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

Although much literary scholarship addresses Alice and the dream world that she encounters, Wonderland’s creator has been an enigmatic figure. In The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst does quite a bit of academic sleuthing in order to piece together the mysterious and largely unknown life of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who was known to the literary world as Lewis Carroll. Douglas-Fairhurst accomplishes this daunting task through the examination of Carroll’s letters, childhood writings, photographs, and, in large part, his very extensive diary. In addition, Douglas-Fairhurst solidly establishes Carroll in the Victorian era and provides a context under which Dodgson became Lewis Carroll and conceived of both Alice and Wonderland. Douglas-Fairhurst portrays Carroll as possessing a strange mix of nonsensical whimsy and calculated, almost obsessive, order. It is this controlled nonsense that has become so endearing to readers as Alice attempts to make sense of Wonderland. Douglas-Fairhurst also does not shy away from confronting the conflicting rumors surrounding Carroll and his relationship with the real Alice. He sifts through the evidence, or lack thereof, and attempts to construct a complete picture of the controversial relationship.

In order to erect an accurate picture of Carroll’s life, after briefly introducing readers to the adult Alice in the prologue, Douglas-Fairhurst begins at the beginning: Carroll’s childhood, “before Alice” (25). Born in 1832, the eldest son of eleven children, Carroll entertained his large family with his stories even as a child. Douglas-Fairhurst creates a portrait of the young Carroll, a lover of puzzles, numbers, and word games who enjoyed “pulling things apart and putting them together again” (45). Douglas-Fairhurst points out that this theme of taking apart and reassembling things is one that repeats throughout Carroll’s life. He describes an odd collection of items found under the floorboards of Carroll’s childhood home—“a linen handkerchief[,] … a child’s battered leather shoe, and a hand-stitched glove,” mixed in with other curious items, including “a thimble, a tiny penknife, a crocheting instrument and some pieces from a dolls’ china tea set” and some “fragments of a clay pipe and crab shell” (29)—which reinforces the idea of bits and fragments being gathered up, ready to be reconstituted into something new. Douglas-Fairhurst creates a sense for the reader that Carroll is always storing away his experiences and surroundings—the sights, sounds, and odd bits—for future use. It is from this notion of controlled nonsense, of strange pieces repurposed, that the future creator of Wonderland begins to emerge.

However, Douglas-Fairhurst reminds the reader that Carroll does not exist in a vacuum. The oddities and eccentricities of Victorian Oxford with its mix of the old and the new, where Carroll would attend school at Christ Church and live out the rest of his days as a mathematics professor, provide a proper context for the creation of dream worlds. Some of the sights in the future Wonderland, for instance, pale in comparison to the habits of the real-life William Buckland, the “celebrated zoophagist,” who was convinced that it was his God-given obligation to “munch his way through the entire animal kingdom” (61). In presenting him and other strange inhabitants of Carroll’s Oxford, Douglas-Fairhurst accomplishes the difficult but important task of presenting an accurate portrayal of Victorian society. In fact, in large part, Douglas-Fairhurst’s success with The Story of Alice lies in his ability to put Carroll in the context of his own age. Without this, much of our understanding of Carroll would be lost.

Similarly, Douglas-Fairhurst does a more than adequate job of fully treating Carroll’s photography obsession. Even before Carroll was acquainted with photography, or Alice, he was always fascinated with time. Douglas-Fairhurst points out that photography allowed Carroll to experiment with the idea of capturing a...