"Adventures of a Children's Writer": Lewis Carroll and Authorship

Just when you may have thought that scholars and critics have said all there is to say about Lewis Carroll and the Alice books, along comes Jan Susina's slim but wide-ranging study of Carroll's place in children's literature. This book serves as a compendium, bringing together work by such contributors as Ronald Reichertz, Will Brooker, Morton Cohen, Helmut Gernsheim, and Carolyn Sigler. Susina covers a lot of ground, and he does so with a scholar's eye for detail and a critic's sensitivity to imagined worlds. This book combines genealogy, biography, interpretation, and speculation. It is the work of a bibliophile, and I mean this in the best of ways. Reading this book is absorbing and informative. The mind at work here is steeped in its subject, and the result is a fascinating study that should prove indispensable both to further research on Carroll and to contemporary and future studies of publishing and its connections to emerging electronic forms of communication. The argument is simple but crucial: Carroll is an author who is at the center of children's literature because his work touches on or innovates much of contemporary practices in children's literature. And by "contemporary practices," I mean practices in both the form and content of children's books and their publishing and marketing.

Susina begins with a review of Carroll's juvenilia, noting how his early family magazines contain the seeds of what later becomes Carroll's mature style. Visual and verbal puns, characters who later emerge fully conceived in Carroll's published work, parody, and vestiges of nonsense verse in the vein of Edward Lear all foreshadow the work to come. Much of what Susina outlines here has been touched on by such writers as Derek Hudson and Jean Gattegno, but already we can see the thoroughness of the research in this book. Susina deftly draws on primary and secondary works, making observations on the writing, drawing, general appearance, and production of the early home magazines. He notes how these early works serve as a prolepsis for what is to come as Carroll matures into an author who takes control not only of the stories he invents, but also the manner in which these stories reach the public. Susina positions Carroll at the forefront of emerging practices in publishing for children. As he goes on to outline, Carroll participated in the production of his books, from the placing of illustrations to the binding and appearance of the cover. Carroll even invented the dust jacket as a marketing device. He was more than an author; he was a book designer and an advertising manager. He oversaw not only the production of his books, but also their transformation into sequels, dramas, and spin-off items such as a date book, a Postage-Stamp Case, a "Mad Tea-Party" tablecloth, a "set of ivory-carved parasol handles in the shape of characters from Wonderland and Looking Glass," and the Looking Glass Biscuit Tin (67-68).

In short, this book is chock-full of interesting information and data certain to fascinate both the professional and nonprofessional reader. Here is the lineup of topics the twelve chapters explore: Carroll's juvenilia; his relationship to the literary fairy tale; Carroll and letter-writing and the connection between his letters and his published work; the creation of the Alice industry; imitations of the Alice books; The Nursery Alice; Carroll's photographs of children; class in the Alice books and in Victorian literature in general; Sylvie and Bruno and cross-writing; the marketing of the Alice books, cyber culture and hypertext; and finally a look at Jon Scieszka's version of Alice, based on the Disney Studio drawings by Mary Blair. The twelve chapters cover a lot of ground, perhaps most originally in dealing with The Nursery Alice and Sylvie and Bruno, the Alice industry and marketing, and Alice as hypertext. This is not to say that the discussions of other matter are devoid of provocative...