The Making of the Alice Books: Lewis Carroll's Uses of Earlier Children's Literature, and: In Memoriam, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898: Obituaries of Lewis Carroll and Related Pieces

As 1998 is the one-hundredth anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s death on January 14, 1898, the year has been marked by a number of conferences and publications dealing with Carroll and his work. These two volumes make interesting companion pieces in that they are both primarily anthologies; one reprints selections from children’s books that influenced Carroll’s writing for children and the other reprints obituaries and articles written shortly after Carroll’s death. Read together they offer a fascinating cultural snapshot of children’s literature prior to Carroll’s publications and then how the mainstream press viewed children’s literature and Carroll shortly after his death.

Frequently Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) has been seen by historians of children’s literature as such a remarkable or ground-breaking book that it has been taken out of its literary or cultural context. Harvey Darton in Children’s Books in England (1932) has compared its 1865 publication to “a spiritual volcano” in children’s literature (153). Percy Muir neatly divides English children’s books into the two categories—“From Harris to Alice” and “After Carroll” (10) —and argues that there was “no comparable giant before or after it” (148). It has become a standard assumption that Carroll single-handedly changed children’s literature with the publication of the Alice books.

Literary history is never quite so simple, or as clear-cut, as it appears in textbooks or in survey courses. Writers didn’t go to bed as Romantics and wake up Victorians. Like most things, literary history is messy. Books influence books. Unlike Athena, Alice in Wonderland did not emerge fully-formed from Carroll’s head. However, to acknowledge that the Alice books were strongly influenced by earlier children’s literature doesn’t reduce Carroll’s genius, a point that Reichertz’s study makes clear.

Reichertz argues that too often Carroll’s use of earlier children’s literature in developing the thematic and formal features of the Alice books has been overlooked, although he acknowledges that Carroll’s parodies of earlier works by authors such as Issac Watts, Ann and Jane Taylor, and Robert Southey have been well researched. Reichertz admits that he is following the lead of Roger Lancelyn Green’s introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of the Alice books (1962) in seeking the sources that may have influenced Carroll. However, Reichertz seems to undervalue Steven Prickett’s Victorian Fantasy (1979) and Marguerite Mespoulet’s The Creators of Wonderland (1934), although both texts are given slight mention. Reichertz seems unaware of the significant work found in Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tellers of Tales (1946), Michael C. Kotzin’s Dickens and the Fairy Tale (1972), John Goldthwaite’s The Natural History of Make-Believe (1996), or Gillian Avery’s Nineteenth-Century Children (1965) in providing a literary context for Carroll’s work in earlier children’s literature.

This is a surprisingly thin book on such a rich subject. The book is divided into two major sections: Reichertz’s 75 pages of analysis and subsequent 148 pages of appendices that reprint examples of children’s texts that are sources or analogues for the Alice books. As a result, the most useful aspect of the text is the reprinting of the original children’s texts, making the study more of an anthology than a work of criticism.

Reichertz uses the concept of “litterature” which Carroll coined when discussing the genesis of Sylvie and Bruno (1889) to show how Carroll’s theory of composition was a collection of bits and pieces of litter, or those “random flashes of thought” traceable “to the books one was reading” or to...