The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, and: Lewis Carroll: The Man and His Circle by Edward Wakeling (review)

Since 2015 marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, publishers celebrated that year with the release of works on Lewis Carroll and the Alice books. Neither of the two volumes reviewed here is strictly a biography, although they both provide rich insights into Carroll’s life and his social context. Unfortunately, Douglas-Fairhurst’s book seems to be a bit of rush job intended to capitalize on the increased interest in Carroll as a result of the Wonderland anniversary. In contrast, Wakeling’s book is an encyclopedic volume of Carroll’s various colleagues and friends, who encompassed a wide spectrum of Victorian society, carefully researched by a long-time and respected Carroll scholar.

Douglas-Fairhust is the author of the well-received Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist (2011), which was published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth. In that study, he chose to limit himself to examining Dickens’s life and career up until 1839 and the completion of his second novel, Oliver Twist. In The Story of Alice, Douglas-Fairhurst attempts a more ambitious and complicated task in presenting the intertwined lives of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell. In addition, he explores the continued appeal of the fictional Alice in the cultural sphere and examines the various ways that this literary figure has been reimagined in the popular imagination. He astutely notes that the Alice books have proved better at adapting themselves to the modern world than has the life of their creator. As a scholar at Oxford University, Douglas-Fairhurst observes that while Oxford is full of traces of Carroll, the Alice books could never be written today. He views them as a modern myth along the lines of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

It is a missed opportunity that Douglas-Fairhurst doesn’t spend more time contemplating the similarities between Dickens and Carroll, since both were popular novelists whose works focus on the lives of children. He does contrast the public funeral of the former, who was buried in Westminster Abbey, with the private family funeral of the latter. Carroll, like many Victorians, was an avid reader of Dickens and owned a substantial collection of his works, which were quickly dispersed at auction along with his other possessions shortly after the younger writer’s death.

Douglas-Fairhurst considers his study of Carroll a story rather than a biography, although he acknowledges that it contains important biographical strands. It is a story about storytelling and how the tale that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson told to Alice Liddell, which became the basis for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, took on a powerful life of its own and gradually became better known than the lives of either one of them. This is a clever decision, since the story of Lewis Carroll and the creation of the Alice books is worth retelling, but Douglas-Fairhurst provides little new information in his entertaining version. Both he and Wakeling stand in the shadows of Morton Cohen’s Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1995), which remains the standard work. The life of Alice Liddell has also been more effectively presented in Anne Clark’s The Real Alice (1981) and Colin Gordon’s Beyond the Looking-Glass: Reflections of Alice and Her Family (1982). Readers seeking analysis of how the Alice books have been adapted and reimagined in popular culture will find Will Brooker’s Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture (2004) a more detailed and wide-ranging study. In many ways, The Story of Alice is a more sophisticated and scholarly updating of Roger Lancelyn Green’s The Story of Lewis Carroll (1949), which was intended for younger readers, in that it provides...