ENG 329: The Endurance of Alice:                                                   Lewis Carroll and his Wonderlands

Syllabus and course description

Good texts to start to understand Lewis Carroll and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: 

• Jan Susina's "Carroll and Cohen: On First Name Basis with Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Book Review of Morton Cohen's Lewis Carroll: A Biography)"
• Alice Liddell Hargreaves:  "Alice's Recollection of Carrollian Days"
• Hugh Haughton's Introduction to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (.pdf document)
• Edward Wakeling's "The Real Lewis Carroll (Ten Myths about Lewis Carroll)"
• The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature by Jan Susina (Routledge, 2009, 2010)
• Lewis Carroll: Reality & Myth. a website exposing many incorrect assumptions about Carroll

Alice and related texts on the internet

The Literature Network has the text for Alice's Adventures set up so it is searchable.

A .pdf version of Alice's Adventures with the Tenniel illustrations. Typeset in 1994, but attempts to recreate many of the typsetting tricks and correct juxtapostion of illustration and text.

Alice's Adventures Underground

• on Project Gutenberg. Link to the original book that Carroll created for Alice Liddell
• The British Library has photographed every page so you can see what the original looked like with Carroll's drawings

Alice and Other Fairy Plays for Children by Kate Freiligrath-Kroeker (1881). Facsimile that you can page through

Alice in Openland by Maria Popova. Links to Lewis Carroll and Alice text, particularly several short films.

Lewis Carroll and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Links

Lewis Carroll Society of North America 

Lewis Carroll Society in the U.K.

Lewis Carroll: A Centenary Exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas. A website to accompany the museum site. The Center has a large collection of Lewis Carroll's photographs, books and related materials. Video on exhibit.

Lenny's Alice in Wonderland site is an informative site with a good FAQ section and thoughtful analysis.

Alice in Wonderland Wiki. Started in 2010 in connection with Disney + Burton film, but has a lot of good information.

"A Girl Like Alice" Alice Hardgreaves' great-granddaughter, Vanessa St. Clair, writes in The Guardian about what it is like to be related to the original Alice (June 5, 2001).

Edward Wakeling's thorough site about Lewis Carroll, his books, photograhy and life.

Contrariwise: an association for new Lewis Carroll studies

 An account of publishing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Eating and Drinking in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Philip Ardagh discusses etiquette & manners related to food and drink in many Carroll books and links to materials (with images) at the British Library on the post on the British Library website.

AlicenTweetland. Tweeting quotations about Alice

Lewis Carroll's Letters and Diariesa page from the diary of Lewis Carroll. Click on image for bigger size

Preface to Diaries of Lewis Carroll (.pdf)

How Lewis Carroll's rules of letter writing can make email more civilized by Maria Popova

Selections from Carroll's Diaries and Letters (.pdf)

The U.K. Lewis Carroll Society has introductory material to the diaries

The British Library has digitized two pages from the diaries

Alice in filmThe first Alice on film was shown in 1903. Photo:BFI

Alice Film Adaptations Jack Zipes: "Alice and the Absurdity of Home and Utopia" from The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films (Routledge, 2011)

David Schaefer's "The Film Collector's Alice" (.pdf document)

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at Alice in Wonderland in Film" essay by Jan Susina

Quick overview in video on several of the Alice films through the years.

1903 Alice in Wonderland  film version on YouTube. According to www.cultural24.org.uk, "the film was produced by the pioneering Hepworth Studios and was based on Sir John Tenniel’s original illustrations - at 12 minutes it was the longest film produced in England at the time." Directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow

1915 W.W. Young's Alice in Wonderland  film. Links to entire 45 min filmFiliming Jonathan Miller's 1966 version of Alice in Wonderland

1933 Alice in Wonderland trailer for film. W.C. Fields was Humpty Dumpty, Cary Grant was the Mock Turtle, Edward Everett Horton as the Mad Hatter and Gary Cooper as the White Night. Directed by Norman Z. McLeod from a screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

1949 Lou Bunin's Alice in Wonderland. Lou Bunin was an American puppeteer, artist & stop-motion animattion pioneer. This was produced in Paris was stop-action and live actors. Disney tried to stop the release of the film as it came out around the same time as the Disney version.

1951. Disney's Alice in Wonderland animated film.  See links below.

1964 Jonathan Miller's Alice in Wonderland. Here is a short segment with the Cheshire cat and the Queen. One minute trailer with Ravi Shankar music.   Part 1 from dailymotion/BBC. Featuring Peter Sellers, Anne-Marie Mallik, John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, Wilfrid Brambell, Peter Cook. Link to the film here. A 2-min segment here with the pig. "Through the Glass Darkly: Alice in Wonderland" Scott Thrill on Miller's film. (12/31/03)

1966. Hanna Barbera's animated Alice in Wonderland with Doris Day singing as Alice.

1966 Alice Through the Looking Glass. A very mid-century modern version.

1976 Bill Osco's Alice in Wonderland: An X-rated Musical Comedy. Trailer for the film  The film was actually rated R and the trailer would probably receive a G rating today.  Directed by Bud Townsend. Kristine DeBell played Alice. In 2007, an Off-Broadway musical based on this film was performed as Alice in Wonderland: An Adult Musical Comedy. 

1983 Alice in Wonderland with Richard Burton and daughter Kate Burton. Production of Eva la Gallienne’s Alice. Directed by Kirk Browning. A PBS Great Performance production of the 1982 Broadway show. The production was a revival of actress-director Eva Le Gallienne and Florida Friebus's popular 1932 play. 

1985 Irwin Allen's Alice in Wonderland. This clip from the two-part, 1985 CBS-TV version stars Ringo Starr as the Mock Turtle. Here's Sammy Davis, Jr., as the caterpillar doing "You are old Father Williams." Directed by Harri Harris. Script from the book with adaptations by Paul Zindel

1972 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland "The Croquet Match" Fiona Fullerton as Alice (later of James Bond film fame) and Michael Jayston as Lewis Carroll. Directed by William Sterling.

1988. Jan Švankmajer wrote and directed an Alice-inspired fantasy film with puppets, stop animination and actors. Its original Czech title is Něco z Alenky, which means "Something from Alice." Trailer for film. Rabbit and Horsemen scene (2 min)

1999 Alice in Wonderland. Directed by Nick Willing  "Tweedle "The Lobster Quadrille" "The Cheshire Cat" scene with Whoppi Goldberg as the cat and Tina Majorino (of Veronica Mars fame) as Alice

2010 Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. The official trailer from Disney.

Disney and Alice films

Alice in Cartoonland. A 1923 short film created by Walt Disney. Features Walt talking to a girl as well as animated cartoons. (8 mins)

MIckey Mouse Thru The Mirror. A 1936 cartoon with Mickey dreaming about Alice's Adventures and Through the Looking-Glass. (8:50 mins)

Alice in Wonderland (1951)

• Introduction to film. (1:50 min).  Can you find the error?
• Alice and the Hookah (1:39 min) Who are you?
• The Cheshire Cat (3:04 min)
• The Mad Tea Party. "A Very Unbirthday" (3:17 min)
• Very Good Advice "I give myself very good advice, but I very rarely follow it" (1:43 min)
• Walrus and the Carptenter (5:55 min)
• Ending Scene (3:41 min)
• Deleted scenes. Walt Disney's intro at Christmastime.
• Kathryn Beaumont on her role in the film

Script for Disney's animated Alice in Wonderland film 

Leonard Matlin's "Disney's Alice in Wonderland" (.pdf article)

Alice entry on the Disney Wiki

Lewis Carroll biographical materialPhotograph of Lewis Carroll by O.J. Reijlander.

Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll by Stuart Dodgson Collingwood (1898). Complete text on Project Gutenberg.

U.K.'s National Archives biography page on LC

Lewis Carroll's scrapbook at the Library of Congress. Every page if photographed and annotated. thorough and interesting

Key points in Lewis Carroll's life, a timeline

Modern Biography and Lewis Carroll 1969-98 on The Victorian Web

Marina Warner analyzes the Tate's 2011 exhibition on Lewis Carroll's drawings.  Many original drawings are included in the online essay and also includes interesting chart on organizing the manuscript of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

 

John Tenniel's illustrations to the Alice books"You're nothing but a pack of cards!" Illustration by John Tenniel

Tenniel illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on Project Gutenberg

Complete text of Michael Hancher's The Tenniel illustrations to the "Alice" books

John Tenniel entry in The Victorian Web, with many links

Illustrators of Alice, after Tenniel

An overview of key illustrators of Alice in a .pdf document

Arthur Rackham's illustrations to Alice (1907)

Marie Luarencin's illustrations to Alice (1930)

Mervyne Peake illustrated Alice. A two-book set was published in Sweden in 1946. This Guardian (April 3, 2010) article by Vanessa Trope notes how his Alice illustrations were influenced by his work as a war correspondence during World War II. The blog Death by Papercuts has illustrations from the Alice books.

Ralph Steadman illustrated Wonderland in 1966 and Looking-Glass in 1977. Many images in this post on Maria Popova's Brain Pickings blog. Images from Steadman's Wonderland illustrations on io9.com

Salvador Dali illustrated Wonderland in 1969

Lewis Carroll's Photographs

Jan Susina's "Staging Childhood: Lewis Carroll's Costumed Photographs of Children."   The slides and images to accompany this talk can be seen here, in this .pdf for the PowerPoint presentation.  These images were shown in class. 

Lewis Carroll's "A Photographer's Day Out" (.pdf)

Photography collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin

Photographs at Princeton University Library

Photographs at University of Virginia. a more easily accessible site than the two previous ones, altho those libraries have the bigger collections.

Standard resources for starting the study of Carroll photographs

How Carroll based a photo of Xie Kitchen on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s famous painting of Penelope Boothby (1785–1791), which was in the Ashmoleon Museum in Oxford. A blog post from the Ransom Center

Illustration for "Hiawatha's Photographing by Arthur Frost.

"Through Lewis Carroll's Looking-glass" Interesting blog post from Ransom Center on Carroll as photographer. Includes page from his photo journal written in purple ink.

Artists in Lewis Carroll's circle, including Pre-Raphaelites

"The Rectory Magazine" The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin has the original copy of this handwritten and illustrated magazine that Carroll created for his family. The link takes you to several full-color pages of the magazine.

"Hints for Etiquette." Two pages from Carroll's Juvenalia that was published in The Rectory Museum or Mishmash. At the British Library

Simon Kane, a British actor and writer, presents a fun, short video reading from The Rectory Museum or Mishmash "The Walking Stick of Destiny"

Lewis Carroll’s La Guida di Bragia: A Ballad Opera for Puppets - 

MathematicsAccording to the Mock Turtle, the four branches of arithmetic are (1) Ambition (2) Distraction (3) Uglification (4) Derision. (From Lewis Carroll Sylogism puzzle page)

"Lewis Carroll by the Numbers" book review by Jan Susina (Children's Literature 40, 2012) (.pdf)

Lewis Carroll Sylogism Puzzles

Alexander Bogolmony in "Cut the Knot" on Carroll's sylogisms

The Game of Logic by Lewis Carroll on The Gutenberg Project, download for free.

A theoretical conversation between Rev. Charles Dodgson and Ezra Brown, of Virginia Tech, in Math Horizons, Nov. 2006.

"The Mad Hatter's Secret Ingredient: Math" on NPR March 13, 2010.

"A Math-Free Guide to the Math of Alice in Wonderland" by Esther Inglis-Arkell

"The Math Wars, Lewis Carroll Style" by Evelyn Lamb (March 4, 2014). A Scientific American blog. Carroll had definite ideas about teaching math, particularly Euclidian Geometry.

"Algebra in Wonderland" Op-Ed piece in The New York Times by Melanie Bayley (March 6, 2010)

Pillow Problems (taken from the book) by Charles Dodgson

The Nursery Alice

"The Nursery Alice" has been digitized by the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries

Jan Susina's "Too Gaudy or Not Gaudy Enough: Lewis Carroll's The Nursery Alice" (in .pdf format)

Inspired by Alice

 Artwork inspired by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

She-still-haunts-me. A lively Tumblr with regular postings of Alice related images and materials

Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Jester

Norton Jester's Phantom Tollbooth, a 1970 live-action film based on the 1960 book.  Created by Chuck Jones. Link is to entire film on YouTube. The one-minute trailer.   Here is an 8 min segment

"Broken Kingdom: Fifty Years of 'The Phantom Tollbooth' " an essay in The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik (October 17, 2011)

"My Accidental Masterpiece: The Phantom Tollbooth" Norton Jester's essay on NPR (Oct. 25, 2011)

"Summer Voyages: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Jester" an essay by Justine Jordan in The Guardian, July 17, 2013.

"Why Teachers Love Depressing Books" by Laura Miller. The New York Times. Aug. 22, 2004. A review of Barbara Feinberg's 'Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up'

Edward LearLear and his beloved cat, Foss

An Edward Lear Home page

A Blog of Bosh. An Edward Lear Home Page

Edward Lear's diaries. Many are transcribed by Marco Graziosi from Houghton Library, Harvard University

Edward Lear's Nonsense Botany. Illustrations of plants by Lear.

Edward Lear: 200 Years of Nonsense

Edward Lear Drawings at the British Museum

Additional interesting material on the history of children's literature

Guide from the Victoria & Albert Museum on the life of Victorian children.  .pdf format designed for both children and aults.

Interesting additional materials

Lewis Carroll's pocket watchAlice Liddell's personal effects including her pocket watch, calling card cases and silver scissors can also be seen at the Oxford Museum. The Alice biscuit tin is one of the few merchandising items Lewis Carroll allowed and then didn't like it once it was created.The original manuscript for the first Alice book is at the British Library.

Lewis Carroll acquired this Hammond No.1 on May 3, 1888. He did not write fiction on this typewriter, but may have written mathematical books.

Lewis Carroll wrote a pamphlet on lawn tennis rules. He created rules for croquet as well.

Essays and reflections by contemporary writers on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Maria Popov's "The Philosophy of Alice in Wonderland"

"The Enduring Charm of Alice in Wonderland" by Hannah J. McGill in The Scotsman newspaper (April 19, 2015)

"Oxford's Literary Heritage" by Steve McKenna in The West Australian newspaper (April 17, 2015)

"Alice Still Relevant" by Patrick O'Gara, Toledo Blade columnist. April 20, 2015