We suffer nowadays from a surfeit of literary anniversaries. One blurs into the next until we begin to long for a moratorium. And yet even so, a few such occasions are welcome. The 150th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland yielded a splendid array of exhibitions, lectures, and books, including Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland.
Do not be misled by the subtitle. No dark secrets are revealed here, but Douglas-Fairhurst’s account of Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll, the genesis of his masterwork, and its extraordinary afterlife is the best I have seen: lucid and refreshingly sane. Douglas-Fairhurst doesn’t try to “explain” Carroll according to some fashionable theory; rather, he illuminates his subject, leaving us with a sense of the man’s essential strangeness (which is, after all, the strangeness of any human life closely observed).
If you are drawn to Carroll and to Wonderland, keep an eye out for Elizabeth Sewell’s The Field of Nonsense, on Carroll and Edward Lear, first published in 1952, unaccountably out of print for a long time but just reissued by the Dalkey Archive Press. And follow that up with Sewell’s Lewis Carroll: Voices from France (a book that she’d almost completed at the time of her death in 2001, published by the Lewis Carroll Society of North America in 2008). It’s worth tracking down.
If Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass ever reach the planet Jakku, it will be in part thanks to the efforts of men and women like the Americans and Russians (none of them household names) profiled in Jay Gallentine’s Infinity Beckoned: Adventuring Through the Inner Solar System, 1969–1989. This is the twelfth volume in a series from the University of Nebraska Press, Outward Odyssey: A People’s History of Spaceflight (Colin Burgess is the series editor), and Gallentine’s second contribution to the series.
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