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    The Alice Behind Wonderland
    The Alice Behind Wonderland
    The Alice Behind Wonderland
    Audiobook2 hours

    The Alice Behind Wonderland

    Written by Simon Winchester

    Narrated by Simon Winchester

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    On a summer's day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church College in Oxford, Charles Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera, recently purchased in London.

    Simon Winchester deftly uses the resulting image--as unsettling as it is famous, and the subject of bottomless speculation--as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of English literature. Dodgson's love of photography framed his view of the world and was partly responsible for transforming a shy and half-deaf mathematician into one of the world's best-loved observers of childhood. Little wonder that there is more to ""Alice Liddell as the Beggar Maid"" than meets the eye. Using Dodgson's published writings, private diaries, and of course his photographic portraits, Winchester gently exposes the development of Lewis Carroll and the making of his Alice.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMay 24, 2011
    ISBN9780062105332
    The Alice Behind Wonderland
    Author

    Simon Winchester

    Simon Winchester is the acclaimed author of many books, including The Professor and the Madman, The Men Who United the States, The Map That Changed the World, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and Krakatoa, all of which were New York Times bestsellers and appeared on numerous best and notable lists. In 2006, Winchester was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen. He resides in western Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for The Alice Behind Wonderland

    4/5

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    • 2/5
      when one spends a great deal of time with creative sorts, one finds oneself collecting certain phrases; phrases that sound like compliments but are not exactly lies if a compliment is not deserved. There's is the quintessential "What an interesting painting!" but that's old hat and too easily seen through. One moves on to such words as "spectacular" (after all, a train wreck IS a spectacle) and "I am so impressed that you got that published!"On the back of this book, as one of the blurbs, there is a masterpiece of the genre I speak of. "An extraordinary tale, and Simon Winchester could not have told it better"This is accurate. Sadly, there are many other folks who COULD have told it better.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The last books of Simon Winchester have suffered from a quality problem and him coasting on his reputation of earlier work. I was thus pleasantly surprised by this small work which is nominally about the author of Alice in Wonderland, Charles Dodgson AKA Lewis Carroll, and the relationship with the Liddell family that led to the creation of the masterwork While Winchester presents this story in broad strokes, he remains oddly non-committed and agnostic. As the source material is silent, there isn't much beyond speculation.Winchester's focus of the book is thus on Dodgson the pioneering photographer which is an interesting small chapter in the history of technology. Would we today find Dodgson as a wedding photographer or working for the BBC?

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I found this a fascinating entry point into learning something about the early days of photography, as well as a look at Lewis Carroll and his relationship to Alice Liddell (and the Liddell family), which was instrumental in his creation of Alice's famous adventures. As I had only heard vague murmurings about Carroll (Dodgson) and his photographs of (and apparent infatuation with) young children, it was helpful to find out what is known about his character and intentions (not a lot) and what is speculative. I began to think more about photography itself--how accessible and popular it has become--and what we attempt to record, inspire, capture, communicate through this medium. And I was touched in a bittersweet way by the way Winchester tells the story of the real-life Alice after wonderland. Looking forward to After Alice by Gregory Maguire next...have no idea where that will take me.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A century and a half ago, in July 1865, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published in a limited edition by Oxford University Press -- and then immediately withdrawn because Tenniel was dissatisfied with the reproduction of his illustrations. Although it wasn't until November 1865 that the second edition appeared (approved by both author and illustrator, this time under the Macmillan imprint which had published Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies two years before) be prepared for a slew of media trumpeting and Wonderland brouhaha this summer. Nevertheless, it's an opportune moment to review this short study of Alice Liddell, the inspiration behind Lewis Carroll's two most famous fantasies.Simon Winchester structures his discussion around a photograph that Dodgson took in 1858 of the five-year-old Alice Liddell, taking as subject Tennyson's 1842 poem The Beggar Maid. In this the legendary North African king Cophetua has no interest in women until he spots the young Penelophon begging in the street outside his palace. "Her arms across her breast she laid," recounts the poet; she is "more fair than words can say ... She is more beautiful than day." Cophetua swears that this dark-haired beggar maid, bare-footed, in poor attire, with "so sweet a face, such angel grace" shall be his queen. Dodgson's portrait of Alice captures all this, but with what to us now seems a degree of impropriety, both as regards her age and her unexpected décolletage. Of his attitude to his favourite "child-friend" there has been no end of gossip but precious few facts, especially as key pages in his diary were removed after his death, and I don't want to add to the wealth of uninformed speculation. Not least of these is the implicit parallel between a king's infatuation for a beggar-maid and a college lecturer's obsession with a prepubescent girl.The author explores a bit of this, but not before he outlines Dodgson's upbringing and education, his penchant for nonsense writing, his enthusiastic involvement with the new 'black art' and his first meeting with Alice, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church College, on the occasion of Dodgson's first foray with his newly acquired camera into the deanery garden. Winchester, a former geologist before he migrated to investigative journalism and then writing, expertly discusses the science of early photography and Dodgson's rapidly specialising in portraiture. By chapter six (of just seven chapters in this book) he finally gets to the heart of the matter in "A Portrait most Perfect and Chaste" when he discusses Dodgson's relationships with the Liddell family.The Dean, of course, was supportive of Dodgson's use of the deanery garden for portraits. Mrs Lorina Liddell was nearer in age to the photographer and by most accounts got on well with him. Dodgson was later said to be "paying court" to the children's governess, Miss Prickett, but his diary entries apparently suggest that this is not a credible theory. Harry, the only boy in the family, hero-worshipped Dodgson. Edith, the youngest girl, was a redhead "with a Pre-Raphaelite look that Dodgson might have found less attractive" than the darker look of the others in the family, Winchester suggests. Lorina -- Ina, as the eldest of the three sisters was known -- is also linked with the young man as a potential spouse, though marriage would have meant him relinquishing his studentship (as Christ Church fellowships were known).When it comes to the middle girl, Winchester notes that "Alice Pleasance Liddell was peculiarly and particularly special to Charles Dodgson;" his "interest in small girls -- he photographed scores of them, and a significant number of them nude -- fascinates many in today's more exposed world." But he notes that Victorian attitudes held that young children "were the literal embodiment of innocent beauty, an innocence to be preserved and revered. All surviving evidence suggests that Dodgson's attitude was no different and that his interest in the Liddell girls during their prepubescent years was unremarkable, in every sense of the word." I tend to agree -- after all, in The Water-Babies (1863) Tom the former climbing boy spends most of the book as a totally naked child, echoing William Blake's earlier Songs of Innocence -- and perhaps it was only with the advent of photography, where real individuals might be identifiable and gazed upon, that candid portraits and adult interest in them became suspect. Winchester doesn't however pursue this line of thinking.If, as Winchester suggests, The Beggar Maid study was taken in June 1857, then it wasn't till Alice was ten, in July 1862, that the famous "golden afternoon" boating trip resulted in an extempore tale becoming one of the best-known children's classics. But by 1865 Alice was on the way to that difficult age that Dodgson found difficult to deal with, and -- for reasons unclear to us -- the Liddell family's relationship with the newly famous author became more distant. So it came as a surprise to Dodgson when Mrs Liddell turned up with Alice and older sister Lorina for new portraits in June 1870, just as Alice was about to enter society. Can we read too much into the enigmatic gaze that the eighteen-year-old turns upon the camera lens? What do we make of Alice as Pomona, goddess of fruitfulness, as taken by Julia Margaret Cameron, where she deliberately mirrors the stance she took fifteen years before of beggar-maid Penelophon? And what do we think of the look given by the widowed eighty-year-old Alice Hargreaves when she visited America for the centenary celebrations of Dodgson's birth? Can posed photographs really tell us anything about the state of mind of the person portrayed, or do we expect to see their backstory echoed in their body language and in their eyes?In a text of around a hundred pages (to which is added Acknowledgements, Further Reading and an index) Winchester covers a lot of ground, though I fear we are little wiser as to who the real Alice was. Apart from the beggar-maid portrait, reproduced on the dust jacket and as a frontispiece, no other images are forthcoming. Instead we do get a lot about early photography and a little about Dodgson's early nonsense writing and not very much about the Alice books. Odd facts stick in the mind, such as one uncle being a Commissioner in Lunacy and another being a Master of the Common Pleas; and I was struck by the curiosity that Winchester admires the conceit of Alice being like the Cheshire Cat's smile so much that he uses it twice, at the end of the last chapter and immediately again at the end of the acknowledgements. Still, as a metaphor for the character of Alice it is probably most apt; and it certainly is no more than Dodgson's own letters tell us about this special child-friend if his.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Brings understanding of the author. Lewis Carroll and his relationship to the Alice Liddell and her family. An excellent and academic resource for an author study or literature analysis, but easy and interesting reading.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A brief look into the story, or should I say the backstory of Alice, the girl behind Alice of Wonderland, and the writer who created her. Gives a history of the beginnings of photography which has come a long way since.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      I thought this looked interesting after recently reading Alice I Have Been. Although it looked like it was going to give more details about the relationship between Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell (the little girl he wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for), it was really just basic biographical information about the two. And waaaaay too much detail about how photographs were taken and developed in 1856. Disappointing.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting from The Alice Behind Wonderland but I came out of this book feeling less than impressed. The main focus was on Dodgson's photography and in particular the photos that he took of Alice Liddell (with main focus on this image). I suppose I thought that this would further my knowledge of the man behind the famous stories of Wonderland and the girl called Alice. However, its narrowed focus on only one aspect of the man (and his relationship with the Liddells) left me feeling disappointed. The book covers Dodgson's fascination with photography and the history of photography itself. Briefly, Winchester touched on the controversy surrounding his "child friends" of which he took many photographs (some of them in the nude). I do appreciate that he made it clear that during this time period (the late 19th century) this was not seen as anything more than an attempt at capturing innocence and purity onto film. Nowadays, the first thought through anyone's mind is PEDOPHILE which we can neither confirm or deny because any evidence was erased long ago (Dodgson removed several pages from his diary or at least someone removed them for him). If you want a tiny glimpse into the man behind one of the world's most famous fairytales then you should take a look at this book. However, I recommend that you delve further and pick up some supplemental reading such as Morton Cohen's Lewis Carroll: A Biography.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Excellent book! The rating on this book were quite low I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it… To my surprise it turned out to be pretty exciting and perfectly well done for a professor of Photography and Art History as I am. The author does an excellent work in describing the timelines and processes of photography and also doesn’t add to what is not there. If you’re not interested in morbid details of yet another author (writer and photographer) being slammed down this is the book for you.
      I will recommend it to friends and students.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      The creation of the Alice in Wonderland story is a tale in its own right and that is what I expected to read in this book. That is not what I got. The focus was on Dodgson and his photography and more specifically his photography of the Liddell children, particularly Alice. The book is interesting for the history of early photography and Dodgson’s part in it but it is not very instructive about the development of the Alice in Wonderland story.
    • 4/5
      The story centers on a photograph of a young girl, Alice Liddell, taken by Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) in 1858. Later on, Mr. Dodgson, a lecturer at Oxford University, tells young Alice and her siblings a story about another Alice and her adventures in an underground place called Wonderland. Alice asks her friend to write the story down for her. And he does.The Alice Behind Wonderland is a short book, fewer than 100 pages, really an extended essay. But the author crams a lot into the book. What I found most fascinating was his description of early photographic processes and cameras. I’ve read about early photography before, but never the details of what a photographer had to go through to obtain a finished photo. Whew! Makes today’s digital cameras even more amazing.As I was reading through the book, I kept on thinking something was missing. Then it dawned on me. In a book that focuses so much on photography, there were no photos other than the one of Alice on the dust jacket. I don’t know if the author was unable to get permissions to include some of the photos that he described at length (making it quite evident that a picture is, indeed, worth a thousand words), or whether this edition was intentionally bare-bones. Still, The Alice behind Wonderland was enlightening and a very quick read.
    • 3/5
      A short treatment of the famous photograph of Alice Liddell taken by the man known to us all as Lewis Carroll. In just a hundred pages Winchester gives a spare synopsis of the story behind the photo, plus brief biographical treatments of Dodgson and the Liddell family and a look at how Dodgson got interested in photography and what uses he put the hobby to. Though a great many other photographs are described in detail in the text, from those taken of Alice and her sisters on the same afternoon as the famous one, to Dodgson's early attempts, to what must be some remarkable photos of animal skeletons he was hired to document, only the one image is included in the book (on the jacket and as the frontispiece). This is somewhat unfortunate, as others would have added a great deal to the book.