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  • "Tea with Alice of Alice in Wonderland"With an Introduction and Cultural Critique by Sanjay Sircar
  • Sanjay Sircar and Miles Franklin

A piece on Lewis Carroll's birth centenary exhibition of 1932 organized by the London booksellers J. and E. Bumpus, "Tea with Alice of Alice in Wonderland" by Miles Franklin, author of the Australian classic My Brilliant Career (1901), lends itself to a critique of once prevalent, perhaps still-existing adult attitudes toward children and their literature. An examination of Franklin's essay, which does not appear in any bibliography of which I am aware, enables us to focus on the production, commercial dissemination, reception, and institutionalization of literature specifically for children. Production and reception take place in a particular cultural or ethnographical context (such as colonialism) and within a capitalist class society (sometimes marked by snobbery, deference, commodity fetishism, and commodification). In this larger context, children's literature can manifest reverence for the good old days and for childhood, it can engender games in which adults take the roles of children and characters from juvenile fiction, and it can foster mythmaking in regard to children's classics generally.

Tea with Alice of Alice in Wonderland Miles Franklin

How many millions must have wished that they could have tea with Alice and the Mad Hatter!

So it scarcely seemed real when I found myself actually seated at the same table as the one and only Alice herself. But so it was in the wonderland of London, in that particularly seductive establishment, the ancient and honourable book store of Messrs. J. and E. Bumpus, on Oxford street, where Royalty shop. It all happened so simply. Certain people had the pleasure of their company being [End Page 127] requested at the Old Courthouse for the private opening of the Lewis Carroll Centenary Exhibition. The card of invitation was about eight inches square, and decorated with Alice, the Cheshire Cat, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Duchess, and other quaint immortal entities. Mr. J. G. Wilson, the head of Bumpus's, is celebrated for his organisation of unique and delightful occasions, and in this one was conspicuously successful. Those who arrived before the rooms grew too full gained a comprehensive idea of the extensive character and methodical arrangement of the exhibition. Here is all of Carroll, as testified by Mr. Falconer Madan's scholarly catalogue of 116 pages. Here is everything from cheapest reprints, parodies, card games, translations, dramatisations, biscuit tins, up to choicely printed volumes bound in vellum: and those even more costly freak volumes beloved of collectors for a spurious rarity, for which, as a would-be living author, I have lively contempt. They are too often the prizes of the maleficently wealthy in a snobbish sport, the toys of those who, perhaps, lack discernment, generosity or courage to recognise and aid writers in their arduous beginnings. There were endless genuine treasures lent by nearly a hundred owners; journals, letters, photographs, paintings; original drawings by Tenniel, Furness, and others; and, sent by Messrs[.] Macmillan, the 42 original wood blocks for Tenniel's illustrations of "Alice in Wonderland." One bay was full of a large and remarkable collection of Carrolliana sent across the Atlantic by its American owner. Everything imaginable was there, superbly arranged.

But the guests very quickly obscured the exhibits, and the speaking began. The Patroness, H.R.H. Princess Beatrice, was unable to be present, because of an operation on her eye. The chairman, the Very Rev. the Dean of Christ Church (Dr. H. J. White), said that the very same verger who had shown him to his seat when he first entered Christ Church was still alive, and had recently tumbled downstairs without hurting the stairs or himself, though he was 92. He also related how, as an undergraduate in his first term, he had met Mr. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), as mathematical tutor, and was sorry to say that he did not come up to standard in his Euclid. After a severe interview, Mr. Dodgson said that Mr. White must attend his lectures. He said that the undergraduates dreaded Mr. Dodgson, and in his own case this fear had resulted in concentrated effort. He concluded by saying that to...

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