Jo Elwyn Jones

"The quest began when the authors discovered a strange link between Lewis Carroll and their forebear, Prime Minister Gladstone. It led them to re-examine Carroll's diaries and search out his many little-known photographic portraits of the celebrities he recorded meeting - such as Faraday, Huxley, Tennyson, Ruskin. By the time they had visited all the places that Carroll frequented, they had unravelled an astonishing code whereby the Oxford mathematician laced his famous "Alice" stories with clues to his scurrilous views on "the great and the good" of Victorian England."… (plus d'informations)

Once, apparently, was not enough.

Jones and Gladstone, before writing this book, published The Red King's Dream, or Lewis Carroll in Wonderland, which was an ambitious attempt to explain large parts of the Alice books as inside jokes about Oxford and Christ Church, where both Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell lived.

It fell flat.

It fell flat because it's just too forced. Yes, much that we see in the Alice books is genuinely based on life at Christ Church. This has been well-documented, e.g. in Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice. And it is no doubt true that there are other references in the Alice books to Liddell Life which the commentators have not found. But The Red King's Dream insists on interpretations that just don't work. They are too subtle; pre-teen children (like Alice and her sister Edith) simply wouldn't understand them. To be an inside joke, something must be both inside and a joke, and the ideas Jones and Gladstone suggest are simply too obscure.

But, having published a book that just adds to the Alice Obfuscation, Jones and Gladstone came back two years later and produced this. Which still contains too many of their ideas.

It's too bad. We need a good Alice reference (the best, Denis Crutch's The Lewis Carroll Handbook, is no longer being maintained or kept in print). There is valuable material -- a lot of valuable material -- in Jones and Gladstone. But there is also that bogus 20% or so. And no good way to know which is which without checking other sources. What this book needs is a good editor to shorten it dramatically -- and turn it into the book it ought to be.… (plus d'informations)

A highly entertaining quest that endeavours to link virtually everyone of note with whom Lewis Carroll had acquaintance or dealings with characters in the Alice books. A perfectly legitimate attempt , given Carroll's fascination with puzzles of various kinds. The results therefore range from the very probable to the entirely fancilful. The Carroll family's destruction of many of his papers after his death has created an area ripe for speculation about his personality and motives and there have been countless theses written upon all aspects of his life and output. I was delightfully taken on a ride through the Victorian landscape and culture and some important areas were illuminated convincingly. Not every theory held up but with vital evidence irretrievably lost we shall ever be mired in the realms of speculation.… (plus d'informations)

Enough already.

That was my immediate response to this attempt to "decode" Lewis Carroll's Alice books. Oh, there is no question that the books contain a lot of inside jokes. (Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie, anyone? Or the Dodo?) But a series of inside jokes do not make a nineteenth century version of a Da Vinci Code. And yet, this book is devoted to finding a secret meaning in everything.

Francis James Child once commented of the Robin Hood scholar J. Hunter that he "could have identified Pigrogromitus and Quinapalus, if he had given his mind to it." This is an even more extreme instance of the same thing. Even where Jones and Gladstone's identifications are possible, that does not make them true. And most of them are based on very thin reeds indeed.

Alice Liddell herself, in requesting the story that became Alice's Adventures, demanded that there be "nonsense in it." A series of subtle references is not nonsense. I am very much inclined to think that Carroll -- who cared for Alice very deeply -- got what she asked asked for.… (plus d'informations)