The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature, and: Alice beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-First Century (review)

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. John Tenniel's illustration of Alice and Humpty Dumpty perfectly conveys how Jan Susina's The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature situates the Alice books within the context of children's literature, while the drawing of Alice and the Cheshire cat (by graphic novelist and artist Barnaby Ward) on the cover of Alice beyond Wonderland vividly represents the volume's focus on the Alice books' expansive influence. In Ward's illustration, Alice looks like a manga heroine, the cat resembles a serpent (albeit one with a furry tail), and the palette is brooding blacks and browns.

But that is not to suggest that Susina's study is narrowly conservative or academically provincial. Highly engaging, it is as well researched as it is, appropriately, curious. It contains two sustained analyses of book covers themselves—of Lewis Carroll's own innovation of the dust jacket and of recent paperback editions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)—and its concerns range from the evolution of the fairy tale and the phenomenon of cross-writing to paratexts and the history of the hypertext.

The result is a study that snaps things into place—the proper generic classification of the Alice books as literary fairy tales, Wonderland's celebration of the middle class, and the domestic nature of its ending—and precisely situates Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (1871) in that too often miscellaneous category, children's literature. Positioning the Alice books alongside Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863), the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and George MacDonald, and Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House (1839), Susina argues that Wonderland "did not change 'the whole cast of children's literature,' as Harvey Darnton and so many other critics have suggested" (45), but that Carroll worked within the tradition of literary fairy tales and was part of a writing community that also included Charlotte Yonge and Margaret Gatty. Similarly, one of Susina's most suggestive chapters places Wonderland alongside Hesba Stretton's Jessica's First Prayer (1867) and considers these two "extremely popular and influential Victorian children's books published within one year of each other" in terms of the "very different social classes" of their readers and protagonists (107, 110). Reminding us that "Jessica's First Prayer sold ten times as many copies as Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland during the Victorian period" (109), Susina asks why Stretton has "been relegated to the infrequently mentioned realm of Evangelical tract writers while Lewis Carroll has become a classic Victorian children's author" (110). Susina thus expands our sense of children's literature as it existed in the nineteenth century, bringing this noncanonical text into productive conversation with Carroll's more durable text.

One of the most valuable sections, "Multiple Wonderlands," details Carroll's involvement in the Victorian "Alice Industry" (61). "Examining the constellation of interrelated texts and objects produced by Carroll" (61), Susina situates his creations within the history of the book, children's literature, and consumer culture, revealing Wonderland to be "simultaneously a landmark in the history of children's literature and a significant text in the history of publishing in the Victorian period" (62). Drawing our attention to Carroll's involvement in marketing and publishing, for instance, Susina points out that Carroll tested his choice of frontispiece with thirty families, replacing the Jabberwocky with "the less threatening White Knight" and that he was already thinking about a sequel nine months after Wonderland was published (63). Susina thus shows that "in analyzing Wonderland primarily in terms of Carroll's relationship with Alice Liddell, critics have tended to overlook Carroll's more long-term...