences with words straight out of the SAT
textbook. It was just a group of pleasant people com-
paring their Alice pins and talking about their favorite
Lewis Carroll stories.

I was able to watch several A/ic^ films, meet fellow
Snark-ophiles, and get great recommendations on
books to add to my collection. When later asked how
my first meeting went, I could honestly reply, "No.
They're not a// mad."

[Erin Hutchinson, aged fourteen, attended our Ft. Lee gath-
ering, her first LCSNA meeting.]

l£^

T»V

Off With Their Heads!

Those Awful Alice Movies

DANIEL SINGER

Creating a satisfying film version of Alice's
adventures is so extraordinarily difficult
that it has consistently eluded filmmakers
for over one hundred years. Visionary director Tim
Burton seems the ideal candidate to hit this elusive
nail on the head: in 2010, Walt Disney Pictures will
release his new star-studded, computer-animation-
enhanced, feature-length film, in 3D no less, entitled
Alice in Wonderland. Will this finally be the adaptation
that succeeds in satisfactorily bringing Alice's bizarre
dream (s) to life on the big screen? Probably not.

Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
and Through the Looking-Glass, aside from being eter-
nally readable books, seem ideal for dramatization:
their lively conversations, amusing characters, and
fantastic settings practically cry out for adaptation.
The stories have spawned several dozen filmed ver-
sions, most of them dreadful or at least misguided.
Most of us have had the experience of watching a
film of Alice in Wonderland (as it is usually titled)
and complaining afterwards that, well, it wasn't very
good.

These films aren't without their charms. But if
you're one of those Alice fans who dreads watching a
film based on Lewis Carroll's stories, you're in good
company. In order to write this article, I've watched
most of them again, and let me tell you, it was pain-
ful. I won't be reviewing all of them — there are simply
too many — but I'd like to look at the most well-known
(and currently viewable) Alice films of the last century
and take a stab at explaining what went wrong. I've
omitted films that stray too far from the basic plot
points of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland {Dreamchild,
for example, or films whose primary focus is Through
the Looking-Glass) . Sorry, I'm not reviewing any porno
versions. Also, these reviews are necessarily short due
to limited space — put a bottle of red wine in front of
me and I could go on for hours.

This analysis is based on my own strongly opin-
ionated ideas, and as Alice would say, "Perhaps
your feelings may be different." Since there's "no
accounting for taste" (as the Gryphon would say),
I know some of you will be outraged by my pro-
nouncements. We all prefer certain films for largely
sentimental reasons; but this is a review — you're wel-
come to disagree.

Let's look at some common problems that film-
makers have faced.

1. Alice is a seven-year-old child. Most filmmakers
cast an older actress, expecting the audience
to accept a post-pubescent woman in the role
of a child. It's confusing and inappropriate.

2. The casting of celebrities should not take
priority over casting appropriate actors for
appropriate roles. Was Telly Savalas or
Whoopi Goldberg really the best person avail-
able to play the Cheshire Cat? I think not.

3. An actor in a tacky animal costume doesn't actu-
ally look like an animal! Puppets and animation
are far better media with which to portray the
Mouse, Dodo, etc., if we are expected to empa-
thize with Alice's difficulty at being suddenly
immersed in their world.

4. A series of conversations doesn't make an
interesting screenplay, so a slavish adaptation
of Carroll's text is a sure-fire way to sink your
movie. On the other hand, most writers' embel-
lishments (and radical reworkings) of Carroll's
text are disastrously inappropriate, so you're
hanged if you do, and hanged if you don't.

5. The fact that the original texts are studded with
funny poems does not mean the film should be
a musical. The era of movie characters burst-
ing into song is virtually over, and since most
audiences squirm when someone on the screen
starts to sing, filmmakers have to be extremely
artful about inserting songs into Alice films.

6. Special effects are expensive. Clearly some film-
makers have been challenged by not having
enough money to create a satisfying vision of
Wonderland.

Even after we've agreed that these are important
points that filmmakers frequently stumble over, we
come to the question of appeal. When movie mak-
ing became a business early in the twentieth century,
producers realized that successful films must contain
certain elements that motivate the public to purchase
tickets. Alice is not a sympathetic protagonist, and

her journey, while fantastic, lacks the classic storytell-
ing fundamentals. This should have thwarted studios
from ever investing in Alice films. Yet the stories have
proven so irresistible that a major release has emerged
in every decade, usually to lukewarm reviews and dis-
appointing box-office takes.

The appeal of Alice's dream tale is that it's fun.
Alice's predicament — tumbling down a very deep
rabbit-hole lined with curios, growing and shrink-
ing whenever she eats or drinks, offending animals
with thoughtless remarks, and holding her own when
faced with rude, crazy people and a savage pack of
cards — is funny stuff. But most of its humor is liter-
ary. Read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland aloud to
someone who's never read it before: it's genuinely hi-
larious. It's funny, however, not simply because of its
content, but because of the way it's written. Carroll's
narrative voice is warm and witty and whimsical in a
way that doesn't translate to film. At least, no one has
ever succeeded in doing so.

Alice herself, in the public's eye, compares unfa-
vorably with the homey Kansas farm girl of The Wiz-
ard ofOz. Dorothy's journey to a strange land is surely
not any fault of her own (many judge Alice's tumble as
karmic retribution for not minding her own business),
and Dorothy's desire to return to her loving family
inspires her to become friends with the oddballs she
meets — ^who themselves then become valuable, coura-
geous allies when faced with a powerful enemy. The
screenwriters who adapted Wizard ofOz so brilliantly
from L. Frank Baum's rather witless novel succeeded
in whipping generations of audiences into an emo-
tional frenzy over a child's discovery that "there's no
place like home." This forever influenced future Alice
in Wonderland screenplays as writers tried to make Alice
more sympathetic by telling us that she's "sad" because
she's "lost." In the original, Alice never feels lost in
Wonderland; she's merely having a very strange day.

Alice's plight doesn't have a pumped-up sense of
emotional importance; she never takes her situation
very seriously, even when events are terribly upset-
ting. She cries, she scolds herself, she stomps away in
anger and frustration, she wonders if perhaps she's
been changed into a different person... all of which
is very amusing in the books, but it makes for a weak
movie character. That's why cinematic Alices tend
to skip blithely from scene to scene: a living prop
against which celebrities do bizarre cameos in tacky
costumes. I know that's a gross generalization, but
isn't that your impression of Alice movies?

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, let's look
at some of these charmingly awful films.

Cecil Hepworth (UK, 1903)

This badly deteriorated, ten-minute silent film is a
marvel in that it still exists at all. The story of Alice's
adventures is neatly compacted into brief, incompre-

'^'^^^ihi ^•"^HiP

May Clark plays Alice, and Mrs. Hepworth plays the White Rabbit
in this first cinematic adaptation. Produced and directed in 1903 by
the latter's husband, Cecil, the film, though badly deteriorated, offers
us a rare glimpse of how Edwardians visualized the book.

hensible scenes that serve to remind the viewer of the
book rather than attempt to tell the tale. The Hall
of Doors is accomplished by a very simple theatrical
effect whereby a multiple-panel door, hidden behind
a curtain, is revealed by Alice either pulling away a
small bit of drape to show one low corner of the door
(when she is supposed to be tall) or by sweeping aside
the full length of the drape (when she is supposed
to be tiny) . The White Rabbit's House, the Duchess's
Kitchen, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Tea Party, and
the Queen's Procession whiz by until a violent argu-
ment erupts and Alice wakes up. It's all broad pan-
tomime with little reliance on dialogue cards. Lovely
costumes, crude acting and photography — and Dodg-
son missed it by only five years! One wonders what he
would have thought of it.

NonpareU (USA, 1915)
Despite being made twelve years later and boasting an
epic running time of one hour, this feature is not an
improvement. It's strangely slow, with actors standing
around a good deal of the time, and there's a heavy
reliance on dialogue cards — meaning the audience
was expected to comprehend the story more from
reading than from watching the actors act. There are
no visual effects to speak of, and the overall appear-
ance of the film (production design and photogra-
phy) is still remarkably crude. Oddest of all are many
shots of the Caucus Race animals following a signpost
pointing the way to the Animal Convention, as if that
was something important enough to emphasize.

Of course, these two films must have seemed
miraculous in their day, but it is unfortunate that no
Alice features have survived from the high period of
silent filmmaking (ca. 1925-1927). Might they have
been wonderful?

From left to right, William Austin, Charlotte Henry, and Cary
Grant ponder reeling and ivrithing in Paramount 's disappointing
production of 1 933.

The failure of this Hollywood spectacular must have
baffled its producers. It cleverly incorporated almost
every scene and character from both Alice stories, was
designed to resemble Sir John Tenniel's illustrations,
featured good performances from big stars, and in-
cluded several charming special effects. So what went
wrong? Paramount's version seemed to include all the
necessary ingredients for success, yet it ultimately failed
to entertain. Filmmakers would be wise to study it.

Black-and-white filming (along with a limited
budget) renders this picture's Wonderland as a series
of remarkably bleak, unsophisticated sets, and the
elaborate costumes and grotesque masks are rather
repulsive. Despite the rapid-fire sequence of scenes,
the whole picture somehow seems flat and repetitive;
the first scene (in which Alice is cooped up in a draw-
ing room) is shockingly slow and soporific. Charlotte
Henry is far too mature and perky to be an interest-
ing Alice. The cast's enthusiasm simply can't pull the
film out of its dull, repetitive rut.

For example, the thought of W. C. Fields as
Humpty Dumpty is much more entertaining than
the actual scene, which is stiff and static. As the Mock
Turde and White Knight, Cary Grant and Gary Coo-
per deliver memorable performances, but critics
were quick to point out that the stars were virtually
unrecognizable. The Fleischer Brothers' animated
version of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" is a nice
diversion, but even that is crudely done, suggesting
that the whole project would have come off better
had Paramount waited a few years for Technicolor
and other advances in film technology to develop in
the later 1930s.

Although the film is not officially available, it's
easy enough to pick up a grainy DVD copy on the In-
ternet. Apparently 15 minutes were trimmed off its
initial running time, and although the screenwriter
claimed that only the Live Flowers, Train, and Lion
and Unicorn scenes were omitted from the script, the
75-minute version we now see also lacks the Caucus
Race, the White Rabbit's House, and the Trial.

Dallas Bower/Lou Bimin (UK, France, 1948)

Carol Marsh is seen here with some of the puppets created by Lou
Bunin for Dallas Boiuer's Anglo-French version of 1948. The script
takes considerable artistic license with the basic facts of Wonder-
land's genesis, and also provides a rare, if unsettling, example of
postwar French animation.

This appalling film features live-action "bookend"
scenes that tell a mostly fictionalized story of how the
(bearded!) Reverend Dodgson first told the story to
Alice Liddell. Although shot at picturesque locations
at Oxford, the prologue and a brief epilogue are weak
and clearly not historical. The middle of the picture,
featuring a live-action Alice amid the stop-motion
puppets of French animator Lou Bunin, is an amaz-
ing example of questionable taste: the "modern" styl-
ization of puppets, sets, voices, and overall presenta-
tion is astoundingly ugly. I find this movie unbearable
and never recommend it to A/?c^fans unless they have
a strong stomach for revolting art direction. Once
again, a lovely actress (Carol Marsh) was far too old to
be playing Alice.

Its American release coincided with Disney's all-
cartoon version in 1951. Disney sued to block Bunin's
film from competing — but lost the case. Turns out
Disney needn't have bothered; both films performed
poorly with both critics and audiences.

Disney (USA, 1951)
Despite the fact that Disney's Alice in Wonderland
dumped most of the text, tone, and appearance of
the original book, it remains the most generally en-
tertaining version made to date. After Paramount's
dull production, Walt Disney felt that the way to ap-
proach the adaptation was to emphasize movement
and music. In place of Carroll's dialogue there are
bouncy sight gags, tuneful songs, magical transforma-
tions, and tons of luscious artwork. Disney's artists
were at the top of their game in creating charming,
funny drawings that moved gracefully and dramati-
cally, even without a real story to tell. The writers
abandoned their attempts at reshaping the story to
make Alice a more sympathetic character, because
Walt knew the audience wouldn't allow him to tam-
per with a classic. His goal was to present Carroll's
familiar characters in a fresh format. "If we don't do
that," Disney said at a December 12, 1938, story meet-
ing, "[our audience is] going to be disappointed with
what we do... We should try to get the spirit oi Alice
in Wonderland, and then, through our medium, do
the things you can't do any other way." A few months
later (March 15, 1939), he told his team, "It's going
to be... an Alice in Wonderland that everybody can like
and enjoy, and it will hit them just the same as it did
the people who remember when it first came out — it
was something fresh. ..and it appealed to people's
imagination."'

Stylistically, the film's art direction is full of typi-
cally bombastic Disney touches. The characters have
all been redesigned to be appealing to a modern
(American) audience. Noticeably absent are the
Mouse, Duchess, Mock Turtle, and Gryphon. Alice's
graceful descent down the rabbit-hole, viewed against
a backdrop of Dali-esque wood paneling, floating fur-
niture, and gradually shifting colors of light, instantly
establishes an eerie, otherworldly quality to the film.
Every sequence tries to outdazzle the last. Alice's
changes of size are astonishing, and her predicaments
are extreme: the Pool of Tears, for example, becomes
a rolling sea! Poor Bill the Lizard isn't kicked out the
chimney and into the yard, but sneezed into oblivion.
The Tweedles bounce as if they're made of water-filled
balloons. The Caterpillar's trippy pronouncements
are accompanied by illustrative smoke rings, an abun-
dance of uncooperative arms and legs, and an unex-
pected metamorphosis into a butterfly. The Cheshire
Cat gleefully disassembles his body and rebuilds him-
self at will. The tea-partiers liberally smash watches,
crockery, and each other. The Queen of Hearts roars
like a freight train and collapses upside down with
her heart-covered bloomers revealed to the crowd. It
all builds to a surreal, nightmarish climax where ev-
erything swirls into blazes of color. It's crazy, man. The
subtle madness of the original has gone full-blown
loony. As an animated vaudeville show loosely based

on Carroll's classic tales, it's magnificent, though con-
sidered by many — including Walt Disney himself— to
be a complete failure.

Disney's version failed with cridcs because it had
strayed too far from its source, and it failed with a
public that was apathetic about its episodic nature
and lack of an emodonally stirring story. The film lan-
guished in the studio vault except for 16mm rentals,
which increased dramatically during the psychedelic
1960s. After theatrical re-releases in 1974 and 1981,
it became available on home video, where its quali-
ties were finally appreciated by a large, mainstream
audience.

BBC/Jonathan MiUer (UK, 1966)

Anne-Marie Mallik and Wilfred Brambell kick off the action in
Jonathan Miller's 1966 version. A fine supporting cast with careful
art direction and photography are subverted by Miss Mallik 's odd
air of disengagement.

For years this well-remembered, black-and-white,
made-for-TV version was frequently mentioned in
articles, but it was not seen again until its much an-
ticipated home-video release forty years later. The
concept is amazing: Wonderland's denizens aren't
animals but people acting like animals! The Overrid-
ing Idea, which pokes fun at the creaky, old-fashioned
Victorians, must have seemed very cool in the 1960s,
and is still valid now — but this is strictly for people
who already know the book. Otherwise, this version's
step away from easily identified characters is hope-
lessly confusing. I mean, a little girl following an ec-
centric bunny into a tunnel in a park is marvelous,
but when the bunny is a gentleman, shouldn't that be
a cause for serious alarm? But I suppose it's okay, be-
cause, well, we know he's supposed to be a rabbit. All
right, I'll play along; the scenes are fairly amusing.

Oh no! What's the matter with Alice? She's sul-
len, despondent, staring off into space, rarely mak-
ing eye contact. In some cases, she's not even speak-
ing her lines — they are voiced-over, like wan, dreary
thoughts. She never smiles, which I rather appreci-
ated, but this is all too much. Anne-Marie Mallik is

the anti-Alice, distant, mumbling, in a stupor, sucking
the energy out of every scene.

Then there's the Tea Party and Mock Turtle
scenes, wonderfully acted in a very conversational
manner that makes Carroll's dialogue (plus some fine
ad libbing) sound remarkably natural. But wait — the
director has inserted long, awkward silences. They
work, but they also make it challenging for us to stay
awake. There's extraneous footage in the Croquet
Game and barnyard sounds at the Trial that'll have
you shaking your head.

Result: a brilliantly conceived but awkwardly ex-
ecuted experiment that comes off looking like an
overindulgent, high-concept excuse to cheap out on
costumes and effects. The fine cast includes Peter
Cook, Peter Sellers, Leo McKern, Michael Redgrave,
and John Gielgud — but sullen Alice ruins the show.

Fiona Fullerton's Alice looms large in William Sterling's 1972
production, another half-hearted British foray into Wonderland with
lukewarm results.

Hanna-Barbera (USA, 1966)

Hanna-Barbera's 1966 version of Alice shanghais our heroine
into the vast wasteland of American prime-time TV with genuinely
mindless corporate efficiency.

Nope, not going there.

William Sterling (UK, 1972)
This peppy musical film boasts some of the best
makeup effects of any Alice film, but everything else
about it falls short. Fiona Fullerton (at 15) was far
too old and terribly uninteresting as Alice. I have to
say it: she looks enormous on the screen — they did
little to make her look childlike. The sets look cheap,
the effects are dull, the "Tell us a story, Mr. Dodgson"
opening is awkward, and worst of all, the score by
John Barry contains some of the dreariest music he
ever wrote. Fun performances by Michael Crawford
(Rabbit), Robert Helpmann (Hatter), Peter Sellers
(March Hare), Dudley Moore (Dormouse), Spike
Milligan (Gryphon), and Michael Hordern (Mock
Turtle) can't save it. The Tweedles were added to the

storyline, but exasperatingly, the iconic Cheshire Cat
scene was cut! Unthinkable.

Rankin/Bass (USA, 1982)
Fully animated, as cheaply as possible, this was an
entry in the "Children's Video Playground" collec-
tion that exploited every public-domain kiddy story
available during the early home-video period. In 30
minutes, it tells the story of Alice's adventures with
admirable simplicity, and while it has nothing to offer
adults, it's inoffensive stuff to show 3- to 7-year-olds.

ChUdren's Theater Co. of Minneapolis (USA, 1982)
A stage-bound production with excellent, lavish sets,
lively direction, and good continuity that gives the
whole a lovely dreamlike quality. This was probably a
delight onstage (it's mostly the Wonderland tale, with
a few Looking-Glass scenes inserted to fill out the eve-
ning), but the video is unwatchable, as Alice (Annie
Enneking) yells her lines as if projecting in a vast au-
ditorium. It's like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Broadway/Kirk Browning (USA, 1982)
I'm glad that Eva LeGallienne's iiber-faithful stage
productions, revived several times since the 1930s
and always featuring outstanding actors doing marvel-
ous interpretations of Carroll's dialogue, have been
documented (somewhat) by this production — but,
alas, it's a big snooze. The video begins with a use-
less and irritating Prologue in which the cast argues
backstage. Then we meet Kate Burton in her dress-
ing room, where we actually witness Alice smoking a
cigarette — it's hard to imagine a worse introduction.
Then the play begins inside the actress's head, which
apparently allows the actors playing the various roles
to remove their masks after their initial entrance in
order for us to better see the actors beneath. Weird!
Alice never falls down a rabbit-hole or passes through

a looking-glass, and the lack of a device to enter
dreamland shows us that this production will lack any
sort of sensible continuity.

However, this is f/i^ production for fans of Sir John
Tenniel's illustrations. The sets and costumes (mostly
paper-white with fussy, crosshatched black lines drawn
onto them and a palette of pale colors limited to red,
green, and yellow) reproduce Tenniel's drawings with
obsessive fidelity. But that's the best thing you can say
about this video. Kate Burton looks picture-perfect,
especially when sitting in a hugely out-of-proportion
armchair, but she enacts the role like a weary adult
who has said the lines too many times. Eve Arden,
James Coco, Kaye Ballard, Colleen Dewhurst, Mau-
reen Stapleton, Richard Burton, and Andre Gregory
are all excellent.

This is the polar opposite of Disney's version. Al-
most no action of any kind — just a series of conversa-
tions, with an occasional Carrollian song — a very dry
interpretation with very narrow appeal.

Irwin AUen (USA, 1983)
In the early 1980s 1 attended a meeting of the LCSNA
in Los Angeles, where Irwin Allen, famed producer of
campy disaster movies, announced he would produce
a new Alice TV mini-series that would take advantage
of modern special-effects technology. 1 promptly
sketched up a poster that ridiculed the idea, show-
ing Alice nearly falling to her death down a terrifying
rabbit-hole, drowning in a sea of her own tears, and
trapped in the White Rabbit's house as the animals set
it ablaze. 1 sent the drawing to Sandor Burstein, who
to my great surprise published it in KL 21, no doubt
sinking any chance I had of a career in Hollywood. I
even suggested a cast list of B actors and has-beens.
My tag line: "A Paradise Destroyed by a Thoughtless
Child!" Ironically my poster was far more entertain-
ing than this disastrous production.

Instead of falling down a rabbit-hole filled
with furniture and props, Alice enters Wonderland
through a dark cave lit with flashes of lightning that
come from all directions. (This was someone's idea
of taking advantage of modern technology? Sheesh!
Cheap, cheap, cheap.) Alice is, at last, a child ac-
tress— Mark Burstein had pointed out the impor-
tance of this to Irwin Allen — but the cute, cheerful
Natalie Gregory giggles and mugs and skips through
the role, singing and dancing to dreadfully inappro-
priate Steve Allen songs with an endless parade of
confused-looking celebs in cheesy outfits. Jonathan
Winters is an awesome Humpty Dumpty, and Lloyd
Bridges is a perfect White Knight, but the presence
of Carol Channing, Sammy Davis Jr., Karl Maiden,
Telly Savalas, Ringo Starr, Ernest Borgnine, Shel-
ley Winters (these last two names appeared on my
parody poster!), Pat Morita, Sid Caesar, Imogene
Coca, Red Buttons, John Stamos, Scott Baio, Sher-

man Hemsley, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme,
Anthony Newley, Arte Johnson, Roddy McDowall,
Ann Jillian, Sally Struthers, and Merv Griffin does
nothing but make the proceedings embarrassing.
Look out, here comes that awful, slithy Jabberwock
monster to scare us!

Jan Svankmajer (Czechoslovakia, 1988)

Jan Svankmajer's Alice is let loose in the Central-European sur-
realist 's vision of Wonderland with unsettling results. As always,
Svankmajer's chicken obsession is given free rein.

This stop-motion animation, with a wonderful
child actress (Kristyna Kohoutova) as a live-action
Alice, is light-years away from Carroll's original,
but I include it here because it follows the story's
structure rather closely. However, each scene has
been reinterpreted by animating a grim collection
of found objects in a highly symbolic style. This
Wonderland is dangerous and profoundly disturb-
ing. Not for kids, purists, or, well, anyone really. A
hard-to-watch curiosity.

Hallmark (UK, 1999)
Boasting a large budget, this handsome but mis-
guided made-for-TV production makes the usual
mistake of covering up for its weak screenplay with
celebrity star turns (Martin Short, Gene Wilder, Ben
Kingsley, Whoopi Goldberg, Miranda Richardson,
Christopher Lloyd, et al). The framing device — that
Alice is shy about being forced to sing for an audi-
ence— is what supposedly fuels her dream-world
anxieties, but the idea isn't strong enough to keep
the pace from tediously plodding along. Fourteen-
year-old Tina Majorino gives an intelligent but dour
performance, endlessly curling up her eyebrows to
express confusion. Surely there must be a director
out there who can create a more interesting charac-
terization for Alice!

The production design is innovative: the Rabbit's
house emerges from a pop-up book; "The Walrus

and the Carpenter" takes place in a charming toy
theater; the Trial set is a massive house of cards that
collapses as Alice wakes up. But these embellishments
rarely serve the story, and there are frequent perplex-
ing choices that confound the viewer: Why does the
Caucus Race take place on a pile of books? Why is
the White Rabbit a clockwork toy with a nasty twitch?
Why is the Caterpillar in the military? Why does the
Duchess zoom around on a motorized stool? Why is
the Mock Turtle so tiny? Why are most animals cre-
ations of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, while others
(Mouse, Dodo, Duck, Pat, Bill, etc.) are portrayed by
people in Victorian clothing? There is an infuriating
inconsistency, made worse by the seemingly random
jumbling of scenes from both Alkehooks.

To sum up — like many of us, I've imagined my ideal
Alice movie many times over. Alice is played by an ac-
tress no more than ten years old, who has to struggle
to keep her sanity as her mad adventure progresses.
When she finds herself chatting with a group of
animals (as if she had known them all her life), the
animals look real, and are in correct proportion to
each other. Alice would have to experiment quite a
bit with that mushroom to return to her normal size,
even if it meant that her neck would rise above the
trees like a serpent, or that her chin might strike
her foot. The plants in Wonderland are also in cor-
rect proportion: you won't see a lovely oak tree be-
hind the Caterpillar's mushroom in my version — all

you'd see would be a giant tree root and the stalks of
tall flowers, because that's what you see when you're
only three inches high. The Cards would all be flat
because, well, they're made of cardboard, not actors.
And I don't care if the dialogue or sequence of scenes
is altered, as long as the screenplay is a clever adapta-
tion vsdth good continuity. There. Is that too much to
ask? Tim Burton, are you listening?

Clearly there are as many interpretations of Alice
on film as there are filmmakers. The source material
seems endlessly inspiring. While I appreciate how
hard the Disney artists worked to make Alice familiar
and entertaining to modern audiences, it's obvious
that many prefer their Alices darker and/or more au-
thentic. There will never be an "ultimate" version be-
cause no one will agree on what that film should be.
But Burton, I hope, will come closer to the bull's-eye.
You can get a sneak preview by checking out the trail-
ers available on the Internet.

But wait — what's this? He's cast a sexy teenager
as Alice? She's returning to the Wonderland of her
childhood dreams to help fix the things that have
gone terribly, terribly wrong there? Oh dear, oh
dear! Someone will be executed, as sure as ferrets
are ferrets!

Transcripts from story meetings held on Dec. 10, 1938,
and March 15, 1939, courtesy of the Walt Disney Studio
Archives.

ANYTHING etSe I
CANPOFORWU'

Veah.Clive.me

jot hit9« 3o»h«r

, holt.Pe*$«^ill.

M« migKl haw for

zee ba today and

me na uarit to

tripoiftd —

t You one ugly 2«eba. J

-CV1UD/,|

Stephan Pastis 's Pearls Before Swine from
October 22 through November 1 ran a series
called "Larry in Wonderland. " Here are
some highlights.

A TALE OF TWO TWEEDLES

.i^yi-

^=<*r

JON A. LINDSETH

^■J^^^^ll Carrollians are familiar with Carroll's use
^^^^ of the Tweedle twins in Through the Looking-
M. \.Glass. Carroll uses a form of the Tweedle-

dum and Tweedledee nursery rhyme that I will call
version A:

Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice
new rattle.

New Edition, 1997, pages 501 and 502) quote both
versions A and B and include the following note:

'' Original Ditties for the Nursery (J. Harris),
C.1805, 'Agreed to fight a batde ... As
black as a tar barrel' [1807] / JOH, 1853
/Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll,
1865 [sic], 'Just then flew down a mon-
strous crow, As black as a tar barrel.'"

Just then flew down a
monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the

heroes so.
They quite forgot their

quarrel.

The other, earlier version
of the Tweedle couplet, which
I will call version B, is usually
ascribed to John Byrom and
included in his posthumously
published book Miscellaneous
Poems (Manchester: J. Harrop,
1773, Vol. 1, pages 343 and
344):

JHiiiet/or tkt Niu-ie/y,

I.
Tweedleduro and TwtctUcdte

Agreed to fight a battle ;
For TwredlcduiQ, said Twrecdkdec.

Had spotted his nice new rattle.

ir.

Ju»t then flew down a raonttroua crow,

As black as a tar barrel :
■Wliich frightcn'd both th« \wton •©,

Tliey quite forgot their qiurrcl.

There was a great old man»
Of a ntoat voracious clan.
Who firigblea'd all the people !

Some say, compar'd to
Bononcini,
That Mynheer Handel's

but a Ninny;
Others aver, that he to

Handel
Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle:
Strange all this Difference should be,
'Twixt Tweedle-dum and Txveedle-dee!

I cite Byrom 's book because it is usually referred
to as the earliest use in print of Tweedledum and
Tweedledee. However, the evidence below will show
that it is not.

lona and Peter Opie in The Oxford Dictionary of
Nursery Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

Figure 1. The first use of the Tweedledum and Tweedledee nursery
rhyme found in Original Ditties for the Nursery, so Wonder-
fully Contrived that They May Be Either Sung Or Said, by
Nurse Or Baby, Third Edition, 1807.

But what are the ori-
gins of the two Tweedle
variants? We'll turn first
to version A. The earliest
use of this version known
in print is in Original Dit-
ties for The Nursery; so Won-
derfully Contrived that They
May Be Either Sung Or Said,
by Nurse Or Baby (London:
Printed for J. Harris, 3rd
Edition, 1807). My own
collection lacks this book,
and for good reason: Only
three copies are known.
In John Harris's Books for
Youth 1801-1843 (Folke-
stone: Dawson Publishing,
1992), the compiler Marjo-
rie Moon reports that she
was unable to locate any
copy of the first or second
edition and only two cop-
ies of the third. In a search
of the UK and Ireland
library database Copac Academic and National
Library Catalogue (COPAC), no copy of the first
or second edition was located, and only the Bodle-
ian copy of the 1807 third edition. Not listed on
COPAC but listed by Moon is the second copy at
the Hockliffe Collection at De Montfort University
in Leicester, UK. The Online Computer Library
Center (OCLC World Cat) listed no copies of the
first or second edition and only one copy of the
third edition at Princeton.

220

The Bodleian copy was bequeathed to the library
upon the death of the antiquary Francis Douce in
1834; hence, the book was there at the time Carroll
was writing Looking-Glass. (Furthermore, his rooms at
Christ Church were only a seven-minute walk from
the Bodleian.) In this 1807 third edition, page 29
(see Figure 1), we find:

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Agreed to fight a battle;
For Tweedledum, said Tweedledee,

Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow.

As black as a tar barrel;
Which frighten 'd both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel.

This version differs from Carroll's in
line 2, where Harris has "fight" and Car-
roll has "have"; in line 3, where Harris
places a comma after Tweedledum and
Carroll lacks a comma (thus reversing
the accuser and the accused!); in line
6, where Harris has no hyphen yet Car-
roll hyphenates "tar barrel"; and finally
in line 7, where Harris contracts "fright-
ened" and Carroll does not. Both Carroll
and Harris have eight lines and 42 words
in the rhyme. Of the 42 words, Harris and
Carroll share 41 identical ones, although
Harris has Dum spoiling the rattle while
Carroll says it was Dee.

Another book that Carroll had in
his own library in two versions is James
Orchard Halliwell's The Nursery Rhymes
of England, Collected principally from Oral
Tradition. The Brooks auction catalogue
of Carroll's estate library, dated May 10,

Figure 2. A Tweedle page from Halliwell's
1898, lists lot 842, Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes xhe Nursery Rhymes of England,
of England, and lot 874, Halliwell's Nursery Collected principally from Oral Tradi-
Rhymes and Tales. Jeffrey Stern reproduced tion, two editions of which were in Lewis
the Brooks catalogue in his own two books Carroll's personal library.
on Carroll's library. In one of these, Lewis
Carroll Bibliophile (Luton, Bedfordshire:
White Stone Publishing, 1997), Stern alphabetically
indexes by author (or compiler in the case of Hal-
liwell), and the two Halliwell books are entries 1126
and 1127.

The Bodleian has the 1843, 1844, 1846, and 1853
editions of Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes. According to
Stephen Arnold at the Bodleian, any book not a do-
nation, such as these, came on legal deposit the same
year as the publication date or soon thereafter, so
these books were available to Carroll in the Bodleian.
There was also a ca.l870 edition of the book, not at
the Bodleian, but no doubt available in Oxford book-
stores at the time Carroll was writing Looking-Glass.

One edition of this book. Brooks lot 842 and Stern
lot 1126, was in Carroll's library. On page 220 of both
the 1853 and ca.l870 editions, headlined as "Jingles,"
is this entry number CCCCXXVIII (see Figure 2):

Tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee

Resolved to have a battle.
For tweedle-dum said tweedle-dee

Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew by a monstrous crow,

As big as a tar-barrel.
Which frightened both the heroes so.
They quite forgot their quarrel.

This version differs from Carroll's in lines 1 and
3, where Halliwell hyphenated the Tweedle names
and Carroll did not and where
Carroll capitalized Tweedle
and Halliwell did not (except
at the beginning of line 1); in
lines 2 and 6, where Halliwell
has commas and Carroll has
semicolons; in line 2, where
Halliwell uses "resolved" and
Carroll "agreed"; between the
two stanzas, where Halliwell
has no space and Carroll leaves
a space; in line 5, where Hal-
liwell has "by" and Carroll has
"down"; and in line 6, where
Halliwell uses "big" while Car-
roll uses "black." Once again,
both Carroll and Halliwell use
eight lines and 42 words, and
of the 42 words, Halliwell and
Carroll have 39 identical.

Also in print, but not at
the Bodleian (the Bodleian
lists only an 1885 edition in
their library), was a ca.l868 edi-
tion of a similar Halliwell book,
Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Tales
of England (London: Freder-
ick Warne and Co.; New York:
Scribner, Wellford, and Armstrong, 5th Edition),
with the Tweedle nursery rhyme on page 86 and
still numbered CCCCXXVIII. Carroll also had this
title in his library, as Brooks lot 874 and Stern lot
1127. I have viewed images from microfilm at the
Cleveland Public Library of the two Halliwell books
(ca.l868 and ca.l870 editions), which are identified
as made from books in the Opies' collection.

It seems unlikely that Carroll, in writing his
own Tweedle rhyme, would have chosen to use most
of the same words as Harris and most of the same
words as Halliwell strictly by chance. There are too

CCCCXXVIII.

TwBBDLB-dum and tweedle-dee

Resolved to have a battle.
For tweedle-dum said tweedle-dee

Had spoiled his nice new rattle.
Just then flew by a monstrous crow.

As big as a tar-barrel,
Which frightened both the heroes so.

They quite forgot their quarreL

ccccxxii:

Comb dance a iig
To my Graimy s pig.

With a raudy, rowdy, dowdy ;
Come dance a jig
To my Granny's pig,

And pussy-cat shall crowdy.

PcssicAT, wussicat, with a white foot.
When is your wedding ? for I'll come to*t.
The beer's to brew, the bread's to bake,
Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, don't be too late.

many other choices. The rational conclusion is that

he must have consulted either Harris or Halliwell, or
quite likely both.

Some critics have conjectured that Carroll used
neither Harris nor Halliwell, but rather an oral
source. However, the Opies, in Three Centuries of
Nursery Rhymes and Poetry for Children (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2nd Edition, 1977), write on
page 6, entry 41, concerning Halliwell: "Neverthe-
less scarcely any of the rhymes — if any at all — were
orally collected."

I asked Prof. Francine Abeles to have a look at the
statistical evidence that Carroll used either Harris or
Halliwell as his source for the Tweedle nursery rhyme.
She in turn consulted Prof. Eugene Seneta, Emeritus
Professor of Mathematical Statistics at the University
of Sydney, Australia. Prof. Seneta performed some-
thing called a "Sign Test" to
statistically determine, based
on a limited number of ob-
servations, whether the pluses
and minuses were imbalanced
enough to eliminate one of
the two possible outcomes,
and concluded that "Carroll
relied heavily on the . . . Har-
ris version." He added that
Carroll may have "glanced" at
the Halliwell rhyme.

The Opies, in their pref-
ace to The Oxford Dictionary of
Nursery Rhymes, also write of
Halliwell's work: "For a cen-
tury its authority as the stan-
dard work (of nursery rhymes)
has been unchallenged." Car-
roll did not cite sources for

most of his parodies or adaptations, which were many,
and so it is left to researchers to locate them. But
the Harris and the Halliwell books were both readily
available to Carroll, and in the Halliwell case, in his li-
brary. Carroll used the form and layout of the rhyme
found in Harris and Halliwell and all of the words
common to both versions. Of those words that differ
in the two versions, Carroll used words from one or
the other but not differing words.

Modern Internet search engines are powerful
tools. If researchers think that Carroll used a source
other than Harris and Halliwell, let them produce
the evidence. Lacking that, a reasonable conclusion
is that either one or both of the Harris and Halliwell
rhymes were used for Carroll's Tweedle verses in
Through the Looking-Glass.

Next, we turn to the Byrom poem (version B).
Byrom's manuscript /owrna/, later published by the
Chetham Society, mentions the Handel epigram
in an entry of May 9, 1725, but does not include
the epigram itself. However, in The London Journal

[ lU
Voy.

emen
went
a nay

::«do-

tohii
; and
:r,in
fame
'cr.
dCn-
b m
rd by

fthc

Lord

Figure 3. The London Journal of Saturday, June 5, 1725, with
the first knozvn use in print of "Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee. "

of June 5, 1725, we find on page 2, column 2 (see
Figure 3):

The Contest.

By the Author of the celebrated Pastoral,
My Time, O ye Muses, was happily spent.

Some say that Seignior Bononchini,
Compar'd to Handel's a meer Ninny;
Others aver, to him, that Handel
Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle,
Strange ! that such high Disputes shou'd be
'Twixt Tweedledum and Tiveedledee.

(Byrom was the author of "A Pastoral," the first line
of which is "My Time, O ye Muses, was happily spent,"
and it is also the first entry on page 1 of his 1773

book.)

Wikipedia has a num-
ber of pages on Byrom
and cites Bartlett's Famil-
iar Quotations (10th edi-
tion, 1919), wherein he
is quoted: "Nourse asked
me if 1 had seen the
verses upon Handel and
Bononcini, not knowing
that they were mine." By-
rom's Remains (Chetham
Society, Vol. i., page 173)
states: "The last two lines
have also been attributed
to Swift and Pope (see
Scott's edition of Swift
and Dyce's edition of
Pope)."

The earliest book I
have found with the Byrom epigram included was
compiled (anonymously) by William Oldys, A Col-
lection of Epigrams (London: Printed for J. Walthoe,
1727), where it is numbered CCCXXI.

The use of this epigram is also cited as an anony-
mous "Epigram on the feuds about Handel and Bon-
oncini" in Jonathan Swift, Miscellanies (by Swift et al.,
London: for Benjamin Motte and Lawton Gilliver,
1733, Vol. 3, page 233). Another reference claims
that this appeared in a 1732 edition, although I have
not seen either edition.

J. A. Picton discussed this epigram in Notes & Que-
ries (5th series. Vol. 3, Jan. 9, 1875), pages 30-31. He
writes: "The epigram in question, at the time of its
publication in June 1725, was popularly attributed to
Dr. Jonathan Swift, then in the zenith of his popular-
ity and the mistake has been perpetuated ever since.
It was really written by John Byrom. . . ." Picton adds:
"The epigram was written in 1725. Byrom's Journal
published with his Remains by the Chetham Society
contains the following entry, under date Saturday

ih^ Lftdy Howe.— ~-Gebrge Brown Esq-, oL
Ditchy inOxfordlhire, Son of SjrCh«rlf5brov;n,l
CO the Lady Barbary Lee, S.ftcr of the Eirl c<
Litchfield.

Tbe CONTEST.

By the .iHtbrr of tl:e celebrated Paffcraf, M)

Time, O ye Mufes, wai happily fpenr.

SOME ffty. that Seignior fiu«i.«c/.;«/,
Compar'd to Handel'^ a meer Ninny ;
Otheii ftver, to liim, ihat Ilarutd
h fctrceiy fit to bold a Candle.
Strange ! that fucb high Difputes fliou'd be
'Twixt Ttx/ecdletlum and 'Ivtedltdec.

We have received tbe Letter f o>» Dublin,
(igned Philaorhropuf, ts.bkb Jball l/t infated
ibe frfi Opporiunitj.

7 he Prices vfGotds at Bear Key.
'A'hcat x6. 53. 16. I Beans 19 to 13.
Rve lo to IX. Pale Mi.lt 16 to i6

i. H

ietcin^
10.
Ap
which
i)iiz(X
«bove

Air

Uis

Mill
ing tl
teis o
tir« 0
■ ht C
SOlEi
cdlcr

AViD :

June 5, 1725: 'We went to see Mr. Hooper, who was
at dinner at Mr. Whitworth's; he came over to us at
Mill's coffee house: told us of my epigram upon Han-
del and Bononcini being in the papers.'"

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) attributes
version B to Byrom and dates it to 1725, but they did
not find it in print before Byrom 's Miscellaneous Poems
of 1773 quoted above. I sent an early version of this
essay to the OED, and Margot Charlton of the OED
responded that the dictionary volume including the
letter T was published in 1916, "not a good time for
scholarly research." She said my note would be added
to the OED's revision file, and "we shall reconsider
every aspect of the entry when we come to revise the
letter T." It is now 93 years after the publication of T,
and the time for revision should be soon approach-
ing.

Also found in print are a number of other uses
of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, both prior to 1773
and then many after. In Shenstone's Works (London,
1769) is his letter of 1739 containing the usage. In
1749 and in a fifth edition of 1758, William Melmoth
used the Tweedle couplet in his Letters on Several Sub-
jects. On page 325, Melmoth wrote: "Tweedle-dum
and Tweedle-dee are most undoubtedly the names of
the two musicians."

Earlier citations can be found of the word twee-
dle alongside the word dub. Alexander Radcliffe in
"A call to the guard by a drum" (ca. 1668-1680) in-
cludes these lines to contrast tweedle as the sound of
the bagpipe with dub-a-dub as the roll of drums:

Some with Tweedle, wheedle, wheedle; whilst we beat

Dub a Dub;
Keep the base Scottish noise, and as base Scottish scrub:

And Aphra Behn in The Luckey Chance (1687)
wrote for the sound of a fiddle going out of tune,
"twang, twang, twang, fum, fum, tweedle, tweedle,
tweedle."

In the Opies' entry for Tweedledum and Twee-
dledee in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, page
502, they conclude with this observation: "Byrom is

said to have coined the words 'Tweedledum' and
'Tweedledee.' However, the last couplet is also at-
tributed to Swift and Pope. The nursery rhyme is not
found in print till eighty years later, but it may origi-
nally have described the feud, or, be earlier, and have
given Byrom the idea for his verse."

Martin Gardner agrees (citing the Opies) and
writes in The Annotated Alice (New York: Clarkson N.
Potter, Inc., 1960): "No one knows whether the nurs-
ery rhyme about the Tweedle brothers had reference
to this famous musical battle, or whether it was an
older rhyme from which Byrom borrowed in the last
line of his doggerel."

Only time will tell if an even earlier citation than
those mentioned here will ever be found of either
the A or B version of the Tweedledum and Twee-
dledee rhyme. The interested reader should contact
me atjalindseth@aol.com with any comments or cor-
rections.

In conclusion, I would like to thank Jay Dillon,
a New Jersey bookseller and skilled bibliographical
sleuth whose findings I have incorporated in this essay,
Peter Hirtle of Cornell, Anne Mouron and Stephen
Arnold of the Bodleian Library, Diana Saulsbury of
De Montfort University, LCSNA member Matt Dema-
kos, LCSNA member Prof. Francine Abeles of Kean
University, and Prof. Eugene Seneta at the University
of Sydney, Australia.

■^

First of all, welcome to our new
members: Virginia Bernd, Bruce
Einhorn, Charles Forester, Lauren
Hynd, Yuka Koizumi, Marilyn Ma-
cron, Chad Marine, William New-
man, Adriana Peliano, and Sandra
Strater. Our total membership has
dipped a bit of late, but we have 29
sustaining members, an increase
over last year. We are very grateful
to all our members for their sup-
port. (If anyone is uncertain about
continuing their membership
during these difficult times, please
contact me; don't just disappear
into the night or slip down a rab-
bit hole.)

Have you seen our terrific new
brochures? There should be one
enclosed in this issue. Keep it
for your collection if you must,
but if you are inclined to help us
publicize the LCSNA by posting a
brochure in a choice site, we cer-
tainly appreciate it. If you would
like more brochures to distribute
to potential new members, please
drop me a note and I'll send you
some. My addresses are on the
copyright page.

JABBERING

noies pRoo) ihe lcsna secnerany

One of the options on our dues
form is to provide additional
support for general expenses.
Recently, one of our members in-
quired as to what exactly we mean
by that. Here's the scoop: As a vol-
unteer organization, we are able
to keep our costs quite low, but
even so expenses for material and
services can and often do exceed
the amount covered by dues. This
includes expenses for the Knight
Letter, expenses for meetings, such
as honoraria for speakers and
sometimes room rental {gratis

meeting space is getting harder
and harder to come by) ; and par-
ticularly in the last two years, extra
costs involved in publishing the
books that members have received
free of cost (although all the de-
sign and editorial work on these
books was member-donated) .
Questions from members about
Society finances are always wel-
come. All members are welcome at
Board meetings as well; these are
usually held the Friday evenings
before the meetings.

Jam Tomorrow
(continued from KL 82)
The Lewis Carroll Society (UK)'s
summer meeting at Guildford is
tentatively planned for July 15 to
18, 2010, though the dates are not
certain yet. Alice's Day in Oxford
will be July 10, so it will be possible
to take a very Carroll-centric Brit-
ish vacation this year. As soon as I
learn about the program for the
summer meeting, I'll send out the
information via the LCSNA Yahoo
group.

Ravings fKom The Wmring Desk

OF ANDREW SELLON

-ii^

•^^

"^^^ iF^^y thanks to all who made the fall film-cen-
M ^^ % trie meeting in Fort Lee, Newjersey, such
M. m.a hit, including our gracious hosts, Tom

Meyers and Nelson Page, and our excellent speakers,
Richard Koszarski, Greg Bowers, Alan Tannenbaum,
and David Schaefer. A special round of applause and
thanks to David, who, with the able assistance of his
wife, Mary, arranged the entire meeting. Well done,
all! While I'm at it, let me rave in advance about our
Spring 2010 meeting. It will be on Saturday,
April 24, at the Rosenbach Museum and
Library in Philadelphia. We're already lin-
ing up a fantastic roster of presenters, and
there's a special exhibit involved, so start
making your plans now!

Speaking of Alice films, I recently re-
ceived an e-mail from a reporter at Glance
magazine asking if I, as president of the
Lewis Carroll Appreciation Society (ouch),
would do a magazine interview about Lewis
Carroll and the Alice books in light of the
upcoming 2010 Tim Burton/Disney film.
In accepting, I noted that we are in the
midst of a mini Carroll renaissance in film
and television, with a number of other high-
profile pop-culture A/zV^ projects also in the
works, including Marilyn Manson's long-
threatened film about Carroll's romantic
love for Alice, the film version of American McGee's
ultraviolent Alice (based on the equally ultraviolent
hit video game), and a new A/?V^inspired modern-day
miniseries on the SyFy television channel. And there
may well be more.

The interviewer asked if she could have two weeks
to read the two books and do additional background
research before our chat. While I was saddened to
hear that she had never read the books, I was de-
lighted that she intended to do so as part of her as-
signment. Two weeks later, we had what was projected
to be a half-hour conversation.

She started by asking when I first read the books,
how long I'd been the President of the Lewis Carroll
Appreciation Society (I gently corrected her again),
and what we do. I responded, and then she asked
what our Society thinks of the upcoming Burton film.

I stopped myself from pointing out that it was a very
looking-glass thing to ask one's opinion of a film that
hasn't yet been released. I contented myself with say-
ing that Mr. Burton has a brilliant visual imagination,
well-suited to the stories, but that I wish he and Disney
had decided to call their project something other than
Alice in Wonderland. After all, Mr. Burton is using Car-
rollian characters from both books (common enough
in adaptions), but has apparently come up with a new
plot that is entirely his own invention. Or
almost entirely — in my opinion, elements
of it bear a striking resemblance to Tommy
Kovac's Wonderland comics.

For anyone who hasn't already seen
the basic film information online. Burton's
Alice is a nineteen-year-old blonde (Alice
may be the only Hollywood starlet whose
hair color apparently never changes!).
She runs away from an unwanted engage-
ment, falls down the rabbit hole again, and
finds herself expected to act as the White
Queen's champion in a battle against the
ostensibly evil Red Queen (something of a
mash-up of the Queen of Hearts and the
Red Queen).

So yes, the film is about Alice, and
she ends up in Wonderland (with Look-
ing-Glass Land thrown in as well). But it
seems to me that they could have managed a new title
that wouldn't lead the uninformed to think Burton's
story was Carroll's. I then assured her that we have a
great relationship with the Disney company, that we
are eager to see Mr. Burton's project, and have high
hopes it will display an appropriately Carrollian spirit.
The interviewer next asked the inevitable ques-
tion about Mr. Dodgson's attentions to little girls, and
how we feel when we see articles proclaiming him a
pervert or pedophile. I responded that I think it's a
pity some people are too lazy to do their homework. I
also good-naturedly noted that the media often bear
some responsibility, as they have a tendency to latch
onto anything that can be misconstrued for fun and
profit, and that it's a common cultural mistake to
judge behavior from a past time by the questionable
standards of our own. She got the point.

The interviewer was intrigued to hear about the
boat rides, Alice's Adventures Underground, the social
politics and rigid class structure of the time, and how
Mr. Dodgson played a key role in giving many, many
children a healthy sense of self-respect not always af-
forded them in shuttling between mothers and gov-
ernesses. She, of course, had no idea that he often
paid for various types of lessons for his child friends,
and that he strongly supported their right to work in
wholesome theatrical endeavors. She asked what Mr.
Dodgson himself would think of Tim Burton's film.
After a brief disclaimer, I ventured that he would
probably have appreciated the visual creativity im-
mensely. I also observed that Mr. Dodgson was well
aware that stories need alteration when moved from
one form to another, as he had himself consulted on
the first authorized stage adaptation of the first book.
I brought the other upcoming projects back into the
talk by saying that I thought Mr. Dodgson would have
been surprised and pleased by the ongoing world-
wide popularity of his works. I added that I thought
(speaking for myself) he would have been troubled
by any rendering that portrayed him in an overly ro-
mantic relationship with the child Alice, and that he
would likely have been flat-out horrified by McGee's
version of Alice, with her homicidal tendencies and
an upside-down cross around her neck.

We discussed the question of when a new artwork
respects and even illuminates the original inspiration,
and when it does the original a disservice. We agreed
that with art, the answer may always lie in the eye of
the beholder. Her last question: What would we want
people to take away from seeing the Burton film? I
said I hoped they would be sufficiently entertained
to go straight to the bookstore, or pick up their e-
reader of choice, and read the original books, and
maybe even The Hunting of the Snark. I noted that how-
ever delightful (or frightful) a new Alic^themed proj-

ect might be, people will be missing out if they don't
read the originals, unexpurgated.

Before we said our goodbyes, I asked the yoting
woman if I could wear the interviewer's cap for a mo-
ment. She graciously acquiesced. I asked what she
thought of the books, having just read them for the
first time. She said the books were far more sophisti-
cated than she'd imagined, filled with elements she
had never run across in any adaptation, and that she
was fascinated. She loved the occasionally mordant
humor, and was touched by the hints of melancholy
in the second book. What started out as a half-hour
chat ended up lasting almost two hours, and the inter-
viewer went off overflowing with connections she was
eager to explore. I have no idea how much of what
we discussed will make it into print. (For instance, I
have since given basically the same interview for an
article that appeared in the online version of the Wall
Street Journal on October 9, 2009, and only my con-
cern about Burton's choice of title made it into the
article!) But if and when the article appears, I hope
that it will respect the original works and their cre-
ator, and that the interviewer's own joy of discovery
will shine through. The magazine is called Glance, but
I hope the article will give readers a more in-depth
look at Mr. Dodgson. After all, that's why we're here.

'^/.

"7^

ALL MUST HAVE PRIZES

JOEL BIRENBAUM

GREETINGS FROM WONDERLAND

This issue I am going to write about some-
thing that nobody collects. That was to be my
opening statement, until I did an Internet search
on "greeting card collector" and found, among other
things, a collection of 71,000 greeting cards at the
Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, Maryland. So, I will
instead write about something very few people col-
lect, Alice in Wonderland greeting cards. While many
people collect postcards, and there are postcard
clubs, and postcard shows, I have never heard of the
same for greeting cards.

Bi-fold horizontally opening card - "Garden of Birth-
day Wishes, " Sunrise, code SFB 6529

I know of Alice postcards from the Victorian era,
but I don't know of any greeting cards of that vintage.
As far as I can tell, Alice greeting cards may not have
existed until as late as 1929. Alfred Reginald Allen
had Carrollian Christmas cards printed by the Frank-
lin Printing Company starting in 1929 and continu-
ing through 1934. Of the six cards, four were from
the Alice books and two were Snarks. The Alice cards
had a Tenniel illustration on the front and an accom-
panying book passage on the inside.

As Afe collectors, I am sure we have all received
Alice-related greeting cards over the years, and have
discarded nary a one of them. This could rightly be
considered a collection; a true collection would con-
sist of mint cards in mint envelopes, but let us avoid
that discussion. I have seen birthday, Christmas, Eas-
ter, Halloween, invitation, announcement, blank.

and no-occasion Alice cards. Belated birthday
cards with the White Rabbit exclaiming, "I'm
Late! I'm Late!" are certainly prevalent. I would
confidently venture a guess that there are more
greeting cards with Tenniel illustrations or illustra-
tions after Tenniel than any other type. Surprisingly,
Disney cards take a distant second place.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I will admit to hav-
ing 145 Alice greeting cards in my collection. The
number is so low only because I refrain from buy-
ing most Tenniel cards. My preference is to collect
cards illustrated by other artists, which is a means to
get alternate interpretations without paying the price
of a book or piece of art. I even collect a few cards
that weren't really meant to be Alices, but should have
been. You know what I mean.

Pop-up card -Japanese, Maho Mizuno, 2009

Here is a list of nonstandard cards to give you a
taste of what exists:

Shaped multi-fold-out - Alice and Tweedle

valentine, no company, c. 1930s
Shaped multi-fold-out card - Alice looking in at

the Tweedles valentine, no company, c. 1930s
Octagonal peepshow card - Dodo

Designs, England, 1980
Octagonal peepshow card (a larger version

of the preceding item) - United

Nations Designs Ltd., London, 1983
Pop-up card - "Birthday Tea Party," Popshots, Inc.,

Westport, Connecdcut, c. 1980s, code PS-147

Mask card (can be worn as a mask) -

Cheshire Cat, Cardtricks, 1988
Shaped multi-fold-out - "Tea Party,"

Portal, 1989, code SRBT082
Pop-up card - "Open Me," Plum

Graphics, 1990, code X02
Pop-up card - "Humpty Dumpty,"

Cottage Industries/Macmillan,

C.1994, code ALICE 725
Pop-up card - "Looking Glass,"

Cottage Industries/Macmillan,

c.1994, code ALICE 726
Pop-up card - "Off with her Head,"

Cottage Industries/Macmillan,

c.1994, code ALICE 727
Pop-up card - "Tweedle Dum and Tweedle

Dee," Cottage Industries/Macmillan,

c.1994, code ALICE 728
Pop-up card - "Down the rabbit hole,"

Cottage Industries/Macmillan,

c.1994. Code ALICE 729
Pop-up card - "Queen of Hearts,"

Cottage Industries/Macmillan,

c.1994, code ALICE 730
Bookmark card - Mad Tea Party and Tweedles

(the Tweedles can be removed and used as

a bookmark). Tango Cards, 1996, code 127
Bi-fold horizontally opening card -

Alice in the Garden of Live Flowers,

Hallmark, code HK 694-0
Bi-fold vertically opening card - Alice and

Cheshire Cat, Hallmark, codeJKB 161 K
Bi-fold horizontally opening card - "A Garden of

Birthday Wishes," Sunrise, code SFB 6529

Lift-the-flap card - "I'm Late," Gibson Greetings,

code E-8
Pop-up card - Elaborate Mad Tea

Party, Santoro Graphics
Rocker card - Alice and the Red Queen,
Santoro Graphics, 2001, code RR23
Swing card - Alice, Mad Hatter, White Rab-
bit, and Dormouse on a movable swing,
Santoro Graphics, 2003, code SC49
Pop-up card - Alice, Robert Sabuda, 2005
Pop-up card - Cheshire Cat, Robert Sabuda, 2005
Pop-up card - White Rabbit, Robert Sabuda, 2005
Pop-up card - Painter Card, Robert Sabuda, 2005
Pop-up card - "Wonderland," Japanese,

Active Corporation, c. 2005, code GF-09
Pop-up card -Japanese, Maho Mizuno, 2009

Thanks go to Yoshiyuki Momma, Byron Sewell, and
Edward Wakeling for the helpful information they
so kindly provided.

Shaped muUi-foldoiit - Tea Party, Portal, 1989, code SRBT082

Pop-up card - "Queen oj Hearts, " Cottage Industries/
Macmillan, c. 1 994, code ALICE 730

Pop-up card - Elaborate Mad Tea Party, Santoro
Graphics

3Jn iWemoriam

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Katharine "Kitty" Minehart
1912 -May 19, 2009

Remembered by Barbara Felicetti

Kitty Minehart, enthusiastic Carrolhan, actress, and artistic director of the
Germantown Theater Guild, died in May at a Massachusetts hospice. She
was almost 97 years old. Those who attended the Spring 1996 meeting
of the LCSNA in Philadelphia will remember the wonderful theater (an
eighteenth-century converted stone barn), the delightful grounds, and
Kitty's extensive Alice collection. Both the Rosenbach and Please Touch
Museums have acquired parts of her collection.

Kitty's devotion to all things A/?c^ stemmed from her work as a theater
director of the Guild. In the 1970s, when Guild productions became more
focused on children's theater, she shared the worlds of Dickens, Shake-
speare, and Carroll with young people from Philadelphia-area schools
and at regional theaters around the country. She staged "The Wasp in a
Wig" at the Spring 1996 meeting {KL 52). Passionate about social justice,
Kitty was awarded the Barrymore Award in 1996 as "a pioneer in the con-
cept of creating interracial theater." Kitty loved the LCSNA meetings and
was an enthusiastic member for many years. She is survived by her daugh-
ter, Pam Courtleigh, and stepdaughter, Alexandra Lounsbery. Memorial
donations may be made to the Actors Fund of America, 729 Seventh Ave.,
NewYork, NY 10019.

^-^

'^^

Virginia Davis McGhee

1918-August 15,2009

Remembered by Dan Singer

Virginia Davis, the curly-haired four-year-old who starred in the young Walt Disney's early prototype film Alice's
Wonderland (1923), passed away in her home in California at the age of ninety. The silent short was not based
on the text of the Lewis Carroll novels but on the idea of a child suddenly finding herself in another world. The
Fleischer Brothers' Out of the Inkwell series had featured animated characters in the real world; Disney's reversed
the notion. Young Miss Davis pantomimed actions and reactions against a
white cloth draped over a billboard in a vacant lot in Kansas City, Missouri,
without rehearsals or retakes, Walt frantically barking instructions to her from
behind the camera. The cartoon characters were drawn in later by animator
Ub Iwerks.

When the fledgling Disney Company went bankrupt, the short film was the
only asset Walt was allowed to keep. Upon relocation to Hollywood, California,
Walt started production on an Alice in Cartoonland series based on the pilot
film. Miss Davis's family was entreated to move to Los Angeles so that Virginia
could star in the series. After the first year of thirteen shorts, Disney proposed
a drastic reduction in salary; Miss Davis bowed out, to be replaced by a series
of other child stars, until the New York distributor finally dumped the series in
favor of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the precursor to the mouse character that
eventually brought the Disney Company solid success.

Miss Davis had minor careers as an actress and a realtor in Southern
California, and in her last decade received much attention from fans as
Disney's first star.

Sn iWemoriam
»• ♦>"<« ■«

Rosella S. Howe
(1912 - September 10, 2009)

Remembered by August A. Imholtz,Jr.

With great sadness we report the death of longtime LCSNA member Rosella Senders
Howe. Rosella attended the Cambridge Latin School and Radcliffe College and then,
after a brief period at Macy's Department Store responding to complaint letters, studied
dance with modern dance pioneer Charles Weidman in New York. She abandoned mod-
ern dance, however, when one day she found herself sharing a dressing room with an
elephant in Providence, Rhode Island. (In spite of the elephant experience, or perhaps
because of it, all her adult life she was a staunch Democrat who supported and advised
Barney Frank and many other politicians.)

She married Hartley Howe, a friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and they spent their first years together in
Washington, D.C., during World War II, and later moved to Madison, Wisconsin. Hartley was a professor of journalism
at the University of Wisconsin, where Rosella finished a degree in linguistics and studied Japanese, becoming a poet
and teacher.

She was, from the early 1980s, a keen member of the LCSNA who brought great enthusiasm and her delightful
wit, always expressed in perfect Cambridge accent, to our meetings. At our fall 1993 meeting at Harvard University's
Houghton Library, Rosella delivered an illustrated and most entertaining talk on "The Harcourt Amory Lewis Carroll
Collection: Its History and Content." A few years later when Rosella and Hartley were in Washington for a few days,
Clare and I took them to the Library of Congress. I had a stack pass at that time, and so we brought them into the
stacks of the Jefferson Building, the main building of the library, where Rosella had quite a bit of fun nipping off here
and there in the ranges of shelves. She said she wished she could stay there forever. We wish she could have, for all
those who knew her now miss her greatly.

^-^

Alan White
1943 -October 25, 2009

Remembered by Mark Richards

A beloved and very active participant in the Lewis Carroll Society (UK), Alan served a term
as its chairman beginning in 1993 and was its secretary from 2000 until his retirement this
year; he was the first editor of the Lewis Carroll Review (1996); and from 1998 until recently,
the editor of Bandersnatch and an editorial board member of The Carrollian.

Alan worked hard to raise the standard of everything we did; he made us more open
to others' points of view, but, above all, he shared his sense of humor with us. His ready wit
kept us entertained over the years and his light-hearted heckling at meetings was some-
thing we looked forward to, rather than feared. Our society became friendlier and more
enjoyable as a result.

Although he often claimed he was not a "scholar" ("They only invite me along to
lower the tone"), he was always studying, had a wide knowledge of the arts, and was one of
the most well-read people 1 know.
Alan was an avid collector, but one who was remarkably generous in helping others develop their collections
as well. One day, some years ago, I spotted a book on my shelves which I did not recognize. Eventually I was able
to deduce that Alan had left it there for me, without my knowledge, at a committee meeting, while I was out of the
room— some weeks before I noticed it! Over the years, other things appeared on our shelves as well: that was Alan's
generosity and also his sense of humor.

Alan was a librarian by profession, mainly at Hertford Library, and served his community by volunteering at the
town museum and local schools, even serving a year as the mayor of Hertford. The last few years were difficult for him,
but he was brave and he continued to do his best for everv^one, right to the end. Our thoughts go to his wife, Myra and
children, Harriet and Will.

,^,
"?^

Carrollian Notes

•2^

Alice's Adventures on
the Yellow Woodpecker Ranch

By Adriana Peliano,
translated by Peter Price

Alice reached Brazil thanks to
the writer Monteiro Lobato
(1882-1948). He translated Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland into Bra-
zilian Portuguese for the first time
in 1931, with illustrations by A. L.
Bowley, and Through the Looking-
Glass in 1933, with illustrations by
Tenniel. However, the presence of
Alice in Lobato's work goes much
further as she visits some of his
stories and interacts with his char-
acters in an intertextual game of
unusual scope.

It is well known that the origi-
nal Alice books contain cultural
characteristics of Victorian Eng-
land. In his adaptations, Lobato
transforms and relocates
these characteristics to the
Brazilian reality of his day.
He often chose to simply not
translate the puns and lan-
guage games of Carroll, and
replaced the parodies pres-
ent in the work with parodies
of Brazilian texts recogniz-
able to the Brazilian public.
He inserted elements from
Brazilian national culture,
creating a Brazilian setting
with an Alice who recites
classic poems from Brazilian
literature and has girlfriends
called Cleo and Zuleica.

The adaptation of the
Alice books was part of a
broader literary project of
Lobato's. A complex per-
sonality considered by many
the most important Brazilian

children's writer of all time, Lo-
bato criticized the trend of his day
to copy the latest Parisian fashions
in art, music, and literature. He
translated innumerable English,
German, and American works
such as Peter Pan, the Brothers
Grimm, Robinson Crusoe, Tom Saw-
yer, Huckleberry Finn, Robin Hood,
and Gulliver's Travels, among oth-
ers. What is more, the incompa-
rable adventure made possible by
reading Lobato's children's books
provided Brazilian children with
a certain cultural globalization.
His writings work as hypertexts
do today, inviting characters from
various tales, fables, and mytholo-
gies to visit his stories. Lobato's
vast works for children were later
brought together in a collection of
17 volumes.

Sj^
"^?

Illustration by Belmonte for Memorias da Emilia, 1936.
Alice (very much resembling A. L. Bowley 's, who illustrated
Lobato's 1931 translation) meets the angel among English
children.

With the publication of Nariz-
inho arrebitado (The Girl with the
Turned-Up Nose) in 1920, we may
say that children's literature in
Brazil and even in South America
was born. Previously, we had had
books like Contos da Carochinha
(Tales of Mrs. Carochinha, 1896),
the first work of children's litera-
ture produced in Brazil, which
collected tales by Perrault, Grimm,
and Andersen, fables, legends,
and tales to set an example, with
moralistic content predominating.
From a critical and metalinguistic
angle, the same Dona Carochinha
(a little story-telling cockroach)
tells us in one of Lobato's books:
"I've noticed that many char-
acters in my stories are already
bored with living their whole lives
trapped inside them. They want
something new. They're talk-
ing of running away to get
involved in new adventures."'
Narizinho arrebitado would
later be expanded, giving
rise to the classic Reinagoes
de Narizinho (Adventures
of Little Nose) in 1931, the
same year as Lobato's trans-
lation of Wonderland. This
work includes the first sto-
ries set on the Ranch of the
Yellow Woodpecker, where
most of Lobato's children's
books take place. On this
small imaginary ranch in the
Brazilian countryside live
the characters of the ranch
owner Dona Benta (Mrs.
Benta), her grandchildren
Narizinho and Pedrinho,
and the cook Tia Nastacia
(Aunt Anastasia) . These char-

acters are complemented by
beings created or animated
by the imaginations of the
children in the story: the
irreverent and mocking doll
Emilia (Emily), the aristo-
cratic and bookish corncob
doll Visconde de Sabugosa
(Viscount Corncob) , the cow
Mocha, the donkey Consel-
heiro (Counselor), the pig
Rabico (Little Tail), and the
rhinoceros Quindim (the
name of a sweet Brazilian
dessert) . However, for the
most part, the adventures
take place in other settings:
in a fantasy world invented
by the children or in stories
told by Dona Benta in the
early evening.

In Carroll's work, it is
known that the episode of
Humpty Dumpty, like those of
the Knave of Hearts, the twins
Tweedledum and Tweedledee,
and the Lion and the Unicorn,
develops an incident recounted
in a known children's song of his
time.-' Similarly, Lobato brought
together characters of almost all
origins and media existent in his
day. We have noted the presence
of figures related to mythology
(Hercules, Medusa, Perseus, the
Minotaur), tales (Snow White,
Little Red Riding Hood, Sinbad,
Blue Beard, The Ugly Duckling),
the theatre ( The Blue Bird and
The Phantom of the Opera), cinema
(Tom Mix and Felix the Cat) , the
Bible (Saint Peter, Saint John,
Judas, Cain, and Jonas), oral tradi-
tion (Saci and Pedro Malasarte),
history (Plato, the Marquess of
Santos, and Hippocrates), Brazil-
ian personalities (Cornelio Pires,
the clown Eduardo das Neves, and
Lampiao), and fables (the ant and
the grasshopper, the animals and
the plague, the wolf and the lamb,
the two doves, and the milkmaid) .
We have also noted quotations
from children's books {Pinocchio,
Peter Pan, and Wonderland).^

On the Ranch, all the great nar-
ratives are reviewed, modified, and

The Map of the World of Wonders " by J. U. Campos, from
Monteiro Lobato 's A penna de papagaio ( The Parrot Teather) ,
Sao Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1930. The names have
been translated into English by Adriana Peliano.

adapted to the feelings and imagi-
nation of the characters. In this
way, Carochinha is a storyteller
criticized for being stale. There
is criticism of the lack of variety
with which childhood is treated.
The characters themselves want
"novelty" and "new adventures."
As Pedrinho says, "If Tom Thumb
ran away it's because the story is
stale. If the story is stale, we have
to throw it away and buy another
one. I've had this idea for a long
time: to make all the characters
run away from the old stories to
come here and make up other
adventures with us."^

For Narizinho to get to the
marvelous Kingdom of Clear Wa-
ters in Reinagoes de Narizinho, she
first must cross a grotto that she
has never seen near the Ranch
before and that frightens her, at
first. We have here a true portal
of passage in the mold of Alice's
falling down the rabbit hole or
climbing through the mirror. At
the same dme, in the first edition
of Narizinho arrebitado ( 1921 ) , the
adventure of Narizinho and Lucia
ends with their waking up before
replying to Principe Escamado's
(the Scaled Prince) proposal of
marriage to a fish from the King-
dom of Clear Waters. This revela-

tion that "everything was
nothing more than a beauti-
ful dream" places the narra-
tive in a space where "logic
disciplines fantasy."' Because
the little girl was dreaming,
the presence of the marvel-
ous in the everyday world is
dissolved.

However, in the defini-
tive version, expanded and
renamed Reinagoes de Nariz-
inho, we can confirm the
dilution of boundaries be-
tween reality, the marvelous,
and a total fusion of both.
So much so that, in Reina-
goes, Narizinho returns from
her first trip to the Kingdom
of Clear Waters "by a very
strong gale, that enveloped
the little girl and the doll
Emilia, dragging them from
the bottom of the ocean to the
bank of the orchard stream. They
were in Dona Benta's Ranch once
again. ""^ It is neither stated that the
little girl was dreaming, nor that
her return to everyday reality was
due to waking up.

In this work, the characters
from Wonderland, including
Alice, visit the Ranch of the Yel-
low Woodpecker on two principal
occasions: the first time they go to
participate in a big party and later
to watch a circus show prepared
by the people of the Ranch. Later,
an invisible character, Peninha,
whom everybody suspects of being
Peter Pan, arrives and shows the
children the map of Wonderland,
clarifying that it is located every-
where.

"Wonderland is very very old.
It came into existence when
the first child was born and will
continue while there's still one
single old man on earth."
"Is it easy to get to?"
"Easy as pie or impossible. It
depends. For whoever has imag-
ination, it's really easy.""

It's essential to note that on this
map, Pedrinho finds the Ranch of
the Yellow Woodpecker itself, as

well as the sea of pirates, the land
of the thousand and one nights,
Robinson Crusoe's island, Lilli-
put, Neverland, and the castle of
Sleeping Beauty. Wonderland and
Alice's house are also on the map,
in a truly intertextual cartography.

In Memorias da Emilia (Emily's
Memoirs, IQSG),** a ship called
Wonderland arrives at the ranch
bringing Alice and Peter Pan,
along with several English chil-
dren, to see an angel fallen from
heaven (a reference to the book
Viagem ao ceu [Trip to Heaven],
1932). Of all the children, it's
Alice who asks the angel a series
of questions, curious about life
in heaven. Later, enchanted by
life on the ranch, she eats Aunt
Nastacia's "adorable" httle cakes
and asks for the recipe. Aunt Nas-
tacia asks Emilia if the little Eng-
lish girl speaks Portuguese. Emilia
confirms this by saying, "Alice has
already been translated into Portu-
guese." In the introduction to his
adaptation of Wonderland, Lobato
announces: "Brazilian children
are going to read the story of Alice
through Narizinho's doing. This
little girl insisted so much on see-
ing her in Portuguese (Narizinho
doesn't know English yet), that
there was nothing else to be done,
in spite of its being, as we say, an
untranslatable work.^

If the fairy-tale characters in Re-
ina^oes de Narizinho showed dissat-
isfaction with always living out the
same adventures, when they come
to the Ranch their stories are mod-
ified, subverted. In this work, the
characters from Wonderland move
to a plot of land neighboring the
ranch, but on Dona Benta's condi-
tion that they don't trespass on
the ranch or jump over the fence.
These terms are accepted, and a
week later the characters from the
World of Fable begin their move
to Dona Benta's New Lands. "But
they didn't come just for a visit,
no; they came armed and with
luggage and with their castles and
palaces to be able to live there
for the rest of their lives."'" Alice

also comes "with the whole crowd:
Tweedledum, the Cheshire Cat,
the White Rabbit, the mock
turde...""

In a more recent adaptation of
Lobato 's work, the characters from
Yellow Woodpecker Ranch go
visiting several stories. Wonderland
among them.'- Emilia, the Vis-
count, Pedrinho, and Narizinho
follow in Alice's footsteps and
retell her adventures adapted to
the perspective of the Ranch char-
acters, both commenting on and
interacting with the story.

In Lobato 's book A chave do ta-
manho (The Size Switch, 1942), the
ranch characters are confronted
by the reality of war. Emilia, full
of initiative, reaches the House of
Switches, where all the switches
that "control and gauge everything
in the world" are." However, none
of these gives any hint as to what
they open, so Emilia chooses one
at random. It isn't the key of the
war. It's the switch key that, instan-
taneously, reduces all humanity
to the size of insects. This altera-
tion in size reminds Emilia and
us directly of Alice's adventures:
"Something happened to me that
sometimes happened to Alice in
Wonderland. At times, she be-
came so enormous she couldn't
fit in houses; at times, she became
the size of a mosquito. I became
tiny."'* Unlike Wonderland, how-
ever, all humanity shrinks like
Emilia and from that time on must
create a society with new rules, a
direct criticism of world events.

For love of Brazil and child-
hood, Lobato created a children's
literature where fictional Brazilian
children and characters from Bra-
zilian folklore live on equal stand-
ing alongside the most celebrated
characters of universal culture (as
in the case of Alice), which is to
say, in relationships of deep affec-
tion and complicity, but without
the paralyzing reverence that im-
pedes new ways of being, thinking,

and creating. Lobato's intention,
we may say, was to make child
readers critical of the world. To
achieve this, he created a charac-
teristically Brazilian literature for
Brazilian children without giving
up the treasures of other cultures.
On the contrary, he knew how
to gulp down whatever was most
powerful in foreign cultures and
introduce it into his own litera-
ture. In this way, he contributed to
the building of the country, for, in
his own famous phrase, "A country
is made with men and books."

' Loboto, Monteiro. Reinafoes de
Narizinho. Sao Paulo: editora
brasiliense, 1956. 6a. ed., p. 11.

- Carroll, Lewis. Gardner, Martin.
ALICE: Edi^do Comentada. Rio de
Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Ed., 2002.

' Ribeiro, Maria Augusta Hermen-
garda Wurthmann. "Guia de leitura
de reinagoes de Narizinho." UNESP-
Reitoria: Nucleo de Ensino do
Campus de Rio Claro, 2005.
Pesquisa de iniciagao cientifica,
p. 259.

* Reinagoes de Narizinho, p. 53.

"' Castello Branco, Thatty de Aguiar.
"O maravilhoso e o fantastico na
literatura infantil de Monteiro
Lobato." Rio de Janeiro: Pontificia
Universidade Catolica do Rio de
Janeiro. Departamento de Letras,
2007. Dissertagao (mestrado), p. 29.

** Reinagoes de Narizinho, p. 20.

' Reinagoes de Narizinho, p. 254.

"^ Lobato, Monteiro. Memorias da
Emilia. Sao Paulo: Companhia
Editora National, 1936.

' Carroll, Lewis. Alice no Pais das
Maravilhas. Tradugao e adaptagao:
Monteiro Lobato. Editora
brasiliense, 1960. 9a. ed, p. 9.
'" Lobato, Monteiro. O Picapau
Amarelo. Sao Paulo: editora
brasiliense, 1968. 13a. ed, p. 22.
" O Picapau Amarelo, p. 24.
'^ Poppovic, Pedro Paulo, (ed.) "Livro
de Historias: baseado na obra de
Monteiro Lobato." Rio de Janeiro:
Rio Grafica Editora, 1979.
' ' Lobato, Monteiro. A Chave do
Tamanho. Sao Paulo: editora
brasiliense, 2003, p. 9.

'"* A Chave do Tamanho, p. 1 1 .

OLA, brazil!

Artist Adriana Peliano, author of
the preceding article, is putting
together the Lewis Carroll Society
of Brazil/Sociedade Lewis Carroll
do Brasil, which "intends to pro-
mote the interchange of ideas with
or without sense, the realization of
absurd events, the maintenance of
a virtual art gallery to sell original
works, the production of art (illus-
trations, photographs, fashion
design, animations) as well as
music and theater performances,
the making of an elaborate map
documenting past Carrollian pro-
ductions (publications, transla-
tions, illustrations, visual arts,
theater) in Brazil, and to produce
a magazine, Alicinagoes/ Alice
nations, which will be in poster
format, contain both art and the-
ory, and come out four times a
year." Their blog can be found at
http://alicenations.blogspot.com,
and they can be reached at ali-
cenations@hotmail.com. Most of
their output is in Portuguese;

some texts are also in English.
Members of the Society will be of
two types: regular (at no cost),
who may see the blog and buy
items individually; and premium,
who pay a fee of us $50 per year
that entides them to automatically
receive all the Society's publica-
tions, collectibles, and posters.

FARNAN STUDIOS

William T. Farnan and his late wife
established Farnan Studios in St.
Louis in 1969, specializing in hand-
lettered and illuminated manu-
scripts, hmited edition books and

prints, and bas-relief sculptures.
In 1972, the studio moved to San
Francisco and has been serving
corporate and private clients since.

Casts of the fine bas-relief of
Lewis Carroll he created in 1992
are still available for purchase.
Each of the 10'/2 x 10-inch pieces
from the edition of 100 is num-
bered and signed. The self-hang-
ing bas-relief is cast in resin-based
Forton MG and comes with an
easel for bookshelf display. The
cost is $150.

He is also offering an artist's
book in an edition of 250 of the
poem "The Walrus and the Car-
penter," hand-lettered, illustrated,
illuminated in gold, printed, hand-
bound, numbered, and signed.
The book measures 7 x 8'/4 inches
and costs $35. He is planning soon
to release a companion "Jabber-
wocky" in a similar edition and
format, based on a larger print/
hand-bound book he produced in
1980.

Contact: www.farnanstudios.
com; williamtfarnan@mac.com;
(415) 771-9600; 1276 La Playa, San
Francisco, CA 94122.

It is vital to the lifeblood of our Society to have a
wider membership base. You will find enclosed a
copy of our new membership brochure; please
pass it on to someone you think might consider join-
ing our Society. And if you happen to be going to a
meeting, reading, screening, conference, class, pro-
duction, book fair, or the like at which you think it
would be appropriate to distribute copies or leave
them on a table (check with organizers if unsure),
please write or email our secretary, Clare Imholtz,
well in advance to request a packet. Her contact in-
formation is on the inside front cover.
Thank you!

■^

^#-

c^,

e CyliiiPitiPta or tnc \)uazK

-e^

WILLIAM HARTSTON

From the (London) DmTy fx/^rie^i "Beachcomber"
column, September 18, 2008:

. . . Carroll's poem, The Hunting of the Snark, you
will recall, was about a crew of sailors, led by the
Bellman, hunting for the mythical snark, but ever
fearful it might turn out to be one of the fatal
boojum variety. The chaps at the Large Hadron
Collider at CERN, the European Organisation
for Nuclear Research near Geneva, on the other
hand, are looking for elementary particles called
quarks, which was a term coined by the physicist
Murray Gell-Mann. Their great fear is that the
hunt for the possibly mythical Higgs boson may
destroy the universe, which would be rotten luck
for all concerned . . .

"Just the place for a quark," the Gell-Mann cried,
As he landed his crewmen at CERN,
"An underground tunnel with protons inside.
Let's crash them and see what we learn.

"Just the place for a Quark! I have said it twice:
Come on, there's plenty to do.
Just the place for a quark! I have said it thrice:
Let's see if Higgs boson is true."

The crew was complete: it included a chap

Who'd met a Higgs boson in Spain,

Or he may have just dreamt it while having a nap.

But he'd know if he saw one again.

The Gell-Mann addressed them when all were

aboard:
"I'm going to turn on the switch.
So keep your eyes peeled lads, we need to record,
Events that could make us all rich.
"Remember that what we're hunting is a quark
That's known as the boson of Higgs,
It makes a dull noise like a sea lion's bark.
Its tail is quite bent like a pig's."

But one young crew member looked quite

unconvinced.
And asked, "Are you really quite sure,
That if it goes wrong we won't find ourselves minced.
And spat out in bits on the floor?"

"Is that," said the Gell-Mann, contempt in his voice,
"What lecturers teach you in college?
Forget health and safety, take risks and rejoice,
At pushing the boundaries of knowledge!"

They set off to find the one missing quark.
That might prove their theories correct.
That boson elusive that hid in the dark,
To gain everybody's respect.

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it

with care;
They pursued it by day and by night;
"We'll ne'er catch the blighter," they said

with despair;
It almost moves faster than light."

But just as the project was nearing its goal,
And the mood was pure rapturous glee.
The universe fell down a gaping black hole,
For the quark was a boson, you see.

"This is like Jabberwocky, which
was the language spoken in Alice in
Wonderland . . . Through the Looking
Glass."

Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York
commenting on the health care
reform debate during an Energy
and Commerce Committee hearing
on July 16.

"I could picture it perfectly. It was
a wide grassy slope that you could
roll down and then come to a stop
at a beautiful stone wall you could
walk on, with a little gate you
could go through just like Alice in
Wonderland."

From Strawberry Hill by Mary Ann
Hoberman, Little Brown, 2009.

"Like Alice in her maze, I walked
in one direction and Luke in the
other, in and out of narrow aisles."
FromThe Late, Lamented Molly
Marx, by Sally Koslow, Ballantine
Books, New York, 2009.

-MM

"Much of the movie's pleasure
comes from the utter ease with
which Ms. Wintour plays the
Red Queen of fashion and orders
off with their heads (and even
tummies)."

From Manohla Dargis 's review
of The September Issue, in
The New York Times, August
28, 2009.

Mr. Rochester, in Jane Eyre, refers
to himself as a "spoonie" for "ruin-
ing himself in the received style"
over Celine Varens.

"'Faster, faster,' cried Anne, be-
coming the Red Queen, and I was
whirled along like Alice in the
picture."

From Yesterday Morning,
A Very English Childhood by
Diana Athil, Granta Publications,
London, 2002.

"She met a large number of birds,
there was the magpie, canaries,
among others. It was pleasant talk-
ing to them until Alice mentioned
Dinah, her cat, when the Mother
Canary called out to her children
— 'Come away, my dears, it's high
time you were all in bed.' . . . She
put her arms through the window.
It was seen by Pat the White Rab-
bit, and Bill, the Big Puppy."
From Alice in Wonderland,
a small booklet printed circa
1 940, published by Samuel Lowe
Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin,
which contains a five-page retelling
as well as one of ''The Pied Piper. "
The pictures include a group of
chicks, but whether chickens or
canaries it is impossible to tell.

Which kids' books, I had wanted
to know, are appreciated more in
theory, or by adults, than by actual
kids? I never heard a knock against
Beverly Cleary and only one
against Dr. Seuss. But probably

'WIT'/

"The person who gets the most
answers [to the Bouncer's Five-
Year Anniversary quiz] wins an all
expenses-paid night out on the
town with the Bouncer. Ties will be
broken by the best response to this
brain teaser: Why is a raven like a
writhing disc?"

Kitty St. Clair, S.F. Weekly,

October 14-28, 2009.

half my sample group had
shrugged at Where the Wild Things
Are. "Impenetrable," one educator
and critic [Humpty Dumpty ? - Ed.]
said... Other revered works flagged
by people I spoke to were the Alice
in Wonderland hooks (too druggy,
too much knotty wordplay; Alice
herself is a drip), Winnie-the-Pooh
(too twee) , and Eloise. . .

From "Where the Wild Things
Weren 't " by Bruce Handy in the
New York Times Sunday Book
Review, October 8, 2009

"What surprised me ... is how
Mark Stern, executive vice presi-
dent of original programming
for Sci Fi, reacted when I actually
asked him about this idea last
year during my visit to the sets in
Vancouver. ... I asked him about
the similarities this [the rz^w Alice
four-hour miniseries coming to the
SyFy Channel] had to American
McGee's Alice, the videogame. He
was definitely familiar with the
work but felt the Alice in Wonder-
land story wasn't really all that
interesting. 'I mean, she's a dumb
girl who fell in a hole — what's so
great about that?'"

Posted by Keith McDuffee on
TVSquad. com on March 1 9, 2008.

■^

In Walrus, Gimble, Mimsy,

Borogove —
Which Lead to Dum and Dee and

to that Wood
Where fury lurked, and blackness,

and that Crow.

And when I die, my spirit will pass

by...
To Nameless Trench and Nameless
Wood, and rest.
A. S. Byatt in ^/i^ New Yorker,
April 6, 2009

The Logic of Alice: Clear Thinking

in Wonderland

Bernard M. Patten

Prometheus Books, 2009

ISBN 978-1591026754

Reviewed by Ray Kiddy

The author of The Logic of Alice, a
retired neurologist, has quite a bit
to say about logic and the brain.
And he obviously knows a lot
about the Alice books. But, while
he discusses logic and Alice at the
same time, it is not clear that he
has actually found any relationship
between them.

For example, he has a lot to
say about the first paragraph of
Wonderland. One can readily admit
that this is a well-written and
meaningful paragraph. And one
can make the point, as the author
does, that Lewis Carroll was a very
capable logician and that it was,
at various points in his life, impor-
tant for him to explain his ideas
about logic. One can accept that
the Reverend Dodgson could have
brought Aristotle, Thales of Mile-
tus, and Descartes to a discussion
of logic. He might even have seen
the relevance to this discussion of
the actions of Neo, the lead char-
acter from The Matrix, if he had
been exposed to that movie. But
I found it difficult to accept that
one could read into that first para-
graph so many deep ideas about
logic and the nature of fallacy.
And the logical fallacies of Tom
DeLay (below) would not have
been part of the discussion.

It seems as though the author
has taken all of the many things he
wants to say about logic and hung
them on points in Wonderland and
Looking-Glass, where one may or
may not see any real connection,
or has used images from the books
to color his prose in an entertain-
ing manner. But even though I
found that I accepted the author's
arguments about the importance
of logic to Lewis Carroll, I could
not really accept the author's use
of throwaway similes and weak

and

metaphor to connect parts of the
Alice stories to arguments of logic.

One can see that as Lewis Car-
roll compiled Sylvie and Bruno, his
purposes were clearly pedagogi-
cal. But this is usually seen as the
root of the flaws in that book,
not the source of its strengths.
Indeed, the point is often made
that Wonderland is a much bet-
ter book because, unlike most of
Victorian children's literature,
its purpose was not to teach. It is
wonderful that a mathematician
and logician was able to be as flex-
ible and creative as he needed to
be in order to write it. Which of
his ideas about logic did he con-
sciously invert, or subconsciously
subvert, in order to come up with
a book that is not illogical, nor
even a-logical, but almost delight-
edly anti-logical? It is clear that
Dodgson playfully turned logic on
its head. In this same way, a math-
ematician can prove that 0 equals
1 in a most amusing way, and we
may even be brought to wishing it
were so. But the exercise does not
prove anything about 0 or about
1 . It is rather about how we miss
important details or trick ourselves
when we desire to. It would be
wonderful to have a book about
how Lewis Carroll used and mis-
used the logic he knew to come up
with his wonderful stories, but this
is not that book.

Dr. Patten makes arguments
with no connection to the Alice
milieu. An example of this occurs
when the author describes the log-
ical fallacies in statements by Tom
DeLay, the American politician
who is no longer a member of the
U.S. House of Representatives. His

inclusion is unlikely to stand the
test of time. If a politician is barely
relevant now, how will the author's
argument work when even the
educated reader has no reason
to remember him? Lewis Car-
roll knew how to refer to current
events and people in such a way
that, even if one was completely
unaware of the events, the story
still worked. Patten's points about
this gentleman are, on the other
hand, already somewhat dated.
The transformations of logic
that exist in AAiWare not obvious,
but subde. Alice's fall down the
hole is not an act that makes a logi-
cal point, but rather is a standard
narrative tool to transform the
characters in the story and a way to
generate dramatic tension. Dr. Pat-
ten makes points of logic that are
interesting. He makes some points
about the Alice story that are inter-
esting. But, alas, they are interest-
ing for very different reasons.

End of the Century
Chris Roberson

Pyr, Prometheus Books, 2009

ISBN: 978-1591026976

Reviewed by Ray Kiddy

While this novel has only a few
direct references to Lewis Carroll,
it has many underlying references
that a Carrollian will recognize
immediately and a person not
familiar with the Alice books will
miss entirely.

Three main stories are told in
parallel, switching back and forth
every few chapters. The stories
link up at the end of the book,
when the characters must, liter-
ally, save the entire universe. (This
is, after all, a fantasy novel.) The
main characters start out in differ-
ent time periods. In one thread, a
teenager named Alice Fell (yes, re-
ally) travels from Texas to England
in the year 2000, chasing epileptic
visions. In her first episode, as a
child, she sees herself floating
slowly down a flight of stairs. In an-
other thread, investigating detec-

live Sandford Blake and his assis-
tant, Miss Bonaventure, are trying
to solve a series of murders that
threaten to disturb the populace
at the time of Queen Victoria's
Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The last
thread takes place in "498 Anno
Domini" and has "Galaad," which
we usually spell with another "h,"
leading King "Artor" on a quest
for what seems to end up being
the Holy Grail, inspired by what
seems to be another epilepsy-in-
duced vision.

The author makes connections
to Lewis Carroll, but is not strident
about them. At one point, Alice
remembers hearing "about Lewis
Carroll and van Gogh and Ten-
nyson all having TLE [ Temporal
Lobe Epilepsy] and all of them tak-
ing their seizure experiences and
turning them into art." Alice also
writes in her journal with purple
ink, inspired to do so after hearing
that Lewis Carroll did so.

Another use of Carroll is found
in the "save the universe" part of
the story. Basically, the story hinges
on the inhabitants of another uni-
verse who are seeking a universe to
colonize. They are not aggressive
and are looking for a compatible
universe without current residents.
They mean us no harm. As they
bump into our universe, though,
they pick up a person who lies to
them. It turns out that the people
of this other universe cannot rec-
ognize lies, or stories, or any infor-
mation that represents something
that does not exist. (The author
makes the point that this universe
certainly had no Lewis Carroll
in it!) As this "ark" starts coloniz-
ing a part of England, it creates a
Red King to defend it, as well as
strange creatures that — based on
Roberson's and Humpty Dumpty's
descriptions — are clearly toves,
borogoves, and a Jabberwock. The
liar describes these animals to the
residents of this other universe,
so they must obviously exist, as far
as the colonists are concerned.
(One is reminded of people who
think that, just because something

is in the New York Times, it must
be true.) All sorts of troublesome
incongruities result in all three
timelines.

Yet, despite the book's three
overlapping plot lines and two, or
perhaps three, mythologies, it is
not confusing. The book is play-
ful and does not take itself too
seriously. Better written than most
Wonderland pastiches and fictional
accounts of what really happened
between Alice Liddell and Charles
Dodgson, this A/zc^tinged sci-fi
fantasy is definitely worth reading.
Dodgson might find himself some-
what bemused — and at least a little
amused.

A Strange Eventful History:

The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry,

Henry Irving, and

Their Remarkable Families

Michael Holroyd

Chatto and Windus, London, 2008

Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
New York, 2009

ISBN-13: 978-0-374-27080-3

Reviexved by Cindy Claymore Walter

The title of this biography — A
Strange Eventful History — sounds as
if it belongs to a Victorian thriller,
and its opening chapter sustains
the impression. The young actress
Ellen Terry disappeared one dark
London night. The only clue was
in her bedroom: A note that read
"Found Drowned" was attached
to a photograph of her estranged
husband, artist G. F. Watts, who
had painted a picture with that
title. The family put on their
mourning clothes and were quite
surprised a few days later when
their daughter returned to tell
them that she was alive, although
sharing that life with a man not
her husband.

So begins the fascinating tale of
Ellen Terry and Henry Irving and
their families. The main thrust
of the story, however, is how they
transformed the bohemian culture
of the theater into one of respect-
ability. Henry Irving became the

first actor to be knighted, and
Ellen Terry became one of the first
actresses to be appointed a Dame
of the British Empire.

Terry and Irving were very
much of their time. Their lives
embody the conventions of a novel
by Dickens or Hardy. Ellen Terry
came from a traveling theatrical
family and was expected to be an
actress, but it was assumed that
her older sister Kate would be "the
Terry of the age." Henry Irving's
transformation from clerk with a
speech impediment to great trage-
dian included a name change.

The story of Ellen Terry's un-
happy marriage to G. F. Watts
and return to her family is well
known. When the Rev. Charles
Dodgson/Lewis Carroll visited,
he sensed something was amiss.
In later years, he wrote about
Ellen Terry's failed marriage with
compassion, stating, "I don't think
she had a fair chance of learning
her new duties. Instead of giving
her a home of her own he went
on living as a guest with an elderly
couple. . . ." Nevertheless, Carroll
suspended his friendship with
Terry as long as she was living with
Godwin, the architect she had met
while married to Watts.

Fortunately, Ellen Terry's
return to the stage was handily
managed after she ran into an
impresario friend while he was
hunting. The comeback netted
her £40 a week — a lot of money
then. She needed it, as Godwin
was nearly bankrupt, and she now
had two children. She was a sensa-
tion. Her appeal is evident in the
book's reproductions of the Watts
portraits and the extraordinary
Lady Macbeth painting, all blood-
red lips and blazing eyes, by John
Singer Sargent.

Henry Irving's struggle for
success took longer and involved
more of a makeover, includ-
ing separation from the wife
who thought his profession was
ridiculous. He and Ellen Terry
had once performed together,
badly, in a Shakespeare adapta-

tion. Nevertheless, when he was
given the lease of the Lyceum,
he chose her to play Ophelia to
his Hamlet. Although Terry did
not think she had played well,
both performances were hailed
as masterpieces. Holroyd relates
that Irving told Bram Stoker, his
assistant, that Shakespeare himself
would have been delighted by her
performance.

Even Henry James noted, grudg-
ingly, that it was London's greatest
theater. Irving and Terry traveled
to the United States several times
to perform (which practice she
repeated for cash), and they be-
came the theatrical team of the
age. Strangely, Irving did not like
modern plays. He disliked Shaw,
who returned the compliment
(probably because he was in love
with Ellen Terry), and he did not
perform Ibsen. Shakespeare and
sentimental Victoriana were the
Lyceum's stocks in trade, and that
was enough for a long time. He
even, unwisely, refused to present a
play based on Stoker's Dracula.

Of course these irresistibly
charismatic people had children
who labored in their shadows.
Both of the Irving sons became
actors, to their mother's fury,
and Henry Junior married the
actress Dolly Baird, one of Lewis
Carroll's favorites. The Terry chil-
dren— ^who adopted the last name
Craig — were much more explo-
sive. Terry's daughter, Edy Craig,
was a costumer, set designer, pro-
ducer, suffragette, and companion
of a woman who was an infatuated
amanuensis to Ellen. Son Gordon
Craig, however, had a personal life
that made Lord Byron's look like
that of a Trappist monk. He had
approximately thirteen children
by an assortment of women who
ranged from his long-suffering
mistress, his longer-suffering wife,
and his muse Isadora Duncan, to
a battery of luckless servitors. Gor-
don Craig inherited his father's
talent for design, and his ideas on
set lighting were avant-garde — and
are still much used today.

This wonderful book plunges
the willing reader into a world
that lurches from the antique
to the modern but is still crazy
after all these years. In addition
to being delightfully written with
a droll wit (Godwin's wife's "re-
spectability was to be enhanced by
chronic invalidism"), the volume
is beautifully produced, with well-
chosen photographs by Dodgson,
Cameron, et al., full-color Pre-
Raphaelite paintings, and colored
illustrations and decorations by
Gordon Craig. It has a formidable
index and should prove valuable
to academics and enthusiasts for
years to come.

KapmuHKu u paseoeopti: Becedu

0 JIbwuce Kapponne

[Pictures and Conversations:

Discussions about Lewis Carroll]

Nina M. Demurova

Saint Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2008.

575 p. ISBN 978-5-93898-173-7

Reviewed by August A. Imholtz,Jr.

At the beginning of her Wonder-
land adventure, Alice mused to
herself about the use of a book
without pictures or conversations,
so she surely would have loved
Nina M. Demurova's beautifully
written, sumptuously illustrated,
and elegantly produced book.
Writing in Russian about conversa-
tions she conducted over a period
of several years, Nina presents a
series of reflective interviews with
the most famous translators and
illustrators of Alice together with
discussions with a Carroll collec-
tor, critics, a composer, a theater
director, and a performance art-
ist couple, all hailing from Rus-
sia or some of the former Soviet
Republics. Some of their names
and works will be well known to at
least a few collectors worldwide,
while others almost certainly will
be quite new to all of them, which
surely is one of the clear purposes
and positive outcomes of a work
like this.

What kind of pictures and
conversations make up this book?
Early on in her introductory re-
marks. Prof. Demurova — for Nina
Mikhailovna Demurova is not
only a famous translator but also a
distinguished professor — explains
her methodology: "The reader will
notice that our conversations flow
in different ways. Certain topics
particularly interested me and I
did not hesitate to raise them for
discussion." One of those topics,
at least for the translators, was how
to cope with the very "Englishness"
of Carroll's works and nonsense
words. This means overcoming
particular textual ambiguities as
well as placing Wonderland itself
into an understandable Russian
fairytale context. Few of the in-
terviewees kept within the strict
framework of the questions. De-
murova reserved the right, de-
pending on the nature of the con-
versation, to include or exclude
her own questions from the final
edited and published transcript.
And yet the tone maintained
throughout the interviews and
correspondence is one in the best
tradition of oral history, rather
than the almost inquisitional aca-
demic quibbling one sometimes
encounters.

At times the interviewer be-
comes interviewee, especially with
people who know Nina Demurova
personally. For one of them she
recounts the story, already well
known to her friends, about the
circuitous route by which she first
came to translate the Alice books
into Russian, in an edition illus-
trated by P. Chuklev and published
in 1967 in Sofia, Bulgaria. In 1978,
a new edition of her translation
was issued in the Literary Land-
marks series by Nauka, the pub-
lishing house of the Soviet Acad-
emy of Sciences. This edition has
Tenniel illustrations and Martin
Gardner's annotations (translated
and edited for her Russian reader-
ship) , as well as an appendix of
critical essays. This was followed
by an expanded version under the

Yuri A. Vashchenko

Nauka imprint
in 1990.

And now
for the pic-
tures, which
sadly cannot
all be repro-
dticed here
and which
include work
by many highly
skilled and largely very success-
ful artists. Yuri A. Vashchenko
has done absolutely brilliant and
almost surreal illustrations, which
were created only after intensely
thoughtful textual discussions
with Nina Demurova and pub-
lished for the first time in 1982
in the splendid little 13 x lOH cm
Kniga editions in 1990. These are
still available only in the foreign
hard currency stores (beryozkas) in
Moscow. Tatiana lanovskaia has
playfully rendered an exceedingly
charming Alice and other newly
conceived, clearly non-Tenniel,
Wonderland creatures. Oleg Lip-
chenko speaks of his intricately
conceived architectonic re-envi-
sioning of the whole CarroUian
universe with humor and serious-
ness. Anastasiya Zacharova depicts
the Lion and Unicorn (Lev i Yedino-
rog) so that they resemble nothing
so much as late twentieth-century
punk rockers. One also finds il-
lustrator Leonid Tishkov with his
starkly minimalist depictions of the
Snark crew; Vladimir Tseplyaev,
a sculptor in wood of characters
of great feeling; and sculptor
Aleksandr Lazarevich. Additional
chapters are devoted to artists such
as Gennadii Kalinovskii, who is
perhaps better known here in the
West than some of the others, but

that in no way implies that the oth-
ers are not very intriguing indeed.

The translators and literary
critics are represented by, among
others, Galina Zahoder, widow of
Boris Zahoder, whose Alice transla-
tion was important and popular in
the 1960s; Leonid Yachnin, trans-
lator of The Hunting of the Snark;
Aleksandra Borisenko, an aca-
demic; Dmitrii Urnov, a critic and
explicator of Carroll's puzzles and

Oleg Lipchenko

Gennadii Kalinovskii

linguistic fun; Victor Fet, an early
translator of The Hunting of the
Snark and a poet in his own right;
and Grigorii Kruzhkov, a physicist
turned nonsense poet and transla-
tor of Carroll's verses, including
yet another Russian version of The
Hunting of the Snark.

For Vladimir Rubin, who is
the sole composer covered in the
book, Demurova prints a page
from the score of "Album Alisii"
and an exposition of how he trans-
poses Carroll's inner jokes (zakritii
shutki) from language to music
and much more.

Boris Bim-Bad, president of
the Open University in Moscow,
affords the perspective of both an
anthropologist and a psychologist
as he explains why Carroll and
his works hold so much attraction
for him. Because of their logical
nonsense and amusing wordplay,
often also rooted in logic, he ranks
Lewis Carroll with Aleksandr Push-
kin and Hans Christian Andersen
as authors to be read by Russian
students.

Delightfully antic and talented
Tania lanovskaia, to select one
participant in the conversations
for closer examination, recounts

how she first became acquainted
with Alice's Adventures in Wonder-
land v/hen a little girl. Her mother,
Iliya Yakovlevna Davtyan, was an
editor at the publishing house
Kniga, the same firm that issued
the Vashchenko illustrations to
accompany Demurova's Alice
translation. Tania, however, had
read the Alice books many times
and on January 28, 1978, on the
eightieth anniversary of Lewis
Carroll's death, began to create
some 36 illustrations of her own.
In 2005, she published her Won-
derland illustrations, at first only
in black and white — an edition
that was supplanted in 2008 by
a fine edition with color illustra-
tions. Her Through the Looking-Glass
volume appeared, with black and
white illustrations, in Ryazan in
central Russia in 2003, and a col-
ored edition is forthcoming. Both
of her books also have editions
in English. In her Alice, for the
verses beginning "Twinkle, twinkle
little bat!" the Russian poet Dina
Orlovskaya, who translated that
verse parody in Nina Demurova's
Nauka editions, changed "bat" to
"elephant" and begins the poem
"Evening elephant" {''Vechernii slon,
vechernii slon," which is a parody of
the famous Russian song " Vechernii
Zvon," i.e., "Evening Bells"); Tania
explains how she at first envi-
sioned an elephant standing on
another elephant to represent the
transferred Carroll's image from a
bat to an elephant, admittedly stay-
ing within the mammalian family
and remaining comical.

The conversation with Mar-
garita F. Roushailo, mathematician
and vsddow of Aleksandr Rous-
hailo, the greatest of the Russian
collectors of Lewis Carroll's works,
forms a fitting conclusion to this
long but engrossing book. Many
of the illustrations in the book,
all produced with great verisimili-
tude, came from the originals in
Aleksandr Roushailo's collection.

It would indeed be splendid
for other scholars to do for Brit-
ish, American, Japanese, or other

countries' Alice translators and il-
lustrators what Nina Demurova has
so ably and entertainingly done for
contemporary Russian ones.

A few minor quibbles may be
mentioned. There are no foot-
notes, but then really, one might
ask, where outside of senior com-
mon room conversations of Ox-
ford and Cambridge colleges do
conversations come alive with pha-
lanxes of supporting footnotes? A
dust jacket, perhaps a transparent
wrapper like the old Transmatic
ones, would have been a good idea
so that the nicely decorated cover
and gold-tooled leather spine
could be appreciated without risk
of damage by one's peanut butter-
and-jelly-fingered curious or Rus-
sian-reading grandchildren.

The only person who I think
has been omitted from Nina's
otherwise almost all-inclusive gal-
lery of contemporary and near
contemporary Russian Carrollian
enthusiasts is the late, outstand-
ing bibhographer Vladimir V.
Lobanov, who did all of his Carroll
research while working as rare
book librarian at the Library of
Tomsk State University in Siberia.
His Lewis Carroll in Russia, which
appeared in 2000 in a 400-page
issue oi Folia Anglistica, the journal
of Moscow State University's De-
partment of English Linguistics, is
the finest and most complete bibli-
ography of Russian Alices through
1999 ever published. Perhaps his
omission was unavoidable since he
died before Demurova undertook
this work.

Ordering a copy of this ex-
cellent work ($95, delivered) is
straightforward, although it takes
a bit of ingenuity. Petropol, a Rus-
sian bookstore in Brookline, Mass.,
lists it on their site (see URL note
p. 42). The site is in Russian, and
clicking "Translate this page into
English" at the top does not work.
What you have to do is to open a
second window or tab with Google
Language Tools, and go through

the standard ordering procedure,
cutting and pasting the Russian
phrases over into the Google
"Translate Text" box to under-
stand them. Also, holding your
cursor over a button with Russian
text will show you its function (in
English) in the toolbar at the bot-
tom left corner of your screen,
although they are pretty intuitive.
[I speak not a word of Russian, and
successfully ordered this book! - Ed.]
Alternatively, you can ivy emailing
Petropol (service@petropol.com);
writing (1428 Beacon St., Brook-
line, MA, 02446); faxing (617-713-
0418); or calling (617-232-8820 or
800-404-5396); their internal code
for the book is KH 141 007.

-jilt

Wonderland: The Zen of Alice

Daniel Doen Silberberg

Parallax Press, 2009

Reviewed by Mark Burstein

As the variously attributed say-
ing goes, "Writing about music is
like dancing about architecture,"
a paradox even more profound
when applied to attempting to
explicate the ineffable institution
of Zen Buddhism. But using words
to transcend words is historically a
part of that tradition, whose koans
("riddles with no answers") are
designed to awaken the student.
Longer expositions, unfortunately,
may have the opposite effect.
Silberberg's thin book, like
its many competitors — the most
recent of which include Buddhism
for Dummies (For Dummies, 2002)
and The Complete Idiot 's Guide to
Zen Living (Alpha, 2000) — at-
tempts a simplified, occasionally
simplistic, exposition of Zen and
its practices. What makes this of
moderate interest to Carrollians
is that quotes from Wonderland
and Looking-Glass are sprinkled
throughout. Although they pro-
vide confirmation of and parallels
to the wisdom and sayings of Zen,
the author does not present any
insights into the Alicehooks or
their author; for him the books

are way stations supplementing his
argument.

That the Alice books represent
derelict canons of Zen Buddhism
is a fine conceit, in fact it was the
subject of my college paper "All Is
in One-derland" in 1970, much
of which appears as Part VII ("No
Matter! Never Mind! No Mind!
Never Matter!") of my 1972 the-
sis, "To Catch a Bandersnatch,"
which has been posted on the
Society's home page since 1996.'
Zen Masters such as Soyen Shaku
(1859-1919) or D.T Suzuki
(1870-1966), who popularized
these teachings in the West, could
conceivably have used Alice in
their groundbreaking work, as
the parallels are so striking.

Unfortunately, the book
under discussion adds little to
our knowledge of either Zen or
Wonderland. It contains an over-
abundance of personal anecdotes,
somewhat odd in a tradition that
is supposed to transcend the ego,
and Silberberg's pop-culture ref-
erences (e.g., Serpico, the Everly
Brothers, Kill Bill 2, beer pong, his
hanging out with Led Zeppelin)
seem forced, with the author try-
ing too hard to be hip. He also
makes things up, for instance
spending several pages on "Lenny
Bruce's talk[ing] about people
having 'Nez,' . . . the opposite of
Zen." An interesting coinage to be
sure, but just as surely not from
the mouth of Mr. Bruce. He also
quotes Carlos Castaneda as if the
Don Juan books were nonfiction.

Well-intentioned, sometimes hu-
morous, the book serves as well as
any other as an introduction to this
curious nonreligious religion. But
to those readers more interested in
Zen's ties to Carroll, I must humbly
recommend my essay.
1 www.lewiscarroll.org/bander.pdf

TWO NEW ILLUSTRATED
WONDERLANDS

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland
Illustrated by Rodney Matthews

Templar Publishing, 2008, £19.99

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

With Illustrations by John Vernon

Lord and an Introduction and

Bibliography by the Artist,

Textual corrections by

Selwyn Goodacre

Artists' Choice Editions, 2009, £68

Reviewed by Andrew Ogus

Nothing has been illustrated as
often as the Alice books. Here are
two more additions to the Alice
library, demonstrating twice again
the variety of approach these sto-
ries afford.

Rodney Matthews lists Disney
and Arthur Rackham as major
influences; one may also find
traces of Dr. Seuss, Ronald Searle,
and art nouveau in the lavish full-
page or full-spread paindngs that
move, as he says, "between macro
and telephoto" and the expert,
single-color spot drawings oddly
dispersed through the text. A care-
ful examination rewards the viewer
with a myriad of whimsical detail,
from the heart-shaped fingernails
of the Queen to the headgear of
the Hatter's extensive clientele; vir-
tually every character wears a hat.
Sadly this blonde Alice looks too
old and is too stiffly rendered, un-
like the fluid but hideous "human"
denizens of her sci-fi wonderland.
The text is subordinated to luxuri-
ous production values including an
elaborate box which even contains
inset marbles; the miniscule type
falls in an uncomfortably wide
reading line.

John Vernon Lord's thoughtful
introduction outlines his unusual
and sensible approach. He has
chosen to leave the dreaming Alice
out of the illustrations altogether
— but unfortunately undermines
this interesting concept by print-
ing her thoughts and speeches in a

bold blue font throughout to "give
her a kind of presence." Lord's lin-
ear style lends itself beautifully to
his emblematic drawings of objects
such as a bat-like brown tea tray,
lovely initial caps, and a tempting
bottle, but not to the characters.
The naked March Hare and Dor-
mouse are a shock; there are jar-
ring variations such as unexpected
collages (one of which apparently
contains an unwelcome photo
element — best butter or not) , and
a chaotic drawing of the Queen of
Hearts that seems to have slipped
in from another book, or perhaps
his sketchpad. A candle going
out cleverly references Holiday's
snatching of the Baker; an exqui-
site picture of an eel, canvases, and
tubes of oil paint (just in case we
didn't get the joke) closely follows
a clumsy bright green gryphon
and black and white Mock Turtle
who share a single page. This in-
consistent use of color and black
and white (once within a single
drawing) is confusing, as is the oc-
casional placement of an emblem-
atic spot drawing in the margin as
opposed to the breakthroughs and
runarounds within the text. The
printed endpapers comprise tan-
talizing but illegible instructions
for playing croquet from an 1864
publication, with flamingos and
hedgehogs substituted for mallets

John Vernon Lord

and balls. Lord's head was clearly
filled with ideas, but too many of
them appear in this interesting but
uneven Wonderland.

Rodney Matthews

EXPLORATIONS:
THREE ACADEMIC STUDIES

The Hidden Adult: Defining

Children 's Literature

Perry Nodelman

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 2008. 390

pp. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-8018-

8979-0, $70.00; Paper: ISBN

978-0-8018-8980-6, $35.00

Children's Literature: A Reader's
History from Aesop to Harry Potter

Seth Lerer

Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2008. 396 pp. Cloth: ISBN

9780226473000, $30; e-book: ISBN

9780226473024, $5.00-$19.00;
Paper: ISBN 9780226473017, $19

Enchanted Hunters: The Power of

Stories in Childhood

Maria Tatar

Norton, 2009. 296 pp.

ISBN 978-0-393-06601-2, $27.

Reviewed by Clare Imholtz

Alice does not play a huge part in
any of these three academic stud-
ies of children's literature, but
each author looks with a clear and
discerning eye at Carroll's clas-
sic. Perry Nodelman 's book is the
meatiest of the three. Trying "to
read and think as intensively as I
could," Nodelman, long a leading
scholar in the children's literature
field, examines AAzWand five
other nineteenth- and twentieth-

century books that are or histori-
cally have been read by children,
in order to identify what it is
that defines "that highly unusual
category: children's literature."
Nodelman believes that AAzW,
while sharing characteristics with
the others, such as the importance
of "pictures and conversations,"
is a special case, a meta-example,
which both exemplifies and tran-
scends the genre.

Children's books show us what
it is like to be a child, someone
who knows less about the world
than an adult does. In Alice, it
is the narrator's comments that
point up the differences between
Alice's perceptions and reactions
and those of the more knowing
adult author and readers. All of
the six books Nodelman examines
have what he terms a "shadow
text," that is, a hidden text of
which adults rather than children
would be more aware, but Alice,
despite its surface simplicity, has a
huge shadow text. Alice is also spe-
cial in that it allows many complex
interpretations. The fact that Alice
herself is always questioning real-
ity and demanding explanations
makes it seem only reasonable that
readers do so as well. "She assumes
that there is more than meets the
eye, that what is being taken for
granted as simple and obvious by
the characters she encounters is
not simple at all. She assumes in a
sense that she is in a story."

The shifting uncertainties in
Wonderland undermine what
Alice thinks she knows. "Almost
every sequence in the book in-
volves Alice confronting a situa-
tion that transcends the expecta-
tion she has built on her previous
knowledge." Many confrontations
with the creatures (Duchess, Hat-
ter, etc.) involve discussion of what
Alice does and does not know. Yet
"the odd thing about all this is
how little Alice is disturbed by it":
Wonderland is not a nightmare.
Alice again and again is delighted
by the strange new things that hap-
pen to her, precisely because she

enjoys learning about them. Al-
ice's sense of uncertainty in Won-
derland represents the essence of
what it means to be a child — and
also, given the limited certainties
of adult knowledge, what it means
to be an adult. Wonderland is ex-
istential reality. And it is perhaps,
Nodelman suggests, for this very
reason that many adults find Alice
unsuitable for children.

As many have noted, AAzWis
a response to and a parody of the
didactic children's literature com-
mon to the time. Yet Alice herself
suffers, just like children in didac-
tic stories, for her adventuresome
nature. "'It was much pleasanter at
home,' thought poor Alice...
'I almost wish I hadn't gone down
that rabbit-hole.'" Nodelman com-
ments that that is a very important
"almost," as it shows that Alice still
believes, on balance, that being
adventuresome is a good thing.
The end of AA?W, however, seems
to refute this message as Alice's
sister reasserts a conventional view
of childhood.

Nodelman's discussion of Alice
and the other books is limited to
the first eighty pages; the remain-
der of the book is a long critical
review of academic commentary
on children's literature generi-
cally, of great interest to children's
librarians and scholars; but less
to the ordinary Lewis Carroll fan.
However, if you depend on the
index to find scattered references
to Alice in this latter part of the
book, you will miss an amusing
one on page 174 about how Alice's
sister counters "the wild anarchy
opened up to Alice by a traveling
male rabbit." Interestingly, Nodel-
man notes that only a few critical
studies discuss Alice zs children's
literature; most dismiss that des-
ignation as a cover for Carroll's
conscious or unconscious true
intentions.

If Nodelman's is the meatiest of
the three books under consider-
ation here, the most entertaining
is that by Seth Lerer, a Stanford
University literature professor

with a specialty in philology. Most
of Lerer's general comments
about Alice are based on second-
ary sources. Yet he too is a close
reader, focusing on nonsense and
language, discussing Carroll in
conjunction with that other nine-
teenth-century master of beguiling
nonsense, Edward Lear.

Lerer looks at length at Car-
roll's use of the word "queer,"
which appears more than twenty
times in the two Alice books, not-
ing that "words are queer, songs
are queer, dreams are queer," and
then after talking about the word's
history ("...by the nineteenth
century it had become one of the
most frequently deployed terms
to define experience outside the
strictures of Victorian propriety"),
he cleverly notes in an aside that
Diagon Alley in the world of Harry
Potter literally means Queer
Street. The book is full of similar
fascinating and unexpected con-
nections; for example, after noting
how "strange things" such as play-
ing cards come alive in Wonder-
land, and "come alive to rule," he
jumps to Woody Allen's hilarious
story "The Kugelmass Episode"
in which an irregular verb races
after Kugelmass on its spindly legs.
Later, he finds similarities between
"Father William" and Darwin's The
Voyage of the Beagle.

Lerer connects Lear and Carroll
by linking the Hatter's tea party to
a Lear limerick, yet carefully delin-
eates the differences between the
two's nonsense. He concludes the
section on the two nonsense writers
by saying that the Dadaists and Shel
Silverstein are their direct heirs. It is
very sad that this rich and evocative
book from a major university press
offers only what is basically a name
and tide index.

The overall purpose of Lerer's
book is to examine what children's
literature tells us about children
through the ages. Maria Tatar's
book, on the other hand, exam-
ines what children tell us about
children's literature. Tatar is a
Harvard literature professor who

has written brilliantly about fairy
tales. Her book, like Lerer's, fo-
cuses more on reader response
than the text itself, but unlike him,
she looks at child readers only.
Her primary interest in this book
is in the psychology of reading.

Tatar's book, while academic
and impeccably sourced, is also
an unabashed paean to childhood
reading. In several ways, Tatar's
comments parallel Nodelman's.
What he calls a search for knowl-
edge, she calls curiosity, saying
that Carroll "creates a character
so brimful of curiosity that she
becomes a curiosity," and stating
that after Alice, curiosity becomes
a common feature of children's
books. Like Nodelman, she be-
lieves that Alice is a meta-example
of children's literature. A/?V^ begins
with boredom, just as it is boredom
that brings children to reading.
Tatar describes at length the intel-
lectual stimulation that Wonder-
land nonsense provides to Alice.

In her quest to explore the
power of children's books, which
she says both absorb and transform
their child readers, Tatar inter-
viewed her young adult students to
see what had stuck from their child-
hood reading. She also includes
an appendix of published recollec-
tions by writers of how books they
read as children changed their
lives, from Emerson to Ozick to
Oates (the latter on Alice).

How do these books treat Car-
roll/Dodgson the man? Nodel-
man, interested only in the text,
says nothing about him. Lerer
makes one small, almost pro
forma, biographical statement. But
he gets it wrong. Noting that biog-
raphy seems to be the major way

of accessing the writings of Lear
and Carroll, he describes them as
"eccentric, maladroit, and sexually
challenging (or challenged) men."
Tatar also gets it wrong. Her book
is the most biographically oriented
of the three, yet, like Lerer, she is
not up to date with the scholar-
ship— she calls Carroll "pathologi-
cally shy."

In focusing on their treatment
of Lewis Carroll, I have truly only
scratched the surface of these
three rewarding, insightful books,
each of which has renewed my
love of Alice and appreciation of
her creator.

EAT ME

An exciting new publication will
appeal to Carroll collectors every-
where, and to everyone else who
likes to cook, eat, or read. It's the
unique and fascinating Alice Eats
Wonderland, an annotated, illus-
trated cookbook adventure!

Written by members August A.
Imholtz, Jr. and Alison Tannen-
baum, and illustrated by A. E. K,
Carr, Alice Eats Wonderland is based
on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
and is filled with entertaining
excerpts modified from the origi-
nal text; delicious and unusual
recipes, both historic and modern;
informative and creative illustra-
tions; and extensive scholarly an-
notations on the social and natural
history of many of the recipes and
ingredients.

Alice Eats Wonderland may be
ordered at $14.95 per copy (plus
postage) from Applewood Books
(www.awb.com), 1 River Road,
Carlisle, MA, 01741. Phone: 781-
271-0055; e-mail: applewood@awb.
com.

SPECIAL OFFER

Black Dog Publishing's Illustrated
Children 's Books "a visual journey
through the history of the picture-
book, examining design formats,
printing processes, and character
illustrations of classic tides from
over the past 250 years" will be
reviewed in full in the next KL
issue, but LCSNA members have
been offered a 40% discount on
all orders for this title until the
end of January 2010. Email Jes-
sica Atkins (iess@blackdogonline.
com) or write to her at 10a Acton
Street, London wcix qng; +44
(0)207 713 5097 tel; +44(0)207
713 8682 fax. Their website is www.
blackdogonline.com, but you can-
not get the discount there. Orders
will be fulfilled through their U.S.
distributor.

.&•

ART (sf ILLUSTRATION

Living on a small island in
the Bahamas with her family,
Elena Kalis took advantage
of the available water and
children and her interest in
underwater photography to
create Alice in Waterkind. Her
series of photos of floating
and swimming children in
Wonderland and Looking-
Glass costumes captures the
spirit of CarroUian playfulness.

Last summer (July 4 to Sep-
tember 7, 2009), the Port-
land [Maine] Museum of Art pre-
sented images from "For My Best
Beloved Sister Mia ": An Album of
Photographs by Julia Margaret Cam-
eron, a rarely seen and privately
owned album. In addition to her
own work, the album includes
pieces by her contemporaries,
including Lewis Carroll, that Cam-
eron collected.

The opening show at Kunsthal
KAdE, a brand-new exhibition
space in Amersfoort, Netherlands,
was Wonderland, Through the Looking
Glass, from May 2 to August 30,
which brought "together a group
of international artists who use a
rich and baroque visual language
to create parallel worlds drawing
on tableaux vivants, extreme narra-
tives, anecdotal story telling, and
fairy tales, and peppered with mel-
ancholic and gothic references."

The Fresno Metropolitan Museum
of Art, History, and Science held
the exhibition Anna Richards Brews-
ter: American Impressionist from
March 21 to June 5. It included six
illustrations from her A New Alice
in the Old Wonderland with illustra-
tions "after John Tenniel." Full-
page reproductions of these pic-
tures are included in the book
Anna Richards Brewster: American
Impressionist (University of Califor-
nia Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-520-
25749-8).

Cuban Artists ' Books & Prints/Libros
y Grabados de Artistas Cubanos
1985-2008, exhibited at the Gro-

lier Club in New York City from
May 20 to August 1 , included San-
dra Ramos's book Jabberwocky,
which mixes excerpts from Lewis
Carroll's text and John Tenniel's
images with her own on pages
facing foldout mirrors.

"Always in search of curious ob-
jects, broken toys, bits of things
and traces of stories, Adriana
Peliano stitches together monsters,
bodies, desires, and fairy tales. Her
collages and assemblages are magi-
cal and multiple inventories,
where logic is reinvented with new
meanings and narratives, creating
language games and dream laby-

All URLs (links)

in "Far-Flung,"

explicit or implicit,

are online and

clickable!

Go to http://

delicious.com/lcsna |

and by using the

alphabetical list or

the "tags" at the

right, you can

instantly be taken to |

the page(s) you
V want. /M

rinths. Everything is
transformed to tell new
stories that dislocate our
way of seeing, inviting
the marvelous to visit
our world." View artist
Adriana Peliano's Alice-
inspired found-object
compositions on her
blog, along with her
explanations and de-
scriptions in Portuguese
and English. See also
"Ola, Brazil!" p. 31.

Further Afe-related
artwork and images by David Dela-
mare (AL 82:51) are featured on
his website. David is planning to
produce an illustrated edition of
Alice in Wonderland so he'll be pro-
ducing images throughout the year.

New York, Nexo York: The 20'' Cen-
tury, an exhibit at The Norton
Museum of Art in West Palm
Beach, Florida, from October 3 to
December 27, features over 50
works of art — including a bronze
head of Alice by Jose de Creeft
from the famous Central Park
sculpture — that capture New
York's unique metropolitan sphere
and the human interaction with it.

"Moore Adventures in Wonder-
land," an installation inspired by
Marianne Moore and AAzWand
created by Rosenbach Artist-in-
Residence Sue Johnson, investi-
gates the Rosenbach 's extensive
Lewis Carroll and Marianne
Moore collections and uncovers
unexpected connections between
the two. The installation will be
at the Rosenbach Museum and
Library in Philadelphia from
September 23, 2009, through
June 6, 2010.

Hats off to the people who worked
on the International Board on
Books for Youth (IBBY) Regional
Conference in Illinois, October 2
to 4. The displays were amazing,
particularly "The Imaginary
Book": Artists from all over the
world were asked to imagine the

books Alice saw as she fell down
the rabbit hole and to create cov-
ers for them. The display included
72 incredible and original works
from 30 countries.

Minneapolis artist Cris t. Halver-
son (the small t is his choice) has
for some years been working on
paintings, sculptures, etc., as his
ongoing "Alice Project." He dis-
played some of his "Alice" work at
the Minneapolis Stevens Square
Center for the Arts in 2008, and
has another display of mostly new
work running from October 24
through November 29 at the Hop-
kins Center for the Arts in Hop-
kins, Minn.

"Hide & Seek: Picturing Child-
hood," an exhibit at the Nelson-
Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas
City, Missouri, running from Sep-
tember 16, 2009, to February 21,
2010, includes Lewis Carroll's
photograph "Alexandra Kitchin"
(1868) as an early example of
photographs depicting children.

Frank Brunner, fantasy and comic
book illustrator, provides adult
illustrations of Alice's encounters
in Wonderland in the "Nudes"
section of his website.

"Picturing Childhood: Portraits
from the Masters of Early Photog-
raphy," an exhibition of children's
portraits, features selected photo-
graphs by Lewis Carroll, Eadweard
Muyb ridge, Edward S. Curtis, and
others and runs from October 10
to November 18 at Castle in the
Air, a gallery in Berkeley, Calif.

ARTICLES 6^ACADEMIA

Richard Alleyne's article "Invis-
ible doorways or portals a step
closer to reality, claim scientists"
in The Telegraph (U.K.) of August
9, 2009, describes how, "[ujsing a
technique known as transforma-
tion optics, the researchers have
revealed a way to alter the pathway
of light waves that could eventually
allow them to create portals that

are invisible to the human eye...
Dr Huanyang Chen, from the
Physics Department at Hong Kong
University of Science and Tech-
nology, said that 'people standing
outside the gateway would see
something like a mirror.'" Sound
familiar?

A previously undiscovered seven-
teenth-century picture of a dodo
was sold at auction by Christie's on
July 9. The picture is particularly
important as it was drawn before
the bird became extinct, although
it is uncertain whether it was
drawn from life. The estimated
price was £5,000-£7,000; the real-
ized price was £44,450!

In the Wall Street Journal, there
were significant Carroll references
on both Monday, September 28,
and Wednesday, September 30.
On Monday's Opinion page, a
letter to the editor came complete
with a Tenniel illustration of Alice
and Humpty Dumpty. Wednesday's
article "Major Miniaturist Makes
Art That Comes With Its Own
Microscope" was about a "nano-
technologist" who sculpted a tab-
leau of Alice at the tea party with
the figure of Alice one-third the
size of a period {KL 79:46).

"Through the Looking Glass: The
Tale of Allison Wonderland," an
article in The Wrestling Daily irom
September 30, covers the 22-year-
old wrestling "starlet."

Jim Beckerman's article "Down the
rabbit hole, onto the silver screen.
Society looks at 'Alice' at the mov-
ies, including version filmed in
New Jersey Overline" ( The Star-
Ledger, Newark, New Jersey, Octo-
ber 14, 2009) and John Brennan's
"Fort Lee as 'Wonderland'" (The
Record, New Jersey, October 18,
2009) both covered the LCSNA's
fall meeting in Fort Lee, N.J., on
October 17.

C. L. Dodgson and the LCSNA
were well represented at the Mac-
Coll Centenary Conference, held
in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, this

October. Society treasurer and
professor of mathematics Dr. Fran-
cine F. Abeles, together with Dr.
Amirouche Moktefi, delivered a
joint paper titled "Hugh MacColl,
On Reading Lewis Carroll," which
revealed the influence of C. L.
Dodgson on the nineteenth-cen-
tury Scottish mathematician and
logician Hugh MacColl. "Mac-
Coil's acquaintance with Dodg-
son's logical and mathematical
works (particularly Symbolic Logic,
Part I, and Curiosa Mathematica,
Part /.• A New Theory of Parallels)
convinced him to return to math-
ematics after he had abandoned it
for about thirteen years. Dodgson
replied to MacColl's comments
and criticisms in his reviews of
Dodgson 's books that appeared in
the important journal. The Ath-
enaeum, in subsequent editions of
those books. Moktefi discovered
these reviews, previously thought
to have been by an anonymous
reviewer. We argue that their ex-
change of views influenced their
subsequent written work on math-
ematical and logical topics."

LCSNA President Andrew Sellon
was quoted in Lauren Schuker's
article "Kids' Movies Grow Up" in
The Wall Street Journal, October 16,
2009. Andrew was once again
clarifying the relationship between
Tim Burton's forthcoming movie
Alice in Wonderland and the Alice
books. La lutte continue!

Despite all our wishes to the con-
trary, the cover article of the
Travel section of October 5's New
York Times, "Adventures in Won-
derland," refers to the Wonder-
land Trail in Mount Rainier Na-
tional Park.

"Through the Looking Glass: The
History, Philosophy & Literature
of Childhood" is an online study
course for members of the Har-
vard Alumni Association, running
from October 20 to December 10,
2009. Professor Maria Tatar leads a
series of online lectures and dis-

cussions exploring "the revelatory
power of childhood reading and
classic children's tales." See review
on page 39.

BOOKS

Originally published in black and
white in 1988, Glenn Diddit's
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland:
A Literature Through Art Novel
(graphic novel) has been re-
released in color.

It seems that Lord Kir ofOz of the
"Return to Wonderland" series
{KL 77:32) is only the tip of the
iceberg. The original kinky "Ro-
mantica" series by Cheyenne Mc-
Cray consists of four books, Won-
derland: King of Hearts (Ellora's
Cave, 2003), King of Spades, etc.
The series title, a character named
Alice, a brief cameo by the rabbit
in the first book, and the journey
into another land are about the
only ties to the Alicehooks.

As a companion to the AAiWbOO-
piece jigsaw puzzle designed to
look like a book {KL 82:51), Potter
Style has just put out a similar-
looking "book" consisting of 24
note cards and envelopes ($17).

Martin Gardner's Sphere Packing,
Lewis Carroll, ^ Reversi (Number 3
of "The New Martin Gardner
Mathematical Library," Cambridge
University Press, 2009, ISBN
9780521756075) is a reprint of
New Mathematical Diversions from
Scientific American (New York,
Simon & Schuster, 1966). It does
include an updated bibliography
for the chapter on Carroll.

The new picture book ABC UK
features the March Hare, Dor-
mouse, and Hatter in quite a nice
full-page picture on the "T is for
Tea" page. The author is James
Dunn, the illustrator Helen Bate,
published by Frances Lincoln
Children's books, U.K. 2008, U.S.
2009, ISBN 978-1845076962.

" Wonderland? is the story of a
young girl Alice whose life is

turned upside down by a powerful
cocaine addiction. We follow her
journey through pain and loneli-
ness, where she discovers that her
chosen lifestyle is not as glamor-
ous as it may seem." A self-pub-
lished photo book by "tigz" avail-
able at Etsy.com. Prints and cards
of photos from the book are also
available.

Lulu, Lolita und Alice: Das Leben
beriimter Kindsmusen [ The Lives of
Famous Child-Muses] by Alexandra
Lavizzari (Ebersbach, 2005, ISBN
978-3934703933) includes a chap-
ter on Ms. Liddell.

In his graphic memoir. Stitches (W.
W. Norton, 2009, ISBN 978-
0393068573), the distinguished
illustrator David Small includes
Tenniel's Alice and pig baby in a
passage showing how, at age six,
he played "Alice," with whom he'd
fallen in love. Feeling that her
long blonde hair gave her entree
in Wonderland, he would wear a
yellow towel on his head. He goes
on to show himself passing
through pieces of drawing paper
as if through the mirror.

The Toon Treasury of Classic Chil-
dren 's Comics, selected and edited
by Art Spiegelman and Frangoise
Mouly, introduced by John Sci-
eszka (Abrams Comicarts, 2009,
ISBN 0810957302, $40) is a de-
lightful volume in and of itself.
Carrollian treasures include Tom
McNamara's "Alix in Folly-Land"
(just the title, really); Dave Berg's
"The Tweedle Twins vs. The Hor-
rible Groark" and "Alice in Topsy-
Turvey," plus a small version of the
cover, from Alice: New Adventures in
Wonderland, Vol. 1, No. 10 (actually
No. I),jul-Augl951 (P&C
FB0800) ; and a small repro of the
cover of The Adventures of Alice in
Wonderland, No. 1, 1945 (P&C
FB0300), wherein Alice is a bobby-
soxer. (P&C numbers refer to
Pictures and Conversations: Lewis
Carroll in the Comics, An Annotated

International Bibliography, 2nd Edi-
tion, Ivory Door, 2005.)

The Year's Best Science Fiction,
Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (ed-
ited by Gardner Dozois, St. Mar-
tin's Press, 2009, ISBN 978-
0312551056) includes "Boojum," a
story by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah
Monette.

Geneva-based publisher editions
Notari has just released a bilingual
version of The Hunting of the Snark
(2009, ISBN 978-2940408023).
The original English text is accom-
panied by a new French transla-
tion by M. Vertut and illustrations
by the Franco-Swiss artist Jean-
Marie Reynier made up of collages
of eighteenth-century prints col-
ored with watercolor.

DC Comics' Detective Comics #854
(June 24), 855 (July 29), 856 (Au-
gust 26), and 857 (September 2)
cover the storyline "Elegy," in
which Batwoman runs up against
Alice, "a madwoman who sees her
life as a fairy tale and everyone
around her as expendable extras"
and who speaks only in lines from
Lewis Carroll.

Fans of comics from the 1950s
might appreciate the Betty and
Veronica Digest, No. 195 (June
2009), which leads with "Betty in
Wonderland" (pp. 1-21). Betty is
babysitting for the Anderson kids,
who beg her to read Alice in Won-
derland every night. This time she
changes the story a little. Betty
(Alice) chases Archie down a big
hole to Wonderland, where she
meets the Cheshire Dog and other
characters. Milkshakes and burg-
ers make her shrink and grow,
respectively. Veronica appears as
the Red Queen who wants to take
Archie from Betty, sticking her
with Dee and Dum. Instead of
croquet, Alice/Betty and Veron-
ica/Red Queen have a bowling
contest with Archie as prize. Betty
loses, but fortunately Veronica's
parents appear and help Betty
escape from Wonderland.

Compiled by Muriel McCarthy,
Ann Simmons, and Sue Hem-
mens, "Beware the Jabbenvock!":
Books on the Animal Kingdom in
Marsh's Library (2009) is a hand-
some, liberally illustrated, 143-
page catalogue (printed in an
edition of 500 copies) of an ex-
hibit of the same name at Arch-
bishop Marsh's Library in Dublin,
Ireland. The book uses quotations
from Lewis Carroll copiously, both
in the titles of exhibit cases and in
captions.

Slovenly Betsy (Altemus, 1911), an
Americanized pastiche (in the
imitative sense) of Der Struwwelpeter
(1845), has been printed in fac-
simile by Applewood Books. Im-
ages of Humpty, the Hatter, the
March Hare, and (possibly) Alice
appear on the endpapers holding
hands with other nursery rhyme
and fairy-tale characters.

Jam Tomorrow: Memories of Life in
Post-War Britain by Tom Quinn
(Reader's Digest, 2009, ISBN 978-
0276445040) offers a social history
of Britain from 1945-1951
through interviews and photo-
graphy.

Originally serialized as Heart no
Kuni no Alice in Comic Blade Maga-
zine, Alice in the Country of Hearts
is a manga-style graphic novel by
QuinRose with art by Hoshino
Soumei, and will be released on
February 2, 2010. "In this inventive
retelling of the classic tale, Alice
is dragged down the rabbit hole
into a frightful world, where the
fairytale-like citizens wield dan-
gerous weapons for an insidious
cause. Unable to return home, will
she be able to find happiness in a
world full of danger and beautiful
young men?" (Also see Cyberspace
for the game version.)

Classic Starts: Alice in Wonderland
&" Through the Looking-Glass is "re-
told from the Lewis Carroll origi-
nals." Member Clare Imholtz says:
"The drawings are charming, but
I'm not so sure about the retelling.
For example, the mouse's tail is

missing. Just the kind of visual
humor little kids love, too."

For the first time ever [sic], AAiW
and TTLG including "The Wasp
in a Wig" are adapted into one
complete tale in Dynamite Enter-
tainment's comic The Complete Alice
In Wonderland. In this all-ages adap-
tation, writers John Reppion and
Leah Moore are joined by artists
Erica Awano (interior) and John
Cassaday (covers) for a four-issue
adventure down the rabbit hole! It
also includes bonus material such
as script pages, annotations, and
samplings of Carroll's original text.

If you want to listen to AA?W, but
don't have a tape player, CD
player, iPod, or any of the other
audio accessories available these
days, you can buy it on a pre-
loaded digital audio player by
Playaway Adult Fiction (2009,
ISBN 978-1441803764) for $54.99.

Leiuis Carrollby Colin Ford (2009,
ISBN 978-0500410981) is one of
Thames & Hudson's acclaimed
"Photofile" series, and contains
some sixty full-page reproductions,
together with a critical introduc-
tion and a full bibliography.

From the Just Local Project: "The
infamous [sicf] story of Alice's Ad-
ventures in Wonderland by Lewis
Carroll has been converted to
Australian English for the enjoy-
ment of Australian readers. By
reading a book in Australian Eng-
lish, young readers need not be
confused with dialects of English
from overseas and can simply
enjoy the story."

Disney Dossiers: Files of Character from
the Walt Disney Studios by Jeff Kurtti
(Disney Editions, 2006, ISBN 978-
1423100553) includes Alice and
the White Rabbit, possibly others.

The Big Book of Little: A Classic Illus-
trated Edition (compiled by Cooper
Edens, Chronicle Books, 2006,
ISBN 978-081 1850858) includes a
short illustrated extract from AyliW

Illustrated on the front cover and
described as item #48 in James
Cummins's catalogue 102: a pre-
sentation copy of TTLG to Marga-
ret Fausset, December 1871, with a
laid-in note from the recipient
explaining the circumstances;
"rebacked preserving original
spine," in a case by Riviere, is for
sale for $15,000.

Alice in Wonderland, illustrated by
Daniel Perez (Stone Arch Books,
2009, ISBN 9781434215857), is a
new graphic novel for elementary-
school-level readers.

Artist Nancy Wiley's new edition of
AylzWis photo-illustrated with
three-dimensional "stage sets" and
18 different Alice dolls created for
the project. The lavishly decorated
book has a vintage feel, using
Lewis Carroll's handwriting for the
typeface and with page borders
that have the aged look of an an-
tique book. The book itself is $35;
hand-painted dolls are $175
(Cheshire Cat) to $350 (Alice).
A video of her process is also on
the site. Purchase the book or
dolls via LCSNA member Joel
Birenbaum (joelbirenbaum®
comcast.net) and a portion of the
proceeds will go to the 150th an-
niversary event in 2015.

The final book in Frank Beddor's
"Looking Glass Wars" trilogy, Arch
Enemy (ISBN 978-0803731561) is
now available, as is the second
volume of his graphic novel. Hatter
M (ISBN 978-0981873718), illus-
trated by Sami Makkonen.

Please visit TheLiteracySite.com
and help to fund free books for
children without donating any
money. Site sponsors provide
funds based on the number of
visitors per day who click on a link
on the web page. The site receives
80,000 visitors a day and has
helped to fund the purchase of
more than 1.6 million books.

For those who missed out
on the collector's edition, a
regular edition of the Alice's

Adventures in Wonderland (ISBN
978-0887769320) illustrated by
Society-member Oleg Lipchenko,
mentioned in KL 79 and featured
on the cover of KL 80, was re-
leased on November 10.

The Neverending Shelf, a literary
re\iew blog, posted a timely review
and reminder of Lynn Truss's
novel Tennyson's Gift (2004, ISBN
978-1861977137; XL 69:21, 67:23).
Set on the Isle of Wight in 1864,
the Victorian comedy of manners
heavily features one Charles Lut-
widge Dodgson. According to
Truss, best known for her manual
of grammar Eats, Shoots and Leaves,
the story is about "love, poetry, the
beauty of girls with long hair, the
questionable sagacity of men with
beards, the language of flowers,
and the acquisition of famous
heads; but it is mainly about the
insane CarroUian egotism that
accompanies energetic genius."

Drawing Down the Moon (ISBN 978-
1593078133), a beautiful collec-
tion of illustrations from the thirty-
year career of fantasy and comic
book artist Charles Hess, includes
a picture of Alice in the Garden of
Live Flowers. The entire book can
be previewed online.

Fantagraphics Books is advertising
the comics compilation From Won-
derland luith Love: Danish Comics in
the Third Millennium (ISBN 9781-
160699-325-5), which includes
Julie Nord's "elegantly drawn
'From Wonderland With Love'
(which gives the collection its
title), a modernistic riff on Alice in
Wonderland."

««

SI*
CYBERSPACE

Unfortunately, the new household-
item shopping service website
Alice.com, with its slogan "Every-
one needs an Alice," seems to be
referencing the Brady Bunch's,
not Carroll's.

To complete her total domination
of cyberspace, Alice is now on Twit-
ter, twice! Follow her adventures

(in increments of 140 characters or
less) in the usual order or in ran-
dom, grammatically complete
chunks of the text from Alice's Ad-
ventures in Wonderland once a day.

Russian digital artist Vlad Gera-
simov has added a "Cheshire Kit-
ten" (both solid and half disap-
peared, of course!) to his
collection of free A/zV^inspired
graphics {KL 78:41) for computer
(and now cellphone/iPhone)
desktops.

"Ever wondered what it is like to
be Alice in Wonderland? Jump
down the depths of the Rabbit
Hole and find out! 'Alice Free
Fair [game for the iPhone] lets you
re-experience the dreamlike and
strangely awesome decent [sic],
which Alice made in pursuit of the
White Rabbit. Just as in Lewis
Carroll's novel, your journey
through the Hole will be accompa-
nied by mysterious Cheshire and
lots of other strange things — both
helpful and peculiar. Sure enough,
the game will unfold your own
memories and fantasies of the
times when you were reading or
watching Alice's Adventures in Won-
derland. Moreover, it was our inten-
tion to make it this way — a dreamy
and entertaining tribute to the
great work of the great author. For
now, the path to the Wonderland
is open, adventure awaits."

"Play the Alice in Wonderland
Costume game and dress Alice in
strange costumes worn by the
characters of Wonderland, then
click on the ace of spades to give
Alice an item from the Mad Hat-
ter!" This mildly amusing dress-up
game from FlashArcadeGamesite.
com appears to be designed for
tween and younger girls. Wonder
if they got permission from Disney
to use the movie version of the
Cheshire Cat in the game.

Yet another Alice video slot-ma-
chine game, "Alice's Wonderland,"
is available online for demo play.
This one has attractive graphics,
three entertaining bonus games.

and many amusing effects (the
Tweedles do a dance when you
line up three of them, the Cater-
pillar puffs on his hookah, etc.).
However, while you can play the
demo for free as much as you like,
the website encourages users to
register to play online for actual
cash. Be warned: Although the
demo version often lets the user
come out ahead, it is unlikely that
the real version is as obliging. That
said, check it out — it's fun!

Virtual Fairground announced on
August 3 that it is developing Won-
derland MMO (massively multi-
player online), a virtual world and
MMO game based on AAiW. The
aim is to create an online hangout
for teenage girls that has a darkly
romantic and mysterious style.

Previously available for the PS2
and PC, "Heart no Kuni no Alice,"
a visual novel game loosely based
on AAzVK is now available for the
PSP. "(A) young man with white
rabbit ears named White Peter
drags Alice down a rabbit hole to
Wonderland. Once Alice wakes up
she's trapped. The Keeper of the
Clock makes her leave the tower
she's in and she has to find some-
place to stay in Wonderland."

In "Alice in Bomberland," an
iPhone/iPod Touch game, the
traditional Wonderland charac-
ters, here designed by children's
book illustrator Mark Meyers,
juggle bombs and blow out burn-
ing fuses while Alice attempts to
collect as many pages as possible.
The game features quotes and
poems from the book, along with
an 1 1-song soundtrack.

Courtesy of Esquire magazine,
actress Mary-Louise Parker reads
from Alice dressed (or undressed)
in what appears to be lingerie.

From the curiouser and curiouser
world of iPhone applications
comes "Alice's Adventures - Rab-
bit Hole of Death," an arcade-style
game starring a buxom anime
Alice. As described by the creators,

"Alice is on a dangerous mission to
retrieve treasure from the bottom
of the Rabbit Hole. Guide her by
manipulating Alice's limbs
through this highly addictive
shape-matching, limb-bending
puzzle game!"

EVENTS, EXHIBITS, 6f PLACES

Lyndhurst in Tarrytown, New York,
one of America's finest Gothic Re-
vival mansions and a remarkable
example of the Hudson River's
grand and historic estates, has an
A&^themed room as part of its
holiday decor each year.

The exhibition of Maurice Send-
ak's work. There's a Mystery There:
Sendak on Sendak, created by the
Rosenbach Museum and Library
and currently at the Jewish Con-
temporary Museum in San Fran-
cisco from September 8 to January
19, 2010, includes a copy of AAiW
as an example of an important
influence on his work. There is
also a short video in which Sendak
discusses Dodgson's photo portrait
of Alice Liddell as a young woman
(he appears to own an original
print).

Goblins, Grimm & Alice: The Genius
of Arthur Rackham, an exhibit at
the Lilly Library (Lincoln Room)
at Indiana University from Sep-
tember 6 to October 6, marks the
70th anniversary of the illustrator's
death by highlighting some of his
most notable works, including
those for AAiWin 1907.

It is to be expected that Points of
View: Capturing the 1 9th century in
photographs, showing in the PAC-
CAR Gallery of the British Library
from October 30, 2009, to March
7, 2010, will include photographs
by Lewis Carroll.

Mr. Lewis Carroll was unable to
attend this year's National Book
Festival, which took place on the
National Mall in Washington,
D.C., on Saturday, September 26.
However, the delightful poster for
the event, illustrated by artist

Charles Santore, most cleverly
features Alice, the Hatter, the
March Hare, the Dormouse, the
Caterpillar, and the White Rabbit,
front and center as they should be.

The sixth annual Dark Alice in
Wonderland Ballv^as held at the
Bossanova Ballroom in Portland,
Oregon, on September 18. This
costumed event celebrates the
dark side of Alice in Wonderland
with proceeds benefiting local
animal shelters.

"Travel down the rabbit hole to
Museum Village [ a living history
museum in Monroe, New York] on
the 8th of August and join the
Queen to play croquet... Have tea
with the Mad Hatter and Alice...
Watch as costumed performers fill
the stage for a Live Chess Match...
Come in best attire for all to ad-
mire at the costume contest... And
beware thejabberwocky."

Following the success of last year's
event, Oxford's virtual Story Mu-
seum celebrated AAzWand TTLG
with Alice's Day on July 4. Events
included tea parties, croquet
games, exhibits, performances,
lectures (including some by the
LCS (UK)'s Edward Wakeling and
Mark Richards), walks, games, and
more, taking place at such inter-
esting and renowned places as the
Museum of Natural History, the
Bodleian Library, the Museum of
the History of Science, the Mu-
seum of Oxford, Christ Church,
and the University of Oxford Bo-
tanic Garden. If you weren't able
to attend, download the souvenir
guide!

The In Focus: Making a Scene ex-
hibit presented more than thirty
tableaux, or staged photographs,
from the J. Paul Getty Museum's
world-renowned photography
collection, on view at the Getty
Center (Los Angeles) from June
30 through October 18, 2009.
Among the nineteenth- and early-
twentieth-century selections were
tableaux vivants, or living pictures,
including Lewis Carroll's Saint

George and the Dragon, inspired by
the popular Victorian pastime of
dressing up and posing to resem-
ble famous works of art or literary
scenes.

Spanish illustrator Angel Domin-
guez has illustrated many chil-
dren's books and books about
wildlife. The Wonder of Illustration,
an exhibition of originals from
Dominguez's 1996 illustrated edi-
tion of AAiW {KL 53:11), was at
the Salisbury Museum in England
from April 4 to July 4, 2009.

Children's author and Oxford
resident Philip Pullman unveiled
the Bodleian Library's nine new
gargoyles on September 12. De-
signed by local schoolchildren in
2007 {KL 79:54), the gargoyles,
including the Dodo and the Twee-
die brothers, are now in place on
the northwest side of the building.

The Alice in Wonderland exhibit at
the Museum van de Twintigste
Eeuw [Museum of the Twentieth
Century] of Hoorn, Netherlands
(from May 21 to November 1)
provided play areas, distorting mir-
rors, life-size scenes from the
books, a library of AAfWand TTLG
in almost every language, and
showings of films, including the
first from 1903.

To announce the first of purport-
edly many designers creating
Alice-related couture as a tie-in to
the upcoming Disney movie, an
acrobatic Mad Tea Party event
featuring jewelry by Tom Binns
took place at the Magic Market-
place fashion trade show in Las
Vegas on September 2.

Vancouver, British Columbia's
Community Arts Workshop Society
celebrated its fifteenth annual
Alice in Wonderland Festival and
Mad Hatter's Tea Party on July 12
with an attempt at the record for
the world's largest gathering of
people dressed as Alice!

Hundreds of tissue and wicker
playing cards, Cheshire cats and
storybook characters lit up the

streets of Ulverston, Cumbria,
U.K. on September 19. The theme
of this year's annual Lantern Festi-
val was "Wonderland: Through the
Looking Glass." In addition to the
lantern processions, musicians,
dancers, and actors, "The Walrus
and the Carpenter" was read by
torchlight.

The ultra-fashionable Cahuenga
Corridor area of Los Angeles has a
new theme bar. "Wonderland"
patrons with concerns about the
contents (and the effects) of the
drinks on offer may be reassured
by co-owner Mike Malin, inter-
viewed in the Los Angeles Times:
"It's a very loose 'Alice in Wonder-
land' theme," Malin said. "We
wanted it to be playful and whimsi-
cal but not beat people over the
head with it."

Another Carroll-inspired watering
hole has recently opened in Lon-
don. Callooh Callay is an eclectic
and infinitely hip gathering place
where the signature drink, the
Mad Hatter's Tiki Punchbowl, is
served in "an exclusive gramo-
phone punchbowl." Mismatched
floral chairs, antique gramo-
phones, black ceilings, and wrap-
ping paper on the walls provide
the offbeat background for con-
viviality into the wee hours.

MOVIES & TELEVISION

i?M55m.' magazine's "Made in Rus-
sia" blog has posted the Soviet-
made /L4eWand 7TLG cartoons
online: "Thirty years after Alice's
colorful, light-hearted Disneyfica-
tion, a Soviet animation studio in
Kiev birthed Alice in Wonderland
(1981) and Alice Through the Look-
ing Glass (1982) — shape-shifting
and color-swirling, comparably
creepy thirty minute cartoons.
Alice's most psychedelic and
schizoid incarnation — a witty,
pouty lash-batter with fringed dark
locks that float and change hue —
bounces her way over bleeding

watercolor landscapes, minimalist
backgrounds, and stretching and
sinking sets. Unlike most other
Alices, all lovely and sugar-sweet
and just a little spoiled, the Soviet
Alice is acidic, stubborn, bitchy,
and very welcoming to any and all
hallucinations Wonderland has to
offer, conjured up in a surrealist
frolic by the Soviet animators. So
what that the Mad Hatter is more
of a depressed drunkard?"

We should have mentioned in the
item on the Oxford Colloquium
(/<:L 82:46-7) that Sanrio's 1993
Hello Kittyversion, in which Kitty, a
Japanese symbol of cuteness, plays
the part of Alice, is available on
DVD as a separate episode in the
U.K., and as part of the Hello Kitty
and Friends, Volume 3: Timeless Tales
package in the U.S. from ADV
Films.

The new television show Warehouse
13 on Syfy (formerly known as the
Sci Fi Channel) likes Alice. "Reso-
nance" (episode 1.2, original air
date July 14, 2009) opens with
Pete playing ping-pong with him-
self via a mirror. A close-up of the
mirror's label notes that the origi-
nal owner was "Lewis Carroll a.k.a.
Charles Dodgson." In "Duped"
(episode 1.8, original air date
August 25, 2009), "Pete is fooling
around with Lewis Carroll's mir-
ror, and when the disco ball from
Studio 54 falls, Myka gets trapped
(in the mirror), switching places
with Alice. He returns to the files
on Lewis Carroll and notes that
the author was chronicling the
insanity of the real Alice. Leena
finds a report indicating that
somehow Alice became trapped in
the mirror right after committing
a series of murders, which she now
attempts to continue in the real
world."

Colored Tenniel figures were part
of the decor of an Easter egg hunt
in scenes from the Ugly Betty epi-
sode "The Rabbit Test," which
aired on ABC on April 30.

AAzWwas the answer to one of the
puzzles on Wheel of Fortune on May
29. And earlier in the month, the
final answer on Jeopardy was "In
1865, this author wrote 'Why,
you're nothing but a pack of
cards!'" Sadly, only one contestant
got it right.

Mickey Mouse Clubhouse: Mickey 's
Adventures in Wonderland, a DVD
for children, was released on Sep-
tember 8. "Meet Tweedle Chip,
Tweedle Dale, and Goofy Hatter,
play croquet with Queen Clara-
belle, and more!"

Syfy has finally started releasing
pictures and press information for
its four-hour miniseries Alice, an-
nounced over a year ago {KL
80:48) and slated for December 6
and 7. ". . . Writer/director Nick
Willing has created the modern-
day story of Alice Hamilton ( Ga-
te rina Scorsone), a fiercely inde-
pendent twenty-something who
suddenly finds herself on the
other side of a looking glass. She is
a stranger in an outlandish city of
twisted towers and casinos built
out of playing cards, all under the
rule of a deliciously devilish
Queen (Kathy Bates) who's not
very happy about Alice's arrival. ...
Rounding out the stellar cast are
Tim Curry as Dodo, Colm Meaney
as the King of Hearts, Philip Win-
chester as Jack of Hearts, Matt
Frewer as the White Knight, An-
drew Lee Potts as Hatter, Alessan-
drojuliani as 9 of Clubs, Timothy
Webber as Carpenter, Alex Diakun
as Ratcatcher, Zak Santiago as 10
of Clubs, and Eugene Lipinski as
Doctors Dee and Dum."

Bollywood director Shashanka
Ghosh has announced that he will
be directing "a completely Indian-
ised version of Alice in Wonderland,
named Alisha."

In Ken Burns's PBS series The
National Parks: Am£rica 's Best Idea, it
is mentioned that the Northern
Pacific Railway took advantage of

the recent publication of AAiW to
promote the Yellowstone area as a
Wonderland.

To celebrate his sixth year of col-
laboration with Louis Vuitton,
Takashi Murakami has created a
new animated movie, "Super Flat
First Love," as a sequel to the "Su-
perflat Monogram" video created
in 2003. A young girl once again
falls down a "rabbit" hole outside a
Vuitton Luggage store.

October 4 was the American pre-
mier of the episode "The Allegory
of Love" in the Inspector Lewis se-
ries on PBS's Masterpiece Mystery. It
features an Oxford fantasy writer
in the tradition of Tolkien and C.
S. Lewis, and much is made of the
fantasy tradition at Oxford that
begins with Carroll. A mirror
(which features in the writer's
novel as a magic mirror) is used in
an attempt to murder a young
woman named Alice, and an unsa-
vory Oxford don who is a Carroll
expert is a major character. He can
be seen polishing framed copies of
Carroll's photographs, lecturing
on the Mad Tea Party to a seminar,
and defending Carroll's reputa-
tion to a fellow don.

MUSIC

"Made in Bombay, born and
raised in the UK, and currently
based in San Francisco, Mi-
cropixie is a self-proclaimed Alien
with extraORDINARY Abilities.
She is also the extraterrestrial
alter ego of writer, filmmaker, and
full-time human being. Single
Beige Female. Her debut release,
Alice in Stevie Wonderland, is a con-
cept album telling the true story
of One Little Alien's mission on
planet Earth to experience life as
a human being."

Dutch composer Michael Corner
has published three books of Alice
music: Songs of Alice/From Looking-

glass ^ Wonder Lands /Quasi-medi-
eval exercises for two voices a cappella
("Walrus and the Carpenter,"
"Jabberwocky," and "The Mock
Turtle's Lament"); Pieces of Alice/
The Walrus and the Carpenter/ Chro-
matic Variations for Piano Solo /; and
More Pieces of Alice/ Loaf of Bread &"
Soup of the Evening/ Chromatic Varia-
tions for Piano Solo IL The instruc-
tions in Songs of Alice dive particu-
larly captivating. For example.
Section 16 of "The Walrus and the
Carpenter" ("It seems a shame to
play them such a trick...") is to be
sung "cheerfully unimpeded by
feelings of sympathy, in which
three oyster variations constitute
the theme in both voices, while a
slow walrus variation forms part of
an intermittent tenor in either
voice." The books, which are avail-
able from the music publisher
MIEV, cost €10 each or €25 for
all three. They can be ordered by
writingj.vreuls@chello.nl, and will
be individually printed on de-
mand, with a series number
should the customer so desire.

Francisco Lopez, one of the major
figures of the musique concrete,
sound art, and experimental music
scenes, released Through the Look-
ing-Glass in July, a box set of five
CDs. Created over the last 30 years,
this collection includes environ-
mental recordings from the forests
of Brazil, Argentina, and Venezu-
ela to New York City buildings.
However, aside from the tide and

perhaps "inspiration," there is no
particular connection to Carroll.

Many musical works have been
inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice
books, and even by The Hunting of
the Snark, but nothing but aca-
demic books have been inspired
by his letters. Fortunately, Free
Music Archive fills this void by
making available Igor Ballereau's
Lettres a des amies-enfants, five songs
for voice, flute, clarinet, violin,
viola, and cello performed byjody
Pou and Ensemble SIC. Based on
Lewis Carroll's letters to his child-
friends Marion Richards, Dolly
Argles, Ethel Arnold, and Jessie
Sinclair, and on his poem "The
Mad Gardner's Song," the five
pieces are in an experimental
classical style, and may or may not
be your cup of tea. But for the
whopping price of $0.00, they are
definitely worth a listen.

On May 3 at the Alex Theatre in
Glendale, the Los Angeles Cham-
ber Orchestra presented Through
the Looking Glass, as part of its 2009
family series. With assistance from
the Los Angeles Children's Cho-
rus, the program included Suite:
Alice Through a Looking Glass, "a
fun-filled work by Los Angeles-
based composer Paul Gibson for
the young and young-at-heart,
based on Lewis Carroll's 'The
Walrus and the Carpenter,' 'Be-
neath a Sunny Sky,' and 'Jabber-
wocky.'" Unfortunately, member
Blossom Norman did not care for
the piece: "This was a big disap-
pointment to me. The choir was
lovely, but you could not hear the
lyrics. Also, I thought the music
was too 'pleasant' and was not
clever or brilliant in any way. In
other words, nothing Lewis Carroll
about it."

PERFORMING ARTS

Ron Nicol's Beware The Jabberwock
(ISBN 978-0-87440-215-5) has
recently been published by Baker's
Plays, a subsidiary of Samuel
French, Inc. The play was sug-

gested by the poem "Jabberwocky"
and is suitable for young people to
perform or for adults to perform
to a young audience.

Alice in Wonderland, performed by
the Move-About Theatre Company
in the Shakespeare Garden in San
Francisco's Golden Gate Park
from May 22 to 31, had the audi-
ence moving from place to place
as different scenes were enacted.

Another performance where the
audience follows the performers
as the story progresses is the Ni-
cole Caruso Dance Company's
Wandering Alice. This roaming
performance journey, inspired by
the writings of Lewis Carroll and
Haruki Murakami, premiered at
the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival
2008. Plans to tour the work in-
clude a performance at First Night
Festival in Binghamton, New York
on December 31, 2009, and a run
at Indiana University of Pennsylva-
nia in April, 2010.

In Cra/i; magazine #10 (the issue
with Amy Sedaris on the cover, so
you get the idea) , an article en-
titled "Mad Tea Party" noted "The
whimsical Barney's World of Won-
derment turned up the color with
handmade props and costumes at
San Francisco's annual Castro
Street Fair in October. A trip
through Wonderland with these
playful circus and street perform-
ers left us as giddy as the Mad
Hatter."

"If Peter Pan and Alice left their
normal boring lives in London
and found each other in the same
fantastical world, would they ever
want to come back to reality?"
Boom Kat Dance Company's Never-
wonderland, performed from May
29 through June 14 at the Miles
Memorial Playhouse in Santa
Monica, California, "depicts the
search for a place in lives 'real'
and imagined: set at the height of
Industrial Revolution-era Eng-
land, it deconstructs and rebuilds
the borderland at which Never-

land and Wonderland confront
the world we know."

The Anonymous Ensemble's A
Wonderland played July 8 through
July 1 1 as part of the Ice Factory
Festival at NYC's Ohio Theatre.
"Alice, a talented, urban dreamer
approaching middle age, is caught
in a quagmire of diminishing po-
tential, corporate insignificance
and the mirage of celebrity. This is
Lewis Carroll deconstructed by the
mind of a modern, mature song-
stress on a journey of self-identity.
A befeathered spectacle; a psyche-
delic, multimedia/music-fueled
trip down the rabbit hole."

project: ALICE, presented by KD-
MINDUSTRIES from May 7 to 16
at the Carriageworks Arts Centre
in Sydney, Australia, explores a
Gen Y Wonderland: "On their
travels Alice and her Hatter take
in the sights: technology, relation-
ships, and social connections — the
spaces where Gen Y live; exploring
important themes of love, friend-
ship, energy, boredom, honesty,
and inventiveness. From manic
London nightclubs, neon frenzied
Tokyo subways, and cyberspace,
Alice follows her white rabbit on a
fantastical journey across the globe
and beyond. Firing through the
online fibres which connect and
define Alice's tech generation, she
delights, questions, and discovers
in a reverberating mash of sonic
power and high energy music on
the streets of Sydney."

Check out the online video for
Alice di Carta, an Italian musical
inspired by the work of Lewis Car-
roll by TodoModo and Artin-
banco.

A July 22 New York Times article,
"Maximum Security and a Starring
Role" by Elisabetta Povoledo, fea-
tured Compagnia della Fortezza, a
theater group in the maximum
security prison in Volterra, Italy,
and the play that the group was
performing, Alice in Wonderland, a
Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civi-
lization. The director calls the play

"a 'tragedy of power' in which the
characters try to break free of the
roles imposed on them by their
playwrights."

The comedy team behind the BBC
Radio 2 show Fm Sorry I Haven 't
a Clue present their own unique
take on Lewis Carroll's most fa-
mous work: Humph in Wonderland.
Originally broadcast in 2007, an
audiobook is now available from
Amazon.co.uk or BBC Audio.

A casting call has gone out for
Exposure Time, a new play to be
performed at the New Jersey Rep-
ertory Company, in Long Branch,
New Jersey. "In the nascent days of
photography, sitting for a portrait
was no mean feat and the art of
capturing a photo was physical
labor and highly competitive. It
was during this time that an ambi-
tious woman, Julia Cameron, went
head-to-head with the neurotic
Charles Dodgson, better known as
Lewis Carroll, in an attempt to
become Britain's premier photog-
rapher. The pawn in their battle
was Alice. Sometimes the real story
is as mad as the made up one!"

THINGS

The Tahki Stacy Charles yarn web-
site features a pattern book titled
Book Smart. It has several literature-
inspired garments, including a
blue (of course) Alice in Wonder-
land duster (more like a lace-pat-
terned pinafore). And as long as
you've got your knitting needles
out, there are patterns for cute
hedgehog toys on the Lion Brand
Yarn website (free) and the Fiber
Trends website ($5.95).

One can always find hundreds of
wonderful, and usually handmade,
AAzWitems just by putting "Alice"
in the search box on Etsy.com. You
can find a particularly fun
Cheshire Cat bag, which also
comes as a hoodie and a t-shirt, by
searching on "When a cat smiles."
"When you see a cat that smiles,
you know you're in trouble."

Find kawaii (cute) stationery and
other fun Japanese items inspired
by A4?Wat FromJapanWithLove's
Etsy store and ShopKawaii.com.

Lasercut from self-adhesive Plexi-
glas, the "Alice in Wonderland"
mirror designed by Matali Crasset
cleverly looks like a girl's head
with long hair, but wouldn't it have
been even more clever to title it
"Alice Through the Looking-
Glass"?

Almost out of date, but now on
sale, and it's the pictures that mat-
ter, anyway: a 2009 calendar is
available for 2008 's Broadxvay Bares
(AL 80:49) musical extravaganza
and fundraiser, with scenes from
both onstage and off.

StampFrancisco.com has a huge
selection of Alice rubber stamps,
including one that displays a page
from AAuG (#28-119). Look for
theme 28: "Alice in Wonderland 8c
Brownies," although what Palmer
Cox's sprites have in common with
Alice, outside of their coetaneous-
ness, is a mystery.

You can have a key made with a
delightful purple Disney Cheshire
Cat on it for only $5! Other Disney
characters are available, but no
others from Alice. Key blanks may
be found online by Googling
"Cheshire Cat key."

I know that it is asking an awful lot
of all you Carrollians out there,
but next time you are in Michigan,
stop in at the New Holland Brew-
ing Company and try their Mad
Hatter India Pale Ale. Come on,
take one (or three) for the team!

Online gift store The Afternoon
carries the intriguing "Haunted
Tea Party" tableware line: an appe-
tizer/dessert plate that features
the Hatter, March Hare, and Alice
in a witch's hat at a midnight tea
table set with pumpkin teapots;
plates that say "Eat Me" and mugs
that say "Drink Me" (of course); a
punch bowl shaped like a giant tea
cup (note the ladle); matching
napkins; and a rather bizarre cat-
erpillar bowl holder. Also, another
online retailer, FlagandBanner.
com, has a matching banner, so
your guests will know where the
Halloween party is.

If you've somehow missed the very
cool Gorey Details online shop,
this is an excellent time to check it
out, for in addition to their large
selection of A/zc^related jewelry,
rubber stamps, books, cards, art-
work, etc., they've just added a
great alarm clock with playing
cards spinning around Alice's
head to count off the seconds, as
well as t-shirts, buttons, and statio-
nery with new Dark Wonderland
designs by Crab Scrambly.

Northern California artist Susan
Sanford has created a 2010 calen-
dar with some very clever images:
"Alice's adventures in Wonderland
reimagined as if Tenniel's illustra-
tions had leaped out of the book
and were adventuring in the rose
gardens and antique stores in the
real world." Also, don't miss her

homage to Alice and Edward
Gorey!

Pipos Doll Shop has released an
AAzWseries of Japanese-style ball-
joint dolls that includes Alice,
"Queen (Heart) ," "Queen (White) ,"
the Hatter, and a very interesting
Cheshire Cat.

Connox, a German online house-
wares store, is selling "coffee
lights," porcelain Limoges cups
and saucers fitted with transform-
ers and brackets in order to be
hung upside down as light fix-
tures. Only €156 each, they would
fit nicely in a Mad Tea Party-
themed decor.

A weekly auction of very fun items
donated by the family of the great
Carrollian collector Carolyn Buck
is now live on the Society website.
Check it out, and keep checking
back, as new items will be added
from time to time.

"Psychedelic Wonderland: The
2010 Calendar" by artist and de-
signer John Coulthard was in-
spired by his recent exploration of
late-'60s psychedelic rock and the
convenient 12-chapter format of
Wonderland. Coulthard provides a
month-by-month explanation of
the calendar's vibrant illustrations
at his website.

The Unemployed Philosophers
Guild new retail catalog for 2010
lists many Alice items, including
a new Wonderland "passport"
pocket notebook ($5). 718-254-
9345.

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