The Making of the Alice Books: Lewis Carroll's Use of Earlier Children's Literature by Ronald Reichertz (review)

HUMANITIES 491 Virginia ... to the mountains of Georgia/ and you wilJ find reasons as thick as blackberries.' McGee emphasized it in the first debates ·m the new Confederation Parliament, November 186T 'Not only at the time of the Trent affair [1861], but at every subsequent period of the four years' civil war, American events deeply impressed themselves on every Canadian capable of observation or reflection ... we were taught that the days of the colonial comedy of Government were over and gone, and that politics had become stern, and almost tragic for the New World.' It was tragic enough for poor McGee. He was shot dead by a Fenian just five months later. These events created the hydraulic pressure under which old colonial loyalties were angled and bent, forcing those who were hesitant about Confederation (and there were many in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland) to revise their thinking, to accept, if grudgingly , Confederation as a measure for the common defence and welfare of Britisl) North America. The same American events also justified the heavy hand of the British in enacting the British North America Act ot 1867. There are some comparisons that jar the academic mind; Edward Whelan is teamed in Literary tandem w.ith Edmund Burke. One has the impression that Burke is brought in mainly because the author likes him and his ideas. Burke (1729--97) is some distance from 1864. Walter Bagehot (1826-77) is also brought in, but he is a contemporary, editor of the London Economist, who joined the British chorus of approval for Confederation: vi2, it would lay some responsibility upon what appeared in London to be fairly irresponsible colonials. But there are twenty pages on Burke and eight on Bagehot, and neither contributes greatly to the texture and feel of the r86os in British North America. That being noted, however, let it be said that the author has excelJent character sketches of the Fathers, Brown, Tupper, Tilley, Macdonald, Cartier, Langevin. Indeed, the best thing about 1867 is its cast of characters and the portraits that Christopher Moore has made. It's a readable book for Canada of the 1990s, lively and to the point; if it is cavalier from time to time chasing a thesis or a hypothesis, that is a minor defect of considerable virtues. To make Canadian history interesting, vibrant, and sufficiently accurate is an achievement in itself. (P.B. WAITE) Ronald Reichertz. The Maki11g oftlze Alice Books: Lewis Carroll's Use of Enrlier Children's Lilerntme MeGill-Queen's University Press. x, 254. $55.00 This is an important book. So I eventually concluded, although after 75. pages I wasn't convinced, and even after 230 I was left asking, 'So what?' It's a short text, the 75 pages divided into six chapters, with 148 pages of appendices: an unusual, disconcerting format, as perhaps suits a book on IN CANADA 1997 Lewis Carroll, and further, it's a book with the ghost of another book within it, waiting to be written, Carroll appeals to a broad audience. Reichertz lists philosophersr logicians, rnathemahciansrphysicists, psychologists, folklorists, politicians, literary critics. We might add children. Reichertz sets out to prove that an unexplored approach is Carroll's use of 'the tradition of children's literature in developing both the thematic and formal features of the Alice books1 from the mid-seventeenth century to the 1890s. The first version of Al.ice was the 1864 manuscript, 'Alice's Adventures Under Ground.' The first edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published by Macmillan in 1865, Through the Looking-Glass mul What Alice Found There in 1871, the published Alice's Adventures Underground in 1886, and The Nursery Alice in 18go, following the 1889 abortive first edition: ten thousand copies rejected in Britain where Carroll deemed the illustrations too gaudy, and in America where they were considered not gaudy enough. Reichertz looks at Carroll's literary sources: books of nursery rhymes and fairy-tales, looking-glass books, books of dream visions~ and the world turned upside down and inside out. As Iona and Peter Opie have shown in theirwork on nursery rhymes, the tradition goes back beforeJolm Newbery (1713-67...