Lewis Carroll book now available in paperback

My book, The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature, is now available in a paperback edition -- and at aThe Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature is available in paperback. lower price! Go to Amazon to get your copy.

I am thrilled that the Lewis Carroll book is in paperback because I think it will make it more accessible to scholars and readers, particularly those that can't access the library version.

Thanks to Routledge for bringing it out in paperback.

If you have a good comment, please consider posting it on the Amazon website.  Everything helps.

Thanks to the great reviews the book has already received.  These include Dorothy G. Clark's review in The Lion and the Unicorn (April 2010) and Claire Imholtz review in the Winter 2010 issue of The Knight Letter, which is The Newsletter of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. Rod McGillis also had a kind review in Children's Literature, and I'll post on that soon.

Carroll always on the cutting edge of technology

While putting together my recent book, The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature, it became from Tim Burton's 2010 Alice in Wonderlandinteresting to note how Carroll was fascinated with new technologies as well as how often his works were adapted to new technologies as well.  So it's not surprising that Tim Burton's upcoming film, Alice in Wonderland, is also at the heart  of controversy with latest of film technology -- 3-D.  Alice's imaginative appeal often dovetails with new technology.

Many Hollywood observers are wondering if 3D Alice will kick out 3D Avatar, the runaway 3D success? In addition, film distributors in the U.K., and now the U.S. are upset that Disney is planning to release the Alice DVD releatively quickly after the film release.  Disney is trying to figure out how to capitalize on the success of the film by shortening the theatrical release.  But owners of theaters want their projection window to be as big as it can be.  Again, it's the very current issue of watching films in theaters (expensive) or at home (not quite as expensive).  Lewis Carroll holding a camera lens. He was one of the earliest amateur photographers in England.

Carroll, of course, was an amazing photographer at a time when photography was just beginning to become popular.  Carroll must have liked that it required lots of equipment, experimenting with chemicals and formulas, and the knowledge of know how to work it all together.  But he must have appreciated the theatricality of it as well -- look at how he staged many of the people in his photographs.  Staging photographs would have particularly helped the children focus but it also is a way to imitate theater, which he liked.  Photography was developed in 1839 and by the 1850s Carroll was an accomplished amateur photographer.  He is considered, with Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the best nineteeth-century photographers of children.

When Carroll published the Alice books, he pushed the envelope for printing and publishing. He wanted a book that would fit the size of children's hands.  He was very specific on the size and color of the binding to appeal to children.  He wanted the words and text to work together because, as he wrote, "What is the use of a book without pictures?"  And in later editions, he asked for the book to have paper covers (a book jacket) and to advertise his other works.  He was one of three people who independently came up with the concept of a book jacket.White Rabbit in a video game from Tim Burton's new Alice in Wonderland

Carroll often had characters in his books who were tinkers, people who experimented with different technologies to see what would happen.  Subsequently, tinkers have liked Carroll's books and re-imagined them in new media.  Alice has appeared in films since nearly the beginning, was early to be animated and has appeared in numerous video games and new media re-adaptions.  There's a whole chapter about these adapations in my book.  And Alice just keeps adapting.  Still, I think the original is the best.

Arthur in Wonderland: NPR reviewer messes up Carroll's name

When Maureen Corrigan, the main book reviewer for NPR's Fresh Air show, The Beggar-Maid by Lewis Carroll, photograph in the collection of Princeton Universityreviewed Alice I Have Been, she revealed that she's not as meticulous or as sharp as I thought she was. The book she reviewed, by Melanie Benjamin, is poorly written and not carefully researched.  Corrigan praised the book and assumed that Benjamin wrote an historically accurate book -- which she did not. If Corrigan had done just a little research, she could have learned about the real Lewis Carroll. Corrigan -- who generally is a good book reviewer -- fumbles so badly that she calls Lewis Carroll by the name Arthur Carroll. (Initially, the transcript of the book review on the Fresh Air website even misspelled Corrigan's first name.)

I find it fustrating when poorly written books -- fiction or criticism -- get recognition. Actually Melanie Benjamin is a pen name and the author's name is Melanie Hauser.   I think that is the most clever aspect of this novel, since Lewis Carroll is the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Besides reading her book, I also read a profile of the author by Julia Keller in the Chicago Tribune as Benjamin lives in the Chicago area (17 January 2010).
       What struck me was Benjamin's limited knowledge of Lewis Carroll.  She wandered into Chicago's Art Institute sometime between October 2003 and January 2004 and "discovered"  the traveling show of Lewis Carroll photographs, which was based on Douglas Nickel's Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll (2002).  Nickel's book is not particularly good scholarship.  The exhibition, which I also saw, was okay.  There are far better books on Carroll's photography -- including Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling's Lewis Carroll Photographer: The Princeton University Library Albums (2002), Morton Cohen's Reflection in a Looking-Glass: A Centennial Celebration of Lewis Carroll, Photographer (1998), Anne Higonnet's Lewis Carroll (2008), and even Helmut Gersheim's  groundbreaking Lewis Carroll: Photographer  (1949). This is to point out that bad novels are often built on poor scholarship.

        So in 2003, Benjamin "discovers" that Lewis Caroll actually took photographs (!) of little girls (!!) and that there was a real child who was the inspiration for the protagonist of the Alice books (!!!).  Oh my gosh. Stop the presses -- have we got a story to tell.   To quote Benjamin, from the Chicago Tribune feature, "I didn't know there had been a real girl named Alice."   Imagine Benjamin's surprise when she discovered that there are at least two book-length biographies of Alice Liddell:  Anne Clark's The Real Alice: Lewis Carroll's Dreamchild (1981) and  Colin Gordon's Beyond the Looking Glass: Reflections of Alice and Her Family (1982).  If readers want to "discover" the true of Alice Liddell, I would encourage them to read either of these  books rather than Alice I Have Been.  They  contain a great deal more accurate information about Alice Liddell, are better written and full of wonderful illustrations.  It seems that Benjamin is just a bit behind the learning curve in terms of  Carroll studies. (For more on Carroll studies, check out the websites of the U.S. and U.K. Carroll societies)
       It reminds me of when my wife was teaching a college course on popular culture and James Cameron's  1997 film Titanic was released. After seeing the film, some of her students indignantly remarked, "Why didn't anyone tell us about the Titanic?!"   Frankly, I don't believe there was much of an international conspiracy to keep people from knowing about the sinking of the Titanic or that Lewis Carroll was a noted photographer of  children and considered, by most scholars, to be, along with Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the two best photographers of children in the nineteenth century.  But all of this seems to be news to Benjamin when she wandered into the Art Institute.
    What seems ironic and telling about Alice I Have Been is that Benjamin was inspired to write the novel as the result of  her "discovering"  the photography of Lewis Carroll at the Art Institute. But the novel's cover features a photograph that was not  taken by Lewis Carroll, but another Victorian photographer, Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden.  The photograh is Hararden's "Clementina before a mirror," and features the photographer's own daughter.  If you want to read about a somewhat creepy Victorian photographer, forget Carroll and read about Hawarden.  I good place to start is  Carol Mavor's Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (1999).
       The other disappointing aspect of the novel is that it follows, or repeats, much of  the plot of Gavin Millar's 1985 film Dreamchild, in which Alice Liddell is an old woman who looks back and reflects on her relationship with Carroll.  So it seems that Benjamin was unfamiliar with Carroll's photography and Dreamchild.
      If authors wants to write historical fiction, they ought to know history.  Alice I Have Been wants to re-invent the wheel and does it rather poorly.  It frankly reads like a rush job that was intended to cash in on the release of Tim Burton's film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Actually Benjamin acknowledges this in the Tribune feature.
        Maureen Corrigan's mess up on Lewis Carroll's name reminds me of that infamous anti-drug tract Go Ask Alice (1971). It  was touted to be an actual teen diary, but turned out to be written by Beatrice Sparks, a Mormon youth counselor,  who misidentified the author of the Alice books as  "Lewis G. Carroll"  and wrote, " I feel like Alice in Wonderland. Maybe Lewis G. Carroll was on drugs too." 
        Just as Go Ask Alice was a poorly written and deceptive novel, and I feel the same is the case with Benjamin's Alice I Have Been.  But that doesn't seem to stop them from becoming popular.  Unfortunately, this is how myths and distortions concerning Lewis Carroll are promoted.  Facts are replaced by fiction and then assumed to be accurate.
       I would prefer that readers interested in Lewis Carroll read Morton Cohen's  Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1995), the standard, for a more accurate portrait of Carroll's life.  They might even want to read my recent book, The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature (2009), which includes  the chapter, "The Beggar-Maid: Alice Liddell as Street Arab." In it, I examine in detail Carroll's most famous photograph of Alice Liddell.  I think some readers might enjoy discovering  that the facts of Lewis Carroll's life are as interesting as the myths.
    While I am reluctant to draw unnecessary attention to Alice I Have Been, I do want to let interested readers know that it is far from original,  sometimes distorts the facts, and there are a number of excellent books about Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll, and his photography published prior to Alice I Have Been that will provide a more accurate understanding of these subjects. The best aspect of the inaccurate historical book is that it may direct some readers to Carroll's Alice books and his photography.  I hope that is the case.

     By the way, Happy birthday to Lewis Carrol today!