Fashioning Alice: The Career of Lewis Carroll's Icon, 1860–1901 by Kiera Vaclavik (review)

Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland begins with Alice announcing, "and what is the use of a book, without picture or conversations?" (9). Kiera Vaclavik's study would be very much to her liking, as it includes eighty-seven black-and-white illustrations and plenty of lively discussion concerning the evolving appearance of Carroll's iconic character. Fashioning Alic e, which uses "a dress-based approach" (5), offers an enhanced and revised understanding of Carroll's heroine during the period 1860–1901. Vaclavik effectively provides the first extended analysis of Carroll, Alice, and the fashion indus try; in using a dress-based approach, Vaclavik reverses the usual privileging of word over image. She effectively shows that the nineteenth-century representations of Alice by various artists were many and wide ranging, and that these visual changes were actually initiated with slight variations provided by Tenniel in the two Alice books and, most dramatically, with the addition of color in The Nursery "Alice."

Vaclavik's relatively short study is divided into two parts. The first two chapters focus on the Alice books created by Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel. These include Carroll's self-illustrated Alice's Adventures Under Ground (1864), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and Through the Looking-Glass (1872), all with black-and-white illustrations. Vaclavik then addresses The Nursery "Alice" (1890), which included the first authorized colored versions of Tenniel's illustrations along with new cover art by Emily Gertrude Thompson. She also discusses the alterations found in The Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case (1890), one of the earliest of the non-book items to feature images of Alice in color, as well as the covers of the People's Editions of the Alice books (1887), which also used a dash of color on the covers. The first two chapters focus primarily on print-based versions of the character found either in books or in cartoons published in magazines.

The two chapters that constitute the second half of the book examine a broader range of material produced in the 1890s when the amount of visual Alice material began to increase dramatically. The second significant wave of new visual Alices appeared with the expiration of the copyright for Tenniel's illustrations in 1907, which is beyond the time frame of this book. Vaclavik's volume feels like an important first step in what could be a much more extensive study that examines the numerous sets of illustrations of the Alice books, in addition to looking at the character's evolving afterlife in a range of venues in print culture and material culture, including illustrations by other artists, stage production, fashion, and various other Alice-inspired products. Given the transnational scope of Alice materials that Vaclavik discusses in the second half of the study, here the analysis lacks some of the specific detail found in the first half, which is more tightly focused on the more limited, canonical versions of Alice created by the collaboration of Carroll and Tenniel. Vaclavik has previously published "Of Bands, Bows, and Brows: Hair, the Alice Books, and the Emergence of a Style Icon" in Colleen Hill's Fairy Tale Fashion (2016), which serves as a useful companion piece to the second half of this volume and picks up where it concludes.

Vaclavik convincingly shows in this book that even after the introduction of color in visual representations of Alice in the nineteenth century, there was hardly a uniform version of Carroll's heroine. Very little consensus developed on Alice's style of clothing. She appears in the illustrations wearing a rainbow of shades, although Vaclavik notes that red/dark pink and blue were the most common. Alice consistently is presented as an older figure in the post-Tenniel illustrations and stage productions; she is almost always older than she is described in Carroll's novels. Alice remains extremely mutable in terms of dress and hair styles. While the other characters featured in the two...