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KNIGHT LETTER

Knight Letter is the official magazine of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. It is published twice a year and is distributed free to all members.

Editorial correspondence should be sent to the Editor in Chief at morgan@bookgenius.org.

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions for The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch should be sent to morgan@bookgenius.org or pcolacino@austin.rr.com.

Submissions and suggestions for Serendipidity and Sic, Sic, Sic should be sent to andrewogus@mindspring.com.

Submissions and suggestions for All Must Have Prizes should be sent to joel@thebirenbaums.net.

Submissions and suggestions for From Our Far-Flung Correspondents should be sent to

farflungknight@gmail.com.

© 2015 The Lewis Carroll Society of North America

ISSN 0193-886X

Mahendra Singh, Editor in Chief Patricia Colacino, Editor, Rectory Umbrella Cindy Watter, Editor, Of Books and Things Rachel Eley & James Welsch, Editors, From Our Far-Flung Correspondents Foxxe Editorial Services, Copyeditor Mark Burstein, Production Editor Sarah Adams-Kiddy, Proofreader Andrew H. Ogus, Designer

THE LEWIS CARROLL SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA

President:

Stephanie Lovett, president@lewiscarroll.org Vice-President:

Cindy Watter, hedgehogccw@gmail.com Secretary:

Sandra Lee Parker, secretary@lewiscarroll.org

www.LewisCarroll.org

Annual membership dues are U.S. $35 (regular),

$50 (international), and $100 (sustaining).

Subscriptions, correspondence, and inquiries should be addressed to:

Sandra Lee Parker, LCSNA Secretary PO Box 197

Annandale, Virginia 22003

Front cover: a collage by Andrew Ogus of figures from previous Alice 150 columns.

All might have been seen by Lewis Carroll in Punch.

Back cover: Alice 150 logo by Adriana Peliano

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THe ReCTORY UMBRSLLA

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Alicel50: The SesquicenTenniel Aspects of Alice: The Alice 1 50 Film Festival

DAVID SCHAEFER Alice in Phillyland

EMILY R. AGUILO- PEREZ

Reflections on Alice 150 Week in New York JOEL BIRENBAUM

Arcane Illustrators: Nils Graf Stenbock-Fermor IP Lilo Rasch-Nagele

MARK BURSTEIN

A Quantic Theory of Translation JUAN GABRIEL LOPEZ GUIX

The Carroll Space-filling Conjecture

CHRISTOPHER TYLER

The Pamphlets of Lewis Carroll, Volume 5: — Games, Puzzles, IP Related Pieces

CINDY CLAYMORE WATTER

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The Photographs of Lewis Carroll:

2 5 A Catalogue Raisonne

CINDY CLAYMORE WATTER

2® The Story of Alice

AUGUSTA. IMHOLTZ, JR.

2 7 Elucidating Alice

CINDY CLAYMORE WATTER

Selections from the Lewis Carroll Collection 2^ of Victoria J. Sewell

CINDY CLAYMORE WATTER

3° The Looking Glass House

CINDY CLAYMORE WATTER 33 How Did Long John Silver Lose His Leg?

SELWYN GOODACRE

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5°

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MISCHMASCH

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Leaves from the Deanery Garden — Sic, Sic, Sic — Serendipity 35

Ravings from the Writing Desk 38

STEPHANIE LOVETT

I Am the Eggman 39

MARK BURSTEIN

In Memoriam: Sandor Burstein 4 1

MARK BURSTEIN

CARROLLIAN NOT6S

Through a ykcowrebba] Darkly 42

CLARE IMHOLTZ

A Cantab Confab 42

CINDY CLAYMORE WATTER

The Liddell Books CLARE IMHOLTZ

Maravilhas IP Espelho (Peliano) ANDREW OGUS

Wonderland (D Aquino)

ANDREW OGUS

Wunderland (Fey)

ANDREW OGUS

Maravilhas (Zerbini) ^Espelho (Renno) ANDREW OGUS

Wonderland (Inky Parrot/ Artists’ Choice) ANDREW OGUS

Adventures into the Woods MARK BURSTEIN

Evergreen

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Alice in Sunderland 43

OF BOOKS AND THINGS

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The Annotated Alice: 150th Anniversary

Deluxe Edition 44

CINDY CLAYMORE WATTER

FROM OUR FAR-FLUNG CORReSPONDeNTS

SIR

Art IP Illustration — Articles IP Academia — Books —

Events, Exhibits, IP Places — Internet IP Technology —

Movies IP Television — Music — Performing Arts — Things 60

Dali’s Wonderland MARK RICHARDS

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This issue of the Knight Letter is a white stone of sorts, since it is mostly reportage of the recent Alicel50 meetings, conferences, and exhibits in New York City and elsewhere, all due to the celebration of Lewis Carroll’s most popular cre- ation, Alice.

Our many contributors have done their best to provide an accurate record of a truly unique moment in the history of the LCSNA, by submitting reports ranging from the Grolier Club’s Alice in Translation conference and exhibit (an Alician Tower of Babel?) to a genuine AlicePalooza (the Alician power of bab- ble?) to the Morgan Library and Museum’s exhibition of the original Underground manuscript.

New members who are receiving their first Knight Letter should bear in mind that the Society’s journal usually contains a far wider variety of articles on a plethora of Carrollian subjects, ranging from book and movie reviews to mathematical and literary essays. In short, there’s far more to the KL than Alice 150, as you will discover in coming issues.

And finally, I regret to announce that, owing to personal circumstances, this will be my final issue as the editor of the Knight Letter. It has been enormous fun and a great privilege working with so many tal- ented Carrollians in North America and around the world, and I can say with complete confidence that few Societies of this nature put out such profession- al-caliber publications, aimed at both the specialist and the general reader. The KL really is a crown jewel of this Society, and it’s mandatory that it be kept to these standards at all costs.

The extraordinary Christopher Morgan, who served so valiantly as editor of The Pamphlets of Lewis Carroll Volume 5: Games, Puzzles, and Related Pieces, will be the helmsman from the next issue onwards, no doubt steering to starboard, but keeping her head larboard.

Many thanks to all members and contributors who have endured my chaotic editorial ways with such aplomb (or was it numb shock?). My parting thought to all of you is: eleven years till Snarkl50!

MAHENDRA SINGH

Photo by Mark Burstein

How can one begin to convey the excitement, joy, and delight- ful camaraderie during the lung-anticipated and monstrously successful Alicel50 lueek ? The word for the week, first intro- duced to us in Edward Guiliano’s talk, xvas “pluriformity, ” which means exactly what you think it does. In that spirit, there were many contributors to this report, all duly credited.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 5 ALICE LIVE!

Dayna Nuhn

As the title suggests, Alice Live! is a wide-ranging and comprehensive exhibit at the New York Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, about adapta- tions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as live enter- tainment. It is pointed out in the exhibit that the story

Alice Live!

itself, as told to the Liddell sisters, was a performance of sorts, and with that beginning, Alice is a natural cre- ative choice for playwrights, composers, and choreo- graphers. The exhibit has sections on Carroll’s per- sonal interest in plays, his friends from the theater world, and the many versions of Alice for the stage, from the first in 1886 by Henry Savile Clark (and Car- roll’s part in it) down through the years until the pres- ent day, with an emphasis on New York stagings. The various productions are represented with a variety of posters, playbills, programs, photos, costume sketch- es, sheet music, ads, reviews, and scripts, and even a marionette. All aspects of theater are covered, both the expected — plays, musicals, opera, dance, ballet, and symphonies — and the unexpected — magic lan- tern slides, Weeki Wachee mermaids performing Alice in Waterland, and the Ice Capades. Audio and video clips are an added dimension, and there are special activities for children. The exhibit was curated by Charlie Lovett and features many items from his col- lection. It is thoughtfully conceived, informative, and beautifully executed, as entertaining as the subject matter. It runs through January 16, 2016.

WHO’S ALICE?

Dayna Nuhn

At 6:00 p.m. at the Bruno Walter Auditorium, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, curator Charlie Lovett moderated a panel

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Photo by Stephanie Lovett

L to R: Charlie Lovett, David Del Tredici, Monica Edinger, Elizbeth Swados, Robert Sabuda, Steve Massa, Elizabeth Carena

consisting of Monica Edinger, author, educator, and keeper of the “Educating Alice” blog; Elizabeth Swa- dos, Broadway composer of Alice at the Palace (1981, starring Meryl Streep); Elizabeth Carena, managing director and the Hatter from Third Rail Projects’ Then She Fell\ Steve Massa, cast member of Eva Le Gal- lienne’s 1982 production; David Del Tredici, who won a Pulitzer for In Memory of a Summer Day (part one of Child Alice)-, and Robert Sabuda, whose pop-up book of Alice won the New York Times Best Illustrated Chil- dren’s Book prize for 2003.

This talented panel of creative people from vari- ous artistic pursuits discussed the enduring appeal and allure of Alice. They talked about who she is to them and how they came to her at different times in their life and through different ways.

To David Del Tredici, Alice is wit, charm, and whimsy, and he tries to capture that in his music.

Robert Sabuda sees Alice as the first feminist and a strong character. Her favorite exclamation is “Non- sense!” and she doesn’t like to obey.

Elizabeth Swados ’s Alice is resilient and unafraid. She doesn’t take any crap. To her, Alice is a radical little girl, and there’s nothing more dangerous than that.

Monica Edinger’s Alice is curious. Monica told us that she wanted to be Alice when she was a child. Her fourth-grade students relate to Alice’s feistiness and how she rebels against the rules.

Elizabeth Carena feels that Alice is bewildered and adventurous. She is turned off by arbitrary rules she doesn’t “get.”

Steve Massa talked about Kate Burton’s vision. Kate played Alice as trying to create order and make things right; Alice liked to make sense of things.

It appears that Alice can be many things to differ- ent people, but she is always inspiring and fascinating.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6 ALICE: 150 YEARS OF WONDERLAND

Dayna Nuhn

About 25 LCSNA members and guests gathered at 1:00 p.m. in the foyer of the Morgan Library for a special tour of the Alice exhibit led by its creator, Carolyn Vega, the Morgan’s assistant curator of liter- ary and historical manuscripts. Carolyn was an inter- esting and knowledgeable guide, and her enthusiasm for this exhibit showed. She took us through, giving lots of background information about Lewis Carroll, Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the origin story of the Under Ground manuscript and how it ended up in the Brit- ish Library, the development and early publishing his- tory of Wonderland and Looking-Glass, and the impact of Tenniel’s illustrations. There were a great many wonderful pieces gathered together in the room, but the main attraction was, of course, the original man- uscript. The last time it left Britain was when it was loaned to the Morgan in 1982 to celebrate the sesqui- centennial of Carroll’s birth. The British Library also loaned two volumes of Carroll’s diaries, one of which was open at the July 4, 1862 entry, a perfect comple- ment to the manuscript. Among the many amazing pieces were original drawings by Tenniel, one never

Carolyn Vega

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Photo by Clare Imholtz

Carroll’s toy theater, ca. 1880, and ms. o/Useful and Instructive Poetry, 1 845, at the Morgan

displayed before, and personal items belonging to Al- ice and Carroll. It was wonderful to see so many rare, beautiful, and unique items in one place. The exhibit is now closed, but it lives on online at www.themor- gan.org/exhibitions/ online/ alice.

[For those of us who had * ahem * better ideas of where to permanently house the ms. and the diary, it got around that the guard was, in fact, an Olympic gold-medal sprinter ( Barcelona , 1992, relays), which dampened our enthusi- asm for that particular scenario. — Ed.]

ALICE AT COLUMBIA

August A. Imholtz, Jr.

For many attendees, the LCSNA’s week of Alice 150 celebrations, conferences, and other happenings in New York City began at Columbia University’s Butler Library on Tuesday evening at 6:00 p.m. with a bril- liant illustrated lecture, “Alice’s Adventures at Colum- bia,” by Dayna Nuhn, founder of the Lewis Carroll Society of Canada.

Dayna explained how the eighty-year-old Alice Hargreaves, who as a young girl inspired Carroll’s masterpiece, was persuaded to make the journey over- seas to receive an honorary doctorate from Columbia University, as part of the American celebrations of the centenary of Carroll’s birth. She discussed the role of Columbia’s president in 1932, Nicholas Murray But- ler, and of the university’s professor of chemistry, J. Enrique Zanetti, a passionate Lewis Carroll collector, in planning the event. It was originally scheduled for Carroll’s birth centenary, January 28, but was moved at Alice’s request to her own birthday, May 4, as she feared a winter ocean crossing.

She quoted from the Paramount newsreel film (which we saw later during Edward Guiliano’s talk) of Alice sitting on the sun deck of the Cunard Line’s pas-

senger ship Berengaria in New York harbor and saying to the assembled newspaper reporters, “I think my ad- ventures overseas will be almost as interesting as my adventures underground.” (Her words, consciously or not, echoed Lewis Carroll’s own words to her in a letter of November 11, 1886, in which, in the context of borrowing back the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground to be printed in facsimile, he wrote: “I have had almost as many Adventures, in getting that unfortunate facsimile, finished Above Ground, as your namesake had Under it!”)

On May 2, 1932, Columbia awarded Alice Har- greaves a Doctor of Letters degree honoris causa in the rotunda of Low Library, and two days later there was a formal celebration in the university’s old gymnasium. The degree was awarded based on the fact that Alice as a child had implored Carroll to write down the tale he had begun on a fateful rowing trip on the Isis.

In the Alice at Columbia exhibit in the Chang Oc- tagon Gallery of the Rare Book and Manuscript Li- brary on the sixth floor of Butler, Curator Jennifer B. Lee presented a wonderful collection of original and rare materials documenting the visit, which was covered by American newspapers coast to coast and around the world. Materials from the University Ar- chives and Rare Book collection were displayed in six gallery cases. They included books from Carroll’s library; first and signed editions of Carroll’s own pub- lications; intriguing correspondence between Profes- sor Zanetti and Alice’s son Captain Caryl Hargreaves, and between Nicholas Murray Butler and Alice (Mrs. Reginald Hargreaves); examples of the invitation to the degree ceremony (Monday, May 2, 1932), and the invitation, ticket, and program for the Lewis Carroll Centenary Celebration (May 4, 1932); a book of news- paper clippings assembled by Sir Leicester Harms- worth on the Lewis Carroll Centenary events; Fred- erick Locke r-Lampson’s copy of the rare book The

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Garland of Rachel, to which Carroll contributed the poem “What hand may wreathe thy natal crown”; and many other fascinating items. In a letter of May 19, 1932, as she departed for England, Alice Hargreaves wrote to Butler, “I cannot begin to express my plea- sure and gratitude for the honour bestowed on me, and the kindness, very undeserved I fear — but please believe ‘Alice’ does appreciate it.”

In putting together the exhibition, Jennifer Lee discovered in the university archives two recordings made on aluminum discs of Alice herself, Nicholas Murray Butler, and Professor Harry Morgan Ayres of the university’s English department speaking to the assembly on May 4th. It was thrilling to listen to Al- ice’s voice played during Dayna’s talk: a little scratchy now, but not heard for 83 years.

After the talk we traipsed upstairs to a warm, inti- mate reception in the Octagon Gallery.

The exhibition runs through January 29, 2016.

THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS DARKLY

Mark Burstein

(Seen at 8:15 p.m. The show was also performed ear- lier on Tuesday, at 3:00 p.m., and then on Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.)

A large yet often scattered group of us moving from the reception through various corridors, stair- wells, and elevators to the several places where An- drew Sellon was rumored to be performing was a scene out of Spinal Tap (you know which one I mean: “rock’n’roll!”). But his staged reading of the current incarnation of his one-man show, Through the Looking- Glass Darkly, or, Lewis Carroll and the Pursuit of Inno- cence, was more than worth it.

Entering the room as Charles Dodgson, mutter- ing to himself, “I knew who I was when I was alive, but I’ve been changed several times since then,” the pro- tagonist said he “just wished to clear up a few things about my reputation,” and remarked that in the af- terlife he had just met a fellow named “Steven Some- thing,” who lent him a most fascinating device called an “eye-pad” or some such.

Andrew/Dodgson/Carroll, using a wide arsenal of quotes ranging from Charles Dodgson Sr.’s letters through Jr.’s juvenilia, letters, diaries, poems, and less- er known works, explored what he called the “dark undercurrents” of his infatuation with Alice. From the unpleasant implications of his Rugby experience through the melancholia of his later years, Dodgson was never comfortable with the sexual aspect of hu- man nature.

His relationship with the Liddell family was dis- cussed in great detail, Andrew feeling that the in- famous break came as a result Mrs. Liddell’s not wanting people to think Dodgson was courting Miss Prickett — or far worse, fourteen-year-old Lorina —

Andrew Sellon

and that Dodgson was doubly hurt to be reminded he was “unworthy” of Alice Liddell and that anyone might think he would court a governess. He playfully showed how some of the characters present at a typi- cal tea party at the Liddells could be precursors to those who showed up at the Hatter’s in the tale spun on the Isis. Much was also made of the quote from a letter from Lord Salisbury (August 25, 1878) that “They say Dodgson has half gone out of his mind in consequence of having been refused by the real Alice (Liddell),” Dodgson being 45 at the time and Alice 26. And back in 1865, Charles’s brother Wilfred had fallen in love with a fourteen-year-old, also named Al- ice (Donkin), but he waited six years before marrying her. Alice’s own romance with Prince Leopold was also discussed (Leopold later naming his daughter Alice, and Alice naming her son Leopold).

In any case, Sellon was charming, delightful, funny, and quite moving, bringing all his professional acting talents to the fore, and demonstrating great dramatic instincts in his writing. “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7 ALICE IN A WORLD OF WONDERLANDS

Stephanie Lovett

Alice in a World of Wonderlands is a book, an exhi- bition, and a conference — all facets of the same phe- nomenon. About seven years ago, realizing that the 150th anniversary of the 1865 first edition of Alice was approaching, LCSNA president emeritus and collec- tor Joel Birenbaum began brainstorming ideas about a worldwide celebration, featuring a variety of exhibi- tions in New York City. In 2009, he started talking with Jon Lindseth, a collector and member of the Grolier Club, about what kind of Alice exhibition would be suitable for the Grolier. Lindseth enthusiastically moved forward with the idea of a Grolier show on Al- ice in translation, and as the club expects a substantial

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Photo by Mark Burstein

Photo by Stephanie Lovett

Grolier exhibit organizer Jon Lindseth shares a laugh with its dedicatee, Morton Cohen

catalogue documenting an exhibition, he also began exploring the parameters of how best to write about translations. This was the genesis for what became Al- ice in a World of Wonderlands, a 3-volume, 2,638-page, 291/4-pound, 1 1 "-tall work of essays, back-translations, and bibliographical checklists; a spectacular Grolier Club exhibition; and two days of conferences this week, bringing together translators, scholars, and en- thusiasts from 24 countries.

In order to make the most of this opportunity to bring together previously uncollected knowledge about Alice in translation, Lindseth decided that three volumes were necessary.

The first volume is an extensive scholarly study, with essays on the story of Alice's presence in each of 174 languages, numerous general essays, repro- ductions of about 250 book covers, and appendices collating data in several different ways. It is hard to overstate the fascinating stories told in the essays: po- litically repressed languages such as Galician reclaim- ing their status; cultural differences in the acceptance of children’s books; complex interplays of politics, language, identity, and literature.

The next feature of the book intended to capture data for English-language readers is the volume of back-translations from many languages. These offer the general audience a window into the kinds of deci- sions made about the nonsense words, the parodies of Victorian poems, the puns and wordplay, the cul- tural embeddedness, and much more, in rendering Alice into other languages. The same passage from Chapter VII, the Mad Tea-Party, can be seen in 207

Alan Tannenbaum

back-translations — including both an early and a re- cent one where possible — supported by substantial footnotes illuminating a myriad of linguistic and cul- tural decisions.

The third volume provides a record, in the form of bibliographical checklists, of over 7,000 editions of Alice in Wonderland, plus nearly 2,000 of Through the Looking-Glass, in 174 languages, dialects, and orthog- raphies, for a total of 8,484 books. Not only are lan- guages from all over the world represented (Azerbai- jani, Tongan, Xhosa, Icelandic, Montenegrin, Oriya, Jerriais), but there are also extinct languages (Old English), dialects (Orkney Scots), constructed lan- guages (Blissymbols, Lingwa de Planeta), and alter- nate orthographies (Shavian, IPA). There is also the

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first-ever index of illustrators of translated editions, documenting 1,200 unique names.

The exhibition at the Grolier Club is a remark- able sight, being essentially the project brought to life, telling the story through objects and curation. There are cases of materials about Lewis Carroll him- self (including the first book to use his pseudonym), and about translating Alice, with translations from the estate of the real Alice. Carroll was active in the pro- cess of bringing Alice to other languages, and one case is devoted to translations made during his lifetime, beginning with German and French in 1869. Seven cases display translations by geographical region, cre- ating very interesting conversations among materials.

The two-day conference at the Grolier Club saw approximately 120 writers from the project and other guests come together for nine talks and opportuni- ties to interact. Children’s literature scholar Emer O’Sullivan, author of Comparative Children’s Literature (2005) and the Historical Dictionary of Children’s Lit- erature (2010), opened the conference by situating Warren Weaver’s Alice in Many Tongues (1964) in his scientific career and his belief in the possibilities of machine translation. She outlined the development of translation studies from its earlier homes in linguis- tics and comparative literature to its still developing presence as an independent field. Linguistic studies contextualized translation as a transaction between two languages; comparative literature imposed nor- mative and prescriptive assumptions about fidelity. Today, an international, interdisciplinary network of scholarly communities is concerned with the cultural and political, as well as linguistic, creation of meaning through translation. She concluded by quoting from the envoi of David Crystal’s Foreword about the trans- lations community that had been created by this proj- ect. This community was highly in evidence for those two days, as people with many different language backgrounds, scholarly interests, and worldviews made connections among themselves and among the ideas that were flowing so wildly. Represented in the room were speakers of 39 different languages!

Gabriel Lopez of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona spoke next, surprising us with the news that many Spanish-language readers believe that a chapter about a horse, created by a translator in 1952, is part of the original text — a good example of the kind of information that this project has brought to light: something well known to many, but not to Eng- lish speakers. We also learned that only 10% of the world’s Spanish speakers live in Spain, and thus Spain is the third-largest exporter of books in the world. The first complete Spanish-language Alice was actu- ally published in 1921 in a newspaper in Mexico City, which specifically positioned her as a revolutionary hero; politics once again came into play when Franco forbade languages other than Castilian, bringing on a two-decade drought of Spanish Alices. Undaunted, Al- ice in Spanish now boasts the second-largest number of editions in the checklist, at 1,223.

After lunch, Derrick McClure, MBE, of Aber- deen gave us a tour of Scots dialect versions, in which the Owl and Panther may dine on haggis, taties, or neeps. Professor McClure explained that some of these dialects have a substantial literary tradition, no- tably Shetland, Doric, and Ayrshire, and made it clear that identity issues around language are prominent considerations. While the Glaswegian version is more exuberant and more culturally specific, for instance, the Ulster Scots version reflects the current struggle for recognition as a separate language.

Next, University of Hawai’i professor Keao Ne- Smith told us that HawaPians, who have been highly literate since the 1820s, have a strong tradition of publishing foreign stories and prefer foreignizing translations, as a way of understanding other cultures (as opposed to domesticating translations, which try to replicate for the reader the experience of reading a book situated in one’s own culture). Today, Hawaiian is an endangered language, with only about 200 na- tive speakers, and Professor NeSmith is especially ex- cited about the potential of this project to generate both interest and literature, to combat that danger. He reported that the “wow” factor and prestige of a

The Grolier Exhibit

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Photo by Alan Tannenbanm

Hawaiian Alice was sensational enough that he went on to translate Through the Looking-Glass as well, and a Hobbit, which has gotten more publicity.

The first day concluded with a panel discussion among the four speakers and the audience, which in- cluded conversation about the role of translations in reviving endangered languages but also in repressive colonialism. Professor O’Sullivan remarked that Alice has two axes of foreignness — place and time — affect- ing translation considerations and also the experi- ences of English-language readers. We moved on to an elegant and most convivial dinner at the Cornell Club, featuring a revelatory after-dinner talk by the project’s technical editor, Alan Tannenbaum, who as- tonished us all by discussing his creation of the mas- ter computer files, creating a consistent format for data in more than 60 fonts from almost 300 sources, standardizing the bibliographical checklist, handling the complex issues created by the back-translations and their footnotes, writing over 168 programs and 6,000 lines of code, and so much more, to deliver 2,638 camera-ready pages to the printer. Alan, who also co-curated the Grolier exhibition, is credited as the technical editor of the book, as no preexisting job description covered the range of expertise required for this unique project.

LEWIS CARROLL IN NUMBERLAND

Dayna Nuhn

Dr. Robin Wilson is a British professor of pure math- ematics, whose interests lie in graph theory and the history of mathematics. He is known to us as the author of Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life.

At 4:00 (and later at 7:00) p.m., a packed room of about 220 people gathered at the wonderful Na- tional Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) — a hands- on place the gadget-loving Dodgson would have thor- oughly enjoyed — to hear Robin Wilson’s lecture on Lewis Carroll as a mathematician. It turned out that Professor Wilson was unable to attend, and instead we were treated to a visit from Charles Lutwidge Dodg- son, who told us about his childhood and life at Ox- ford. He brought along some guests to help with a few dramatic readings. One performer was our own Fran Abeles, who played Mrs. Liddell and Queen Vic- toria, among others. The lecture was fast-moving and interesting, and “Dodgson” engaged the audience with a variety of games, posed mathematical prob- lems, and worked through exercises in logic. He took the audience on a journey that incorporated his let- ters to Maggie Cunnyngham (1/30/68) and Wilton Rix (5/20/85), quotes from Alice and the Snark and Sylvie and Bruno (Fortunatus’s Purse), his maps and mazes, questions from exams for high-school and col- lege students in the mid-nineteenth century (daunt- ing!), puzzles, geometry, his passion for Euclid, pro-

L to R: Joseph Dauben, Robin Wilson, Jennifer Beineke, Fran Abeles

portional representation, A Tangled Tale, lawn tennis, the “two clocks” paradox, and his relationship with Bartholomew “Bat” Price. The audience really got in- volved trying to solve the puzzles put to them.

I enjoyed this opportunity to learn more about this aspect of Carroll’s life, and found it especially ap- pealing to look around and see a room full of people of all ages (ten to ninety!) interested in Lewis Car- roll’s mathematics.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8 ALICE IN A WORLD OF WONDERLANDS, CONTINUED

Stephanie Lovett

At the beginning of day two, we heard from Zongxin Feng, professor of linguistics and English language and literature at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He maintains that of all Western classics published in China, Alice has the most editions (462), despite the three-decade gap of the Cultural Revolution. His own academic interest in it was sparked because lin- guistics scholars took it seriously and cited it, and also because of the Lewis Carroll/Martin Gardner/ Warren Weaver link between Alice and mathematics. Then Russell Kaschula of Rhodes University in South Africa spoke about issues around literacy in minority languages. He is very concerned about the creation of more literature for young people, quoting Nelson Mandela, who said that in speaking to people in a lan- guage they understand, you speak to their mind, but if you speak to them in their own language, you speak to their heart. Professor Kaschula has coined the term “technauriture” to refer to the combining of technol- ogy, aural language, and literature to develop African languages, and is interested in creative and sensitive ways of doing so. He sees this project as a springboard for the expansion of written literature for Africa’s young people.

In the afternoon, Sumanyu Satpathy, chairman of the English Department at the University of Delhi, described the web of political and cultural issues in- volved with translation in a country with 22 official languages and 1,600 more spoken. He told us of Rabindranath Tagore’s interest in Alice and in writing

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Photo by Mark Burstein

a similar fantasy himself, and he also related Alices revolutionary role in fighting fascism, as we had seen with China and Spain. Publisher Michael Everson of Evertype next took us on a tour of some of the more unusual orthographies represented on his Alice list, including Deseret, IPA, Shavian, Unifon, and Npel. We were all very entertained by his bravura readings from a variety of languages, featuring Scouse, Icelan- dic, Old English, Middle English, and Ladino.

The second day also concluded with a panel dis- cussion, in which questions flew around about what was next for us. The project has created a huge trove of data to be mined, a scholarly network has been es- tablished, priorities have been articulated about put- ting books in the hands of young speakers of minor- ity languages, and major lacunae for Alice have been identified (Native American languages, most of the languages of Africa, and many more). A number of people called for a similar work on illustrators of Alice, and many other effects on attendees’ own work were evident. The question was raised, in light of the global nature of this enterprise, if English is still a negative, colonializing, and oppressive force. The panelists agreed that at this point, it is no longer a matter of ei- ther/or, but of both/and — both one’s own language and English.

Even for those of us who had worked closely on the book, everything was a revelation. Political and social factors in translation mixed in with linguistic factors, and one of the themes that quickly became evident was how closely tied all those choices are for a translator. An example of this is Kimie Kusumoto’s observation that it was culturally impossible not to change the Mad Tea-Party in a Japanese translation, because interaction between a young girl and a grown man has specific semiotic content in Japan.

The translations portion of the conference came to an end Thursday evening with a gala dinner at the Cosmopolitan Club. Michael Suarez, S.J., from the University of Virginia’s Rare Books School closed the conference with an after-dinner speech in which he celebrated the creation and renewal of meaning through interpretation, translation, and localization.

A video of the entire conference is available at vimeo.com/ album/3664885. More information about Alice in a World of Wonderlands, including how to order a copy, may be found at AlicelnAWorldOfWonderlands. com. The books will be reviewed in more depth by Jan Susina in the next issue.

The exhibition runs through November 21, 2015.

JIM GARDNER AT MOMATH

Mark Burstein

On Thursday evening, another fine MoMath event took place. Martin Gardner’s son Jim gave a warm, intimate illustrated talk entitled “Skepticism, Magic, and Whimsy: Anecdotes and Collected Thoughts

about Growing Up Around Martin Gardner.” He talk- ed about Martin’s very disciplined daily routine (sev- en days a week), his fondness for cryptograms in the daily paper, and his use of technology — namely scis- sors, glue, Wite-Out, a pen, a typewriter, a photocopy machine, an abacus to balance his checkbook, and a rotary-dial phone. Despite living until 2010 and be- ing of sound mind all the way, Martin never really got into computers, save for a CD of his Scientific American articles and the occasional dip into Wikipedia.

Martin was a whimsical practical joker (and a good sport when one was played on him), examples of which were his infamous April 1975 “Mathemati- cal Games” column in Scientific American, “Six Sensa- tional Discoveries that Somehow or Another Have Es- caped Public Attention” (such as Leonardo da Vinci’s invention of the flush toilet), or his prediction that the millionth digit of pi would be a 5 (mysteriously, he was correct!). Martin was famously not a collec- tor, but he did have certain things he prized, mostly artwork (he was the first to champion Escher to the American public) and a few puzzles. In his pockets he always had the same things: a handkerchief, a book of matches (so he could perform “Match-ic,” as his book on the subject was titled), a watch winder, and a realistic-looking thumb tip.

Jim mentioned, among other things, his dad’s heroes (William James, Chesterton, Baum, Carroll), those he considered charlatans (“Ronny” Hubbard, Uri Geller, etc.), the biography of Martin currently being written by Dana Richards, Salvador Dali’s insis- tence on meeting “Dr. Matrix,” and Martin’s fondness for baseball (the Boston/Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves for some inexplicable reason) and country-western music. We saw a self-portrait on a birthday card Mar- tin had drawn for his beloved wife, Charlotte, and a great “Believe It or Not”-parody cartoon: “World’s Most Skeptical Man! Martin Gardner . . . when asked if he might be too skeptical, replied ‘I doubt it.’” Jim concluded by showing us a puzzle for which Martin had the original art: a picture of five Cheshire-ish cats

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in a tree. When the pieces were rearranged, it became a picture of four cats plus a grin. Martin’s relation to Carroll is an oft-told tale, from his earlier Oz obses- sion through his proposal that Bertrand Russell do an annotated Alice, but Jim’s heartfelt reminiscences about his dad added a very human dimension for those of us who never had the pleasure of meeting him in person.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9 THE MAXINE SCHAEFER READING

Patt Griffin

Carrollians — as Alicel50 has done a frabjous job of reminding us — are part of an iconic, nonsensical community spanning continents, obsessions, and sar- torial whimsy. During the New York festivities (both serious and loopy), followers and fanatics showcased their personal passions, from mind-blowing collec- tions to opinions, artworks, literature, costumery, and other signs of devotion.

As for me, aside from a small but cherished stock- pile of Humpty Dumpty miscellanea, my favorite in- volvement in all things Alice centers on my partici- pation as an actress in the Society’s Maxine Schaefer Readings.

These presentations for kids generally take place in elementary school libraries, classrooms, or audito- riums, and, post-reading, Society members hand each young attendee a beautiful hardcover edition of Won- derland or Looking-Glass (depending on the reading), with a special bookplate designed by Jonathan Dixon.

To celebrate Alicel50, our PR diva, Anita Cotter, arranged for the reading to take place off-campus at the Morgan Library, within walking distance from PS 116. At 10:45 a.m., teacher Anita Cheng and her 30 fifth graders headed downstairs to the Morgan’s audi- torium for a reading of the “Mad Tea-Party” chapter presented by Ellie Salins (Narrator), Andrew Sellon (Mad Hatter and March Hare), and myself (Alice and the Dormouse).

Several members of the Society were also in atten- dance, as were a handful of esteemed international visi- tors. Overall, a pretty impressive turnout and reception.

Prior to setting the “table set out under a tree,” Ellie gave a wonderful intro, explaining that the read- ings were in honor of her late mother, Maxine, who served as the Society’s secretary for 20 years. Because Maxine was an avid reader who loved children, this seemed like an ideal way to celebrate her memory. Meanwhile, several rows behind the children, former LCSNA president David Schaefer — who established these readings to celebrate his wife’s legacy — looked on approvingly as his daughter spoke so lovingly of her mother.

The reading itself went off nicely, even when I dis- covered that my script was missing every other page. Andrew shared, and we had a great time not only dur-

ing the performance, but during the Q&A following it. (I should point out that for many years Andrew and I were the go-to reading couple until his professional acting career took off, and he was unable to make it to a number of meetings. In his absence, I was fortunate to be able to team up with other LCSNA members — but sharing the stage with him after years apart made for a most happy reunion.)

The Q&A, as always, was a singular sensation, with this particular group of kids — two-thirds of whom were more familiar with Disney’s recent Johnny Depp version than the book — taking a personal interest in Elbe’s loss of her mother. They also wanted to know about Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell: When was Lew- is Carroll born? When did he die? Is Alice still alive? In fact, in retrospect, these kids were heavily into life and death issues, although they did seem interested in Tea-Party trivia, such as treacle being molasses and pet dormice sleeping in teapots in Victorian times.

Afterwards, books and bonus Alice 150 pins were handed out to the kids (several of whom demanded Elbe’s autograph), and they headed upstairs for a guided tour of the Morgan’s exhibit. Twinkle, twinkle.

DAY ONE OF THE ALICE IN POPULAR CULTURE CONFERENCE

Clare Imholtz

We had waited so long for this day. There were no doubts: We always knew it would be special. But when the Alicel50 popular culture conference opened on Friday, at the New York Institute of Technology, with a brilliant video — images from the new Alice illustrated by Andrea D ’Aquino set to sinuous, enrapturing song and music by German composer Carsten Braun (You Tube.com/watch?v=kzznqlGsxgk) — we settled deep into our seats, confident of an extraordinarily glori- ous experience.

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Stephanie Lovett

We were not to be disappointed. After an intro- duction from our president, Stephanie Lovett, LCS- NA founding member and former president Edward Guiliano, now the president of NYIT, kicked off the proceedings with a luminous and voluminous talk on Lewis Carroll’s “posthumous productivity” (the sign of genius, according to Goethe). Carroll died, his works live on: Alice is one of the most quoted, trans- lated, published, collected, adapted, and loved works ever. Edward offered several reasons for Alice's long life: “pluriformity” — there are many Alices (Alice is who we make her); unforgettable language and char- acters; breadth — it has everything, jokes, melodrama, and even the grotesque; and depth — the issues Alice explores (time, identity, death, etc.) remain relevant today. Alice lives on also through many excellent ad- aptations, including those that pique our voyeuristic curiosity about the relationship between Carroll and Alice Liddell. Thriving Lewis Carroll societies such as our own keep the flames of fandom (and scholar- ship) fanned.

Why meet in New York? Edward provided endless examples of Alice's entanglement with the Big Apple. The earliest copies of Wonderland — the 1865 printing

Alethea Kontis

rejected in England — were sold here, by D. Appleton and Co., whose office would have been just down the street from where we sat. New York has been home to important Alice movies and theatrical productions through the decades of the twentieth century, many of which were enumerated. Alice Liddell Hargreaves traveled to New York in 1932 — the beginning of our devotion to the historical Alice (the newsreel with her being interviewed was shown). In 1939, Wonder Bread’s Wonderland pavilion was a popular World’s Fair attraction, as was Disney’s Alice in the 1964 New York World’s Fair “It’s a Small World” show. The 1951 Disney movie premiered in New York (the original trailer was screened). Part of the Disney promotion was a magazine story of the Disney Alice cartoon char- acters collaged into the ballroom of the Waldorf As- toria. The Disney “Alice in Wonderland” theme song composed by Sammy Fain, which became an Ameri- can Songbook classic, has been performed over the years in the NY jazz scene by renowned musicians from Bill Evans to Dave Brubeck to Oscar Peterson (all shared in audio excerpts). We could go on for days, but will name just a few more examples: David Del Tredici’s compositions, Elizabeth Swados’s Alice at the Palace (Meryl Streep’s breakthrough performance, shown in video excerpts), and Annie Leibovitz’s 2003 photo shoot for Vogue.

Our next speaker was Alethea Kontis, an award- winning Young Adult author and the co-author (she wrote the poems) of The Wonderland Alphabet: Alice's Adventures Through the ABCs and What She Found There. It’s not a baby book; Alethea’s target audience for the book’s 26 witty and ingenious quatrains was herself and, by extension Alice fans of all ages. Alethea has remained a lifelong Alice fan, even though her ambi- tion to play the Duchess in her high school play was thwarted when she demonstrated her amazing sneeze and was assigned the role of the cook.

Andy Malcolm, with his production team, Robin Bain (his wife) and Wendy Rowland, next screened the latest version of their important documentary

to

Photo by Mark Burstein

The Collectors Panel,

L to Ft: Mark Burstein, Clare Imholtz, Alan Tannenbaum, Matt Crandall, Joel Biren- baum, Dayna Nuhn

There's Something about Alice, in which Carrollians, many very familiar to us, discuss the attraction and mysteries of the book. The film (which we last saw ex- cerpts from last year in Toronto) keeps getting better, with more interviews and more insights into Carroll’s immortal work. While here, Andy and friends cap- tured several others of us, including Morton Cohen, to be integrated into the film.

THE COLLECTORS PANEL

August A. Imholtz, Jr.

Following Andy’s presentation, a panel of our Carroll collectors took the stage. President emeritus Mark Burstein, speaking first and chairing the discussion, spoke about his collection, which derives genetically from his father, Sandor, who was fascinated by the Wonderland wallpaper in his bedroom in 1928 and by his elementary school teacher, Kathleen Sherman, who played Alice and the White Rabbit (somehow) in a school production. Sandor joined the LCSNAin the late 1970s after buying an Alice translation while vaca- tioning in Portugal, the beginning of a collection that filled a room of his house until 1999, when the col- lection moved to Mark’s quaint house in Mill Valley, and then to a tower on Llisa and Mark’s home in Peta- luma. He showed pictures of some of its treasures: the 1848 edition of Havilland Chepmell’s Short Course of History, a copy of The Holy Land by Canon Duckworth, and a copy of the 1982 Morgan Exhibition Catalog signed by Herb Ahrend, who had met the elderly Mrs. Hargreaves at Columbia in 1932, leaving Mark one handshake removed from the real Alice.

Joel Birenbaum, president emeritus, then began by declaring himself an unreformed Alice-aholic. His addiction began in Brooklyn’s Technical High School when he had to write a paper for English class and had no clue what to do. His teacher suggested a life- changing topic: The Annotated Alice by Martin Gard-

ner. His first purchase was the Dali Alice, and then, with a copy of the Ovenden and Davis Illustrators of Alice in hand, he set out to collect all illustrated Al- ices. Not satisfied with books alone, he branched out into figurines, tea sets, and dolls, and the collection is growing so much that Joel and his wife, Deb, had to move to a bigger house.

Next up was Clare Imholtz, who focused on a sin- gle collecting interest: high school and college year- books with an Alician theme. Her collection has 32 Alice-themed yearbooks, dating from 1924 to 1991. She was able to purchase them mainly through dili- gent searches on eBay — probably the only way one could build such a collection. Different levels of cre- ativity can be seen in these adolescent or early adult “rite of passage” commemorative volumes. Clare pointed out several particularly interesting and clever features in the illustration, design, and writing of the yearbooks, and noted that the Walrus was the single most popular character.

Matt Crandall, one of the preeminent Disney collectors in the LCSNA, showed us only a very tiny selection from his houseful of Disney Alice materials. He began with art from David Hall’s never-produced concept, followed by Mary Blair illustrations for the originally planned 1951 film, the earliest Alice Little Golden Book, and for the famous 1951 Disney car- toon film, a variety of posters, lobby cards, records, figurines, and the like.

President emeritus Alan Tannenbaum, who won- dered out loud whether he was a collector or a hoard- er (no question: a major collector, as everyone who has visited him will testify) , became interested in Car- roll when he was writing spell-checking software for IBM and wanted unusual English words. He turned to Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice, and so it began. He now has the largest collection of Alice pinball ma- chines (i.e., both of those known ever to have been

1 1

made, and in working order as well). When one en- ters his Alice room, one sees a Victor Talking Machine Victrola, which he purchased because the founder of the company, Eldridge Reeves Johnson, had once owned Carroll’s original Under Ground manuscript. He next showed his copy of the rare blue-cover Hunting of the Snark, books from Dodgson’s library, inscribed editions, a nine-foot Johnny Depp poster from the Tim Burton film, Mardi Gras doubloons from New Orleans, original Alice art from MAD magazine, and much more.

Dayna Nuhn, like Clare before her, focused on a single topic; hers was Alice in advertising. “Flat things,” her term for the paper Alice advertisements she collects, certainly were not on her mind when, de- cades ago, her mother read the Alice books to her. She got interested in Alice at the age of eighteen, read The Annotated Alice, went to the 1998 Carroll conference in Oxford, and wondered what she could collect. She settled on advertisements, and showed us a wonderful selection of Alice trade cards and ads for almost every imaginable product, from Campbell’s Mock Turtle Soup, to automobiles, to the famous Guinness book- lets, even Ex-Lax. She left us thirsting for more.

Regrettably, the planned panel discussion had to be canceled for reasons of time. (We quarreled last March.)

DAY ONE, CONTINUED

Clare Imholtz

Martin Gardner’s son Jim next spoke briefly about the new Annotated Alice, edited and art-directed by our own Mark Burstein. Standing on the shoulders of three previous editions, this book outdoes them all, incorporating more than 100 new and revised an- notations and the work of more than 45 artists. Jim told an amusing anecdote about his Dad, who was not a collector, inadvertently giving away the contents of a deluxe Dali Alice, keeping just the clamshell box. Ouch! (The book is reviewed on p. 45.)

Andy Malcolm

We then heard from Kiera Vaclavik, senior lec- turer in French and comparative literature at Queen Mary University of London and curator of the Victo- ria 8c Albert Museum’s current The Alice Look exhibit in London. Alice, Kiera assured us, has always been a trendsetter. (The day before, at the translation con- ference, she had made a fashion statement of her own, wearing a shirt that said, “Alice is a boy!”) Kiera showed us how Alice’s appearance and dress changed from Wonderland to Looking Glass and even more strik- ingly (because more time had elapsed) to The Nursery Alice. These differences were due to Carroll’s desire to keep Alice fashionable. The pleats in the skirt of the “Nursery” Alice were highly fashionable in 1886, when Carroll originally thought the book would come out, but unfortunately passe when the approved version was finally published in 1890. Even in the nineteenth century, Alice was gaining new looks with illustrators such as Elto and Blanche McManus, and the color pictorial bindings of U.S. publishers such as Dono- hue and McLoughlin. Nineteenth-century stage Al- ices looked nothing like Tenniel’s girl, preferring to wear long sleeves and sashes, and abjuring pinafores.

Kiera also showed some ads for Alice-inspired ap- parel, mostly from the 1930s and 1940s. Today, Alice remains a blank canvas on which the likes of Vivienne Westwood, Marc Jacobs, Liberty, Grace Coddington, and many, many others scribble — as a section in New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT)’s forth- coming exhibit, Fairy Tale Fashion, will show. Why does Alice stay in fashion? Kiera suggested that it is mainly the appeal of her youth and Englishness; plus, hers is a readily identifiable look, and one relatively easy to achieve.

Leonard Marcus, the leading American expert on children’s books and curator of part of the won- derful Rosenbach Museum exhibit in Philadelphia, then examined how Carroll’s revolutionary wonder- world paved the way for Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, published 96 years after Wonderland and im- mediately compared to it. Both books open with a bored child, but while Carroll deftly sends Alice right down that rabbit-hole, early drafts of Tollbooth at the Lily Library show that Juster had to rewrite it several times to craft a similar transition for his protagonist, Milo. Both Carroll and Juster send their heroes on a quest to realize their identity. Both satirize arbitrary authority, and love language, logic, and math jokes. In Tollbooth, square meals are literally square and, since the average family has 2.58 children, Milo en- counters a boy who is actuallyjust .58 of a child, being to his eternal misfortune, the third child born in his family. Alice grows up and down, whereas Milo meets a boy named Alec who is suspended in midair, and grows only down to meet the ground.

Tollbooth illustrator Jules Feiffer was Juster’s friend and neighbor, and the author purposely devised unil-

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lustratable scenes to tease him — for example, the smallest giant in the world or the tallest midget (these are of course the same). Feiffer turned to Tenniel and others for guidance in illustrating. Feiffer’s Milo is as serious as is Tenniel’s Alice. While it is interesting to compare these books and easy to note differences as well as similarities, they are alike in one very impor- tant way: In contrast to characters like Peter Pan who seek escape from reality, Alice and Milo escape from their dream worlds into reality, but retain their sense of wonder and proportion.

Marcus also discussed — though he never linked this with Juster — the possible influence of Darwin’s The Origin of Species on Carroll. But while Carroll al- ludes to Darwin several times (e.g., the ape in his Un- der Ground illustration of the mouse telling its tale to Alice and the assembled creatures), he never directly comments, leaving the question open to speculation.

After dashing out in a thunderstorm to grab a bite of dinner, we were treated to a talk and screenings by the world’s foremost Alice film expert, David Schaefer (another LCSNA founding member and former presi- dent). Did Lewis Carroll ever see a motion picture? The answer is probably no, although the technology was growing all around him. Carroll enjoyed watch- ing magic lantern slides at the theater, and in 1856 he himself presented a lantern slide show to children at Croft. Cecil Hepworth, who made the first Alice film, began his career by working with magic lanterns — Carroll may have visited Hepworth ’s lantern shop in Cecil Court in London, but we will never know.

Hepworth ’s 1903 Alice film, shot at Walton-on- Thames, was the longest film (800 feet) up to that time. David’s copy shows the original tints for each scene, which he has verified through discussion with Hepworth ’s daughter, and restored. By 1910, Alice had been filmed in the Bronx by Thomas Edison; this film was 995 feet long. After showing these two wonderful early, short silent films, David interposed a very amus-

ing 1933 Betty Boop cartoon, before our next feature. Betty follows the White Rabbit through a mirror and down into the subway for some conflated Wonderland and Looking-Glass-\ike adventures.

Next we saw the fascinating 1915 film by W. W. Young, mainly filmed on Long Island, with seaside scenes shot at Cape Ann in Massachusetts. This film featured beautiful costuming; a famous midget actor played the White Rabbit. Several stills from it appear in the 1917/18 Grosset and Dunlap edition of Won- derland and Looking Glass. The film, as shown by Da- vid, incorporates frames from three sources — Alice is seen discovering two different rabbit holes. The Tea- Party scene that David showed is not in the version available on the Net. The Looking Glass portion of the film is lost — except for the final reel (reel 5), which was located through David’s detective work. That reel bears a 1927 copyright, but was actually produced in 1915! Intertitles were added to both Wonderland and Looking Glass in 1927.

David has been researching all of these films for many years, and the versions he showed are the most complete and accurately colored available. His narra- tion pointed out their special features, for example, how size changes were managed and/ or ignored. Par- ticularly notable was David’s color-coding system for the Hepworth and Young films, indicating the source of each frame and the means David used to resurrect their original authentic look.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER lO DAY TWO OF THE ALICE IN POPULAR CULTURE CONFERENCE

Cindy Claymore Watter

As if putting the Alice Live exhibition at Lincoln Cen- ter together and running a panel discussion on Mon- day weren’t enough, Charlie Lovett, president emeri- tus and collector extraordinaire, spoke to the group again on Saturday morning.

*3

Photo by Stephanie Lovett

The translation of Alice to the stage was natural — both Alice books are full of song and parodic verse. Henry Savile Clarke wrote the first Alice in Wonderland play (“a musical pantomime in two acts”), performed in London at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1886, with Dodgson/Carroll’s enthusiastic approval. Phoe- be Carlo was the first actress to play Alice.

In New York, the first Alice play appeared in 1898, written by Emily Prime Delafield, and put on at the Waldorf as a benefit performance.

In 1905, Alice appeared as a character in Victor Herbert’s musical Wonderland , and later in Jerome Kern’s song “Alice in Wonderland” from 1914’s The Girl from Utah. This failed to go to Broadway, lead- ing into the humorous aside from Charlie that he couldn’t imagine a play about Mormons on Broad- way: “It would never sell.”

Alice in Wonderland opened on Broadway at the Booth Theater in 1915. Alice was played by Vivian To- bin, who was described by the New York Times critic as the “perfect embodiment of Carroll’s and Tenniel’s Alice.” However, the production itself was “for all its considerable charms, a trifle slender.” Many set pho- tos were published, showing a mad tea-party with an apparent expenditure of “literally tens of dollars.” The script was published, with color illustrations de- rived from set photos of either the Chicago or New York production. The Hatter’s costume is flashy (checks were nearly always used for the Hatter).

Charlie opined that “there probably never can be a Wonderland play sure to content those who have happily followed Alice.”

The Century Girl, a 1916 revue at the Century The- ater, featured an “Alice in Wonderland” number by Irving Berlin. The show ran for 200 performances and was described as “lavish and vastly entertaining . . . altogether like nothing else to be seen in America.”

Charlie Lovett

The Century Theater was at 62nd and Broadway, just about where we were meeting.

In 1924, the Music Box featured the revue Puttin’ on the Ritz, with a song (again by Irving Berlin) called “Come Along with Alice.” One review said the show had “precision, deftness, and just enough novelty.”

Tony Sarg, the famous puppeteer, brought his Al- ice puppets to the Belmont Theater in 1930. (Sarg is famous as the creator of the helium puppet balloons that first graced the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade.) His protege, Bill Baird, opened a studio in the West Village and put on an Alice production, too.

Shortly after it opened in 1933, Radio City Mu- sic Hall hosted the Lionel Barrymore film One Man ’s Journey. The precision dancers known as the “Roxy- ettes” performed a little number called “An Impres- sion from ‘Alice in Wonderland.’” Later, they became known as the Rockettes, and the dance was performed every spring.

Probably the most revived Alice is the version from Eva Le Gallienne, founder of the Civic Reper- tory Theater. Actually, there were three of them — one in 1932, one in 1946, and another in 1982. A 21-year- old Florida Friebus wrote it, but it was overhauled by Le Gallienne, who at least did give Friebus credit. Friebus said that every line and image in the dialogue, scenery, and costumes was taken from Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel. She was correct — the play is so close to the visual text that the costumes and scenery actually have cross-hatchings drawn on them! (Flori- da Friebus, an actress herself, went on to play Dobie’s mother on The Many Loves ofDobie Gillis .)

The productions are a commentary on the changes that overtook the theater, apparently without Le Gallienne noticing. (She played the White Queen in all three plays.) The first two productions (respec- tively starring Josephine Hutchison and Bambi Linn as Alice) were very well received. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times said that “Alice and her voyagers have crossed the footlights without surrendering their nationality” in 1946, but by 1982 (Kate Burton star- ring, with her father, Richard, as the White Knight) the play was considered unoriginal and static. Charlie said that it was remarkable that this Alice could move from “glowing reviews to total disdain” but, indeed, that is what happened. Times and tastes had changed. Today the Civic Rep is the site of a 7-Eleven.

Andre Gregory’s Alice in Wonderland was an Off- Broadway play that was “lavishly documented” by Richard Avedon in remarkable photographs (avail- able in book form). The play itself was shockingly modern, mixing humor with the threat of violence. Time’ s critic called it “an exciting, absorbing, vertigi- nous descent into a laughing hell ... a wholly satis- factory theatrical experience.” It was very influential, and launched a new way of doing theater.

Vinnette Carroll’s (no relation) Alice play But Never Jam Today closed after eight performances in 1979. Carroll was the first African-American woman to direct on Broadway, and her career was littered with successes; But Never Jam Today was not one of them. One reviewer described it not as the expected Broadway hit, but as “brilliant pieces strewn all over the place.”

Joseph Papp’s Public Theater had a success with Elizabeth Swados’s musical play Alice at the Palace, which starred a young Meryl Streep, in 1981.

In 2011, Wonderland came to Broadway. (LCSNA members had been able to preview this by way of pro- motional CDs given out at one of the New York meet- ings.) This variation on Alice involved a young woman looking for excitement in the big city — New York, in fact. Charlie noted that talented actors, great source material, and lots of money very often create a recipe for “an absolute disaster”; the show folded after 33 performances. “The desire to create a traditional arc from the unruly dreamscape” of Carroll’s original work can result in a convoluted story line. “What we like about Alice — its craziness — can militate against its dramatic success.”

Finally, Then She Fell opened in 2012 in Brooklyn — and is still running (until December 30, 2015). This is an immersive theatrical experience — fifteen people per performance are welcomed into Wonderland. (The play was originally staged in a hospital; now it is performed in a former parochial school — both very suitable.) Then She Fell incorporates music and dance. Charlie quoted Ben Brantley of the New York Times, who wrote, “This show occupies a dreamscape where the judgments and classifications of the waking mind are inoperative, and where the single self keeps split- ting and blurring.” One of the conference-goers vol- unteered that she saw Then She Fell, and it was the best $125 she had ever spent.

[ Charlie’s complementary exhibit at the NYPL Perform- ing Arts Center of memorabilia from these and other produc- tions is discussed infra. 7

After a break, Andrew Sellon, actor on stage and screen (both big and little), and, not incidentally, a president emeritus of the LCSNA, discussed his one- man show Through the Looking-Glass Darkly, which some of us were fortunate to have seen at Columbia earlier in the week. Andrew joked that he got his MFA in dramatic arts “before the Internet,” and he pre- pared and performed the first, 40-minute version of his play more than twenty years ago as part of obtain- ing his master’s degree. To get ready for that show, he surrounded himself with topic-based files on Dodg- son. Andrew decided that Dodgson/ Carroll should be “dead, but very lively” and in a state of limbo due to his unresolved relationship with Alice. This way, he could see events that happened after his death.

Andrew said that he used as much of Carroll’s own words — from diaries and letters — as possible, while avoiding an arbitrary straitjacket. He inserted a stammer in key places. The aim was a “combination of playfulness and propriety, with a flow.”

He told of one person in the audience of the original MFA production who thought the most lurid worst of Lewis Carroll, and asked him: “How can you possibly put that filthy man on stage?” He responded: “Come and see my show.” She did, and apologized to him for her prejudgment. Andrew said she changed her mind because “I managed to portray a complex and all-too-human being.” Later, he told us that he wants to create a play “that works for the person who walks in off the street.” (He certainly did that. More than one non-Carrollian spouse of a devotee said that the play was engaging as well as educational.)

Andrew’s preparation for the next version took more than ten years, because of his tendency to pro- crastinate (he freely admitted) and the sheer amount of reading he had to do. After the first version, he wrote a full-length version with three actors in it, but “I didn’t have ityet.” By 2013, he said, Alicel50 had be- come “such a big target even /couldn’t ignore it.” He revisited the first version and melded it with elements of the second version, along with entirely new mate- rial. It wasn’t until July of 2015 that Andrew discov- ered the format that would work for Charles Dodg- son, the teacher, and Lewis Carroll, the creative artist. He used a lecture-hall setting that combined physical writing and drawing, which was very effective in show- ing the mercurial qualities of Carroll’s personality.

While his play got a wonderful response — he asked for ideas and suggestions — he said he was still fine-tuning it. “At this point I have to keep cutting stuff I love. I can only tell one story.” He also said, “I am not a self-appointed keeper of a reliquary. I am a translator. I am a storyteller. And I think Mr. Dodg- son would respect that.” He also pointed out, “If you try to be 100 percent faithful to the books, you are doomed to disappointment.”

Andrew considers his play to be about Lewis Car- roll and the pursuit of innocence as well as “the ongo- ing search for his muse, the dreamchild, and states of grace.” After that magical time (the seven years with Alice, and creation of the Alice stories), Dodgson “continued searching for the golden key to get back into the magical garden” the rest of his life.

Update: In late October, Andrew delivered one more performance of a revised version — further streamlined and clarified on the basis of helpful feed- back received during Alice 150 — at Monmouth Coun- ty Library in Newjersey. The response was terrific. He is now looking at other opportunities, such as crowd- funding, to mount a fully staged production. Further information can be found on andrewsellon.com.

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Our next speaker, Daniel Singer, discussed his two-man show, A Perfect Likeness , in which Charles Dickens drops by Oxford to have his photograph tak- en by Lewis Carroll. The two men engage in verbal fencing, until closely held secrets are revealed. (The show was first performed in Winston-Salem at the Spring 2013 LCSNA meeting, and it also played, to excellent reviews, in Los Angeles.) Daniel pointed out that there had been several other dramatizations of Carroll’s life, including the film Dreamchild, starring Ian Holm, and Crocodiles and Cream, a long-running traveling play in England, with Kevin Moore. He said they had the “complete ring of authenticity,” but were necessarily limited in scope. Less successful efforts in- clude Sherlock Through the Looking-Glass, set in a Lon- don where people are going mad, and Lewis Carroll is a suspect. “The playwright had done no research at all, which was a little shocking.”

Back to Perfect Likeness. Daniel came up with the idea after rereading Morton Cohen’s biography of Carroll, where it is mentioned that Dodgson request- ed Dickens’s address from Alexander Macmillan, who replied on January 5, 1870.

“I immediately thought ‘What if... ?’” He created the play, in which Dickens, “in ruinous health” and near the end of his life, goes to Dodgson ’s studio and engages in a litde “pre-mortem reflection.” Singer de- scribed it as a meeting between a “world-weary bon vivant and his biggest fanboy.” All he had to do was create the Victorian conversation, in which they “gain each other’s trust — and go a little too far. Dickens unlocks Dodgson ’s secrets and reveals a few of his own.” Daniel said he envisioned Dickens as portrayed by Orson Welles — “loud, bumptious, extroverted. . . . He liked sex and the life of a celebrity, fathered ten children, and had a mistress. He wore loud clothes.” Dodgson could not have been a bigger contrast: He valued privacy, led a sheltered life, was celibate, and dressed conservatively. “I envisioned him as being played by Leslie Howard.” Daniel moved the meet- ing back to 1866, when Dodgson would have been “flushed with the success of Alice and suffering the loss of the intimate friendship with the Liddells.”

Daniel said it was necessary to become a literary historian to write his play. He quoted Cohen’s descrip- tion of Dodgson as a “fountain of wit, but beneath the bubble and froth was a brooding guilt.” He added, “I was also brave enough to ask Edward Wakeling for advice.” Wakeling told him to avoid promulgating the Alice myth and stick to Dodgson ’s personality, which was witty, occasionally pedantic and fussy, yet pious and determined.

Daniel showed video excerpts of the play, which is indeed hilarious, beginning with Dickens wanting a bowl of punch and instead being served, to his hor- ror, claret in a (very small) sherry glass. He next gets

fined by Dodgson for swearing: “Well, this is going to be a very expensive afternoon,” he huffs, stuffing money into the swear box.

A Perfect Likeness received very good reviews and is currently available for licensing through Playscripts Inc. Daniel joked about how difficult it is to launch a new play about two Victorian authors. “Must it be about two embittered alcoholics and star Robert Downey, Jr., and Daniel Radcliffe? Does no one care that this is the perfect vehicle to introduce two clas- sic authors to students?” he queried in mock outrage. Some colleagues with an eye to commercial viability told him that it would be terrific if the educational bits were trimmed down and more emphasis was placed on the revelatory scenes. In the Q&A follow- ing his presentation, he did say that he is working on a new version of the show, with a new ending, “for more mature audiences.” One person suggested that since Tenniel often acted in Dickens’s theater com- pany, perhaps there is a place for him in the play. Ev- erybody’s in show biz.

Mark Burstein again played moderator for our next presentation, on the illustrators of Alice. He took this opportunity to announce the publication of the first trade edition of the Dalf Alice, up to now only available in the deluxe 1969 edition currently selling for five figures. A co-publication of Princeton Uni- versity Press and MoMath, it features an introduction not discussing Carroll’s life, but rather Dalf, surreal- ism, and mathematics. It is reviewed on p. 45.

Mark then introduced Arnold Hirshon, associate provost and librarian at Case Western Reserve, who has been presenting about illustrations of Alice at venues around the country. For this illustrated talk, “Much of a Muchness: 150 Years of Artistic Visions of Alice,” Hirshon whisked us through his brisk, lively lecture, and critiqued what goes into making an effective or less-effective illustration. Along the way, he expressed some opinions that he understands that others may not always share (e.g., he doesn’t like the illustrations

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The Illustrators Panel, L to R: Nike Pereira, Arnold Hir- shon, Wendy Ice, Lello Es- posito, Stefania Tondo, Adri- ana Peliano

of Blanche McManus and believes that the Alice books are more for adults than for young children).

Hirshon illuminated his talk with plenty of illus- trations from those artists who followed Tenniel. He declared that the creative process of illustration is the result of inspiration from the text plus transformation and artistry, and then showed us what he meant. Draw- ings by Matisse and Picasso appeared to be an inspira- tion of the modernist Hatter by Rene Bour (1938). This example was accompanied by the famous quota- tion often attributed to Picasso: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” He next gave us examples show- ing “reinterpretation as inspiration,” using Carroll’s original illustration for the Under Ground manuscript showing Alice swimming in the Pool of Tears as the inspiration, with reinterpretations by Ian Beck in a 2013 polychromed double spread, Kiki Smith’s 2000 redrawing, and Lello Esposito’s brilliantly recolored interpretation (mostly yellow) with Vesuvius afire in the background (2002). Hirshon noted that the tech- nique of including references to familiar surround- ings in the background to make the picture relevant to a local audience, dates back to Renaissance Italian and Dutch Golden Age painting.

In discussing textual interpretation, Hirshon not- ed that considerations for the illustrator include the intended audience for the illustration (child or adult) , and the cultural background and native language of the illustrator. Regarding audience, he praised the works of some illustrators, such as Willy Pogany (1929) and Marketa Prachaticka (1982), but he took issue with Camille Rose Garcia’s claim that her illustrations (2009) were designed for children. He noted that hers is a very Goth Alice (her Alice character looks particu- larly dissipated, with spidery eyelashes and limbs and black lipstick) , and that “if she designed this for chil- dren then I don’t want to meet hers.”

Hirshon showed perhaps the most compre- hensive sampling of illustrations ever seen at a con- ference, and he peppered them with critiques. Of

Beatrix Potter’s pictures, of which there are only six extant, he noted that it was “probably good that she didn’t go further because they all look like Peter Rab- bit.” Of Uriel Birnbaum’s Alice (1923) in a cobalt-blue hall with a glass table and a golden oval ceiling, he observed that “this looks like a production of Parsi- falHe also quoted Trevor Brown (2009), who self- described his work as being of the “sick little girls” school of art, a genre Brown said he invented himself.

He then gave a summative outline of what to look for, before he presented a quick succession of many illustrations of the fall down the rabbit-hole (a scene that Hirshon noted neither Tenniel nor Carroll ever illustrated) . The factors he mentioned included inter- pretation (time and space), audience (adult/child, cultural diversity), form (genre, medium, technique), and composition (e.g., perspective, the angle of Al- ice’s fall, and objects in the background of the rabbit hole that are (or aren’t) mentioned in the text, or that are shown before being mentioned in the text). Every criterion was illuminated with art.

Hirshon ’s conclusion was that “ Alice illustrations may sometimes-, reflect changes in fashion or artistic style; be deceptively simple or highly complex; seem familiar or disorienting; be set in the past, present or future . . . but they foreverwtW capture the imagination of new generations of illustrators or readers.”

Before closing, Hirshon issued a bold proposal: Why can’t there be a database (he even provided a format) of all the illustrations of Alice by every illustra- tor, scene by scene, with high-resolution graphics, full bibliographic descriptions and metadata, date of first published appearance, a preservation-level technol- ogy platform, and intellectual property management (so people could purchase copies of the book or the image, or know who owns reproduction rights). Hir- shon called it the APB (Alicia Picturae Biblioteca), noted that he has prepared a prospectus, and provid- ed his email (ahirshon@gmail.com) for anyone who is interested in this very worthy project.

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Our next panelist was Nilce Pereira of the State University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, on “ Alice Illustrated: Brazilian Views of Wonderland.” Pereira discussed several editions of Alice, beginning with the first Bra- zilian translation into Portuguese in 1931 — “a bit late,” said she. She called it a “false translation,” as it was an abridgment. There were many cuts (all but two poems, for example), and no illustrations. A 1960 edition had a colored cover, but the illustrator was anonymous, and it showed a midcentury Alice in a red dress with a white collar and hair bow, sitting up and taking notice of the White Rabbit. Two editions followed. (Some were produced in Portugal.) There was no date for the edition with an Oswaldo Storni cover; it showed a fairy-tale-like setting, with the White Rabbit’s house (this was the book that started the Burstein collection, alluded to earlier). The 1970 cover art by Darcy Penteado features a pinafored Al- ice (the dress was pink), with “ALICE” spelled out in picture letters — the “A” is a pair of striped-stockinged legs, the “L” is a key, the “I” is a candle (balanced on Alice’s head, how odd), and so forth. In 1972 Lila Figueiredo drew a cover with a very graceful Alice swooping down the rabbit-hole.

The groundbreaking full translation by Sebastiao Uchoa Leithe appeared in 1978, with illustrations by Tenniel. This is considered the scholarly edition of Brazil. Claudia Scatamacchia illustrated a later edi- tion of this with a beautiful pastel cover, obviously influenced by the graphic styles of the flower child era, with Alice’s hair fanned out like a sunset, and sur- rounded by pastel posies.

Since 2010 there has been a flood of translations, with both reprints of Tenniel and illustrations by for- eign artists. Pereira told us that the artists’ names became a marketing strategy (Eric Kincaid, John Tenniel, Jo de Oliveira, Peter Newell, Yayoi Kusama, Camille Rose Garcia, etc.). She also showed how art- ists adapted their illustrations to their own visions. Darcy Penteado’s Alice is colorful, scrubbed, and childlike, while Claudia Scatamacchia’s pen-and-ink “Drink Me” illustration looks as if Alice is coming down from a very hard day’s night. Jo de Oliveira’s black-and-white pictures have a South American folk- loric quality, with the profile view that reminds one of embroidery or sculpture. Celia Seybold’s airy yet detail-packed courtroom scene is delightful, and Lila Figueiredo’s tea party picture shows a brunette Al- ice walking away, with the table apparently twirling to echo the shape of the pocket-watch, which is sus- pended over the scene. The lines swirling about are a visual allusion to the rabbit-hole.

Pereira closed with a series of comparisons of Brazilian artists and the Tenniel illustrations. Oswal- do Storni ’s Alice has dark hair, and her caterpillar sits on a mushroom, but is surrounded by tropical vegeta- tion. Darcy Penteado’s kitchen is brightly colored on

a black background, and has a pot, a pie, and a teacup (among other objects) flying overhead, while in Ten- niel’s drawing the violence is under control. The mes- sage is that Alice is universal, and artists don’t need a narrow interpretation of the story; they can be as free as they like.

Adriana Peliano, founder of the Lewis Carroll Society of Brazil, artist, scholar, and illustrator of Won- derland and Looking-Glass (Zahar, 2015), titled her talk “Alicedelic Collages: Pictures in Conversation.” She told us that Alice is a “living kaleidoscope ... a bloody serial killer, drug addict, warrior; she is all of these — she is none of these.” Adriana’s lively lecture was il- lustrated in part with her own collages, including her picture of Alice as the “largest kaleidoscope ever seen.” This is a Tenniel-style Alice, holding a ’scope made up of many smaller telescoped Alices, looking at kaleidoscopic images constructed from Tenniel’s.

Peliano told us that Alice “drove down barriers between the outside world and the inside mind. . . . She is paradoxical, inspiring, not linear. . . . She sati- rizes the commonplace, the well-balanced, and ‘good taste.’ She crosses the frontiers between the mind, madness, and consciousness.” Her bread-and-butter- fly image is a collage of displacement, “the merging of words and object.” The mixtures of images in her collages are “signifiers . . . that conduct conversation and challenge comfort,” just as Carroll did.

Her talk was illustrated with images from her own as well as other artists’ work. She showed us the re- configurations of Wolfe Von Lenkiewicz (Tenniel’s Al- ice swept into the air by Michelangelo-esque winged fiends; a Tenniel/Picasso mashup), and a “Roy Lich- tenstein” Alice and a “nightmarish” one (a blue, baby- like Alice on an orange plane surrounded by shadowy shapes) by Diogo Munoz.

Peliano’s work is collage and homage to Victorian design, decalcomania, and scrapbooks. She discussed the multiplicity of Alice imagery in the Bouverie Al- bum (1872-77), which combines Tenniel drawings with photographs of nineteenth-century girls. “This procedure would be reinvented by contemporary digital illustrators, highlighting the ongoing transfor- mation of an Alice who in each figure was a differ- ent girl,” such as by Maggie Taylor in her Alice (2008), with haunting nineteenth-century portraits superim- posed over a very still Wonderland. “Alice becomes everybody and nobody.”

Kenneth Rougeau’s collage featured the “ugly duchess” from the National Gallery holding a very distressed baby; a Pre-Raphaelite avenging angel with her skirt on fire, throwing pots; and a black cat that looked as if it might have rabies, because it appeared to be foaming at the mouth. The Helenbar Alice is very contemporary, has red hair (Helenbar took on the role herself) , and seems to challenge the viewers to say what we think of a mass of Alice Liddell-like

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playing-card gardeners who are painting the roses red. Peliano called it an “Alice selfie.” Pictures by Jan Svankmajer (his paper-collage illustrations to the Al- ice books, not the film), Pat Andrea, and Antonio Peti- cov were also displayed.

She next turned to the “gothic and surreal” style of Alice illustration, beginning with Jasmine Becket’s Bratz-doll-meets-Dalf version, with Alice holding a melting watch. (Becket even uses the Dali palette.) “You can imagine everything here.”

This fascinating presentation was closed with one of Peliano ’s own collages, an homage to both Tenniel and Magritte, Ceci n ’est pas une Alice, with the “Nurs- ery” Alice multiplied and transformed into a pipe.

Wendy Ice was our next speaker. Her husband, David Delamare, is the artist behind the elegant crowdfunded Alice in Wonderland that was being print- ed as she spoke. Her talk, entitled “Betwixt and Be- tween: Liminality in Alice and the Creation of Art,” told us about the profound influence of the muse on Delamare ’s art, and linked it to the influence of Alice Liddell on Dodgson/Carroll.

First, she discussed the “magic hour,” the twi- light/crepuscular/liminal moment when we are at our most vulnerable, when we can be caught off- guard, when anything can happen. (In fact, the color range of the illustrations is very subtle and dreamy looking.) Things seem “unusual, off-kilter, unsettled.” Lewis Carroll described this feeling as “fairy-ish,” a state in which our curiosity can be engaged. We might be just a little sleepy, as Alice was when the White Rab- bit ran past her. Ice said we can all have this experi- ence, this “numinous quality” that makes us appreci- ate the unusual.

Ice said that this was the feeling she and her hus- band felt when they were searching for models for

their Alice project, and met Cameron. This young woman, at nineteen, possessed a remarkable ratio of intelligence to beauty. (Frankly, she looks as if she could breathe inspiration into a stone.) Ice com- mented on her mixture of innocence and worldli- ness: “This kind of muse quality is ephemeral, which explains Carroll’s melancholy. . . . The muse always leaves . . . and we are left to wander alone.”

As they worked together on the project, their concept of the story changed. “Something unpredict- able appears and takes charge.” Every character in the story except Alice was transformed by Delamare into an animal, perhaps because everyone except Alice (who “kept her wits”) was badly behaved. Ice showed us the metamorphosis of the tea-party scene. It has a visual allusion to Georges Seurat (the pose of the lady rabbit in a bustle dress, a monkey). In fact, it is homage to classic Victorian illustration, packed with details that merit multiple viewings (e.g., the picture for the lobster quadrille echoes the dance of death in Bergman’s Seventh Seal).

Ice gave us a fascinating look into the creative process, and everyone present, not only the crowd- funders, appreciated it.

Next, Stefania Tondo spoke for her husband, art- ist Lello Esposito, in “ Alice ‘int’ ‘o Paese d’ ‘e Maraveglie. A Visual Translation into Neapolitan.” Espositio is a Neapolitan artist who uses the archetypes and sym- bols of his land — masks, horns, Mt. Vesuvius — as ele- ments of his art, which includes sculpture as well as drawings and paintings.

Tondo began her lecture with an overview of Es- posito’s work in video form. This included an enor- mous Pulcinella head — at least nine feet tall — set into a hillside. (Originating in seventeenth-century commedia dell’arte and called Punch or Punchinello in English, Pulcinella is a stock character in Neapolitan puppet- ry.) She then moved on to some of his pictures for Alice, which were colored and overpainted versions of Carroll’s own draw- ings for Under Ground. The hues were cheerful, ranging from the bright yellow of the sky to the intense blue of a Mediter- ranean-style pool of tears (with Vesuvius bubbling away in the background). Father William and his distressed son are both wearing commedia-style masks (and the upside-down Father William is rebelliously sporting red-and-yellow striped stock- ings). A long-necked Alice looks down at a pair of Pulcinellas, who appear to be trying to cheer

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her up. The picture of a pensive Alice listening to her sister read to her is enlivened by Pulcinella peering down from a corner. The gigantic Alice in the house is adorned with brilliant scribbles of red and yellow.

Tondo quoted Laura Bocci, an Italian scholar in translation studies:

Translation is an act of literary generosity, one of true love for the dead author and for the future reader, and, above all, of true love for one’s own mother tongue into which the liter- ary work is translated.

She then gave us a quick overview of some of Es- posito’s illustrations for children’s books that were translated into Neapolitan. He illustrated Pinocchio , not surprisingly, and was able to insert his trademark motifs. He was not able to do that for the translation of The Little Prince for copyright reasons. However, he managed to draw his Pulcinello character on the page numbers!

Tondo stated that Esposito’s Alice artistic meta- morphosis was “beyond Tenniel, beyond Disney... back to the source ... a family setting ... deep re- search-oriented work.” She said that Alicehad primar- ily visual origins, and Alice translators “manifest them- selves as mediators of language.” Esposito liked to imagine Aliceas a part of the new Neapolitan culture, while respecting the original Alice, to create a work of art that is “joyful.”

She went on to say that just as literature is a dia- logue between the work and the reader, so are transla- tion and illustrations similar dialogues. “Translations and retranslations have moved around the world.” This reminded me of a statement by Philip Conk- lin Blackburn, an Alice collector, who said (as quoted by Charlie Lovett at the Spring 2000 LCSNA meeting) :

Alice . . . has tripped her way blithely ... ig- noring immigration laws, tariffs, and the com- plexes of unreasoned nationalism. She has be- come the heritage and property of the world.

... It is safe to predict that as long as there are human beings and as long as there are written languages Alice will plunge down the rabbit holes of the world. She has been elevated to that great company of cultural treasures which neither treaties, nor wars, nor boundary lines, nor peoples can obliterate.

This segued into a panel discussion by the pre- senters, covering such topics as: “Does the experience of reading the same book with different illustrators change the way the text is perceived?”, “The elephant in the room: John Tenniel,” “What makes Alice the most, or one of the most, widely illustrated novel in existence?”, “We know that Alice did not wear a blue dress nor have long curly blonde hair; how can an art-

ist transcend these expectations?”, “Who are some of your favorite (and perhaps least favorite) Alice illustra- tors?” and “Which artist or illustrator from history (or even today) would you most wish to have seen (or see) provide a fully illustration edition of Alice, and why?” Many insightful and occasionally unexpected respons- es (e.g., “Caravaggio” as an answer to the last ques- tion), from both the panel and the audience, ensued.

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER

Mark Burstein

After the program, we walked over to the nearby New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, where an elegant reception was provided, along with an opportunity to wander around the su- perb Alice Live! exhibit (supra). It was truly marvelous to have the building to ourselves; lively discussions ensued, and Charlie Lovett gave a warm talk on the difficulties of selecting what ended up on display. Car- rollian-themed magic tricks were provided by profes- sional magician Marc DeSouza. Then fourteen of us spontaneously decided to have dinner together — at 8:30 on a Saturday night at Lincoln Center with nary a reservation! Fortunately, the Carrollian guardian angels worked some magic and found us three tables enplein air right across the street.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11 GO ASK ALICE

Dayna Nuhn

We spent Sunday at New York University, Washing- ton Square, which had created in the Mamdouha S. Bobst Gallery at the Bobst Library an exhibit with ma- jor pop culture appeal, and had appropriately cho- sen a line from the Jefferson Airplane song “White Rabbit” as the title for the display. Go Ask Alice is cen- tered around items from the Jon Lindseth Collection of Alice Ephemera, which had been donated to the University in 2012. Many of the pieces were on display for the first time. The exhibit showcases the large and

David. Schaefer at the NYU Go Ask Alice exhibit

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Photo by Mark Burstein

varied “Alice industry” that sprang up soon after the book was published and has grown ever larger over the last 150 years. The items on display cover a wide range of Alice collectibles: the early Looking-Glass biscuit tin, records, toy tea sets, dolls, coloring books, Viewmaster slide reels, many different types of games, puzzles, jewelry, figures, hankies, Christmas orna- ments, cigarette cards, and comic books. Other cases display editions of Alice, with a selection of illustrators from three different eras, along with an 1865 Alice, several lovely presentation copies, translations, and parodies.

The curator, Fales Librarian Marvin Taylor, chose to make this exhibit different from the others taking place in New York this fall with a fun and more casual take on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and it defi- nitely succeeds in showing how Alice has permeated our culture over the past century and a half.

The exhibit runs through December 11, 2015.

alicepalooza: day THREE OF THE ALICE IN POPULAR CULTURE CONFERENCE

Mark Burstein

The ever charming Dr. April James, aka Madison Hat- ta, welcomed us to AlicePalooza, held in the spacious, highly raked auditorium of the NYU Global Center for Academic and Spiritual Life, adjacent to the Fales. The theme of the meeting, she declared, was “Look what they’ve done to our Alice: video games, comics, movies, anime, manga, and cosplay, O my!”

Our first speaker was Hayley Rushing, who re- ceived her master’s degree in dramaturgy from the University of Glasgow and is currently pursuing her PhD. Beginning, naturally, with a nod to the upcom- ing Burton-produced Looking-Glass, she spoke of ad- aptations as somewhat of a tree, branching and in- tertwining, and something of a palimpsest in which traces remain, infinitely layered, of not only the source text, but of other adaptations — running, if you

will, as hard as they can to remain in the same place, and producing a sort of meta-Alice.

A millennial herself, Hayley next spoke of Ameri- can McGee’s dark videogame released in 2000, in which Alice, a spooky Goth teenager, lives in an in- sane asylum, and Wonderland is at war. This (with a nod to Svankmajer’s 1988 film as catalyst) begat Ze- nescope’s sexy, violent comics; Frank Beddor’s Look- ing-Glass Wars ; Marilyn Manson’s EatMe, DrinkMe, the SyFy Channel’s and ABC’s adaptations; and arguably Camille Rose Garcia’s edition and the Mad T Party nighttime event at Disney California Adventure.

Hayley posited a cultural need for this genera- tion: a warrior/Joan of Arc Alice in response to a sexualized Alice, even a nongendered one (in the Burton film, the Mad Hatter calls her “he”).

Next, former world champion freestyle skier, film producer ( There’s Something about Mary, Wicked) , actor, stuntman, and author Frank Beddor took the podium in an animated, rollicking talk. Frank is the author of the New York T rmes-be s ts e 1 1 i n g The Looking-Glass Wars trilogy, and its adaptations into Hatter M. comics (five volumes at present), Princess Alyss of Wonderland, the upcoming Hatter Madigan: Ghost in the Hatbox novel,

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Photo by Mark Burstein

L to R: Asuka Toritamari and Shinichi Kinoshita

and possibly a Broadway musical (the company who produced Wicked is “interested”).

As a child, Frank hated the Alice books, which had two strikes against them: being a favorite of Grand- ma’s and being a “girl’s book.” We fast forward to his tale of seeing a deck of cards in an exhibit at the British Library, a dark and twisted take on the Alice books by one Dugan Buffington. All of the themes that he needed for the trilogy were there: “murder, revenge, betrayal,” Alyss Hart, the Pool of Tears as a portal, a warrior queen of Wonderland. The conceit is that Carroll had not created a work of fiction, but had instead rewritten a young girl’s autobiographical account of her exile from Wonderland.

Frank shared his process of writing and develop- ing the characters and story, returning always to the power of imagination, and how ultimately he had to choose the creative rather than the production side of things. Much of this work has been financed through Kickstarter, and Frank told a story of one pseudonymous donor who paid to be a character in the comic — it turned out to be Whoopie Goldberg, an avowed fan, which led to Frank’s appearance on The View alongside a number of cosplayers dressed as his characters, which he said blurred the distinction for him between dream and reality.

Our next presentation was entitled “Alice in Japa- nese Popular Culture.” That she is popular in Japan comes as no surprise to us, what with a flourishing Lewis Carroll Society since 1994 and a large number of books and trinkets emerging from there each year.

The talk (Asuka Toritamari and Shinichi Kinoshi- ta were co-authors; Asuka presented it and Shinichi was there at the end to answer questions) broke the phenomenon into three categories: the early period, the Disney years, and the modern era.

Carroll’s first appearance in Japan was, oddly, Through the Looking-Glass, in an 1899 translation by Tenkei Hasegawa, serialized as “Kagami-Sekai” (Look-

ing-glass World) in Shonen Sekai ( Boy’s World), a chil- dren’s magazine. There, the heroine was Mi-chan, not Alice, a more friendly name for Japanese children. In these early years, both the name of the girl (English vs. Japanese) and her dress (British vs. kimono) var- ied in different publications. The first Wonderland, of sorts, appeared in 1908 in Shojo no Tome ( Girls’ Friends) magazine, with the title “A Golden Key.” It was an abridged and serialized retelling of Chapters I to IV, after which the author went off track, making up his own adventures for our heroine. Many retell- ings, abridgments, and continuations, usually called something along the lines of “The Story of Alice,” were printed, most often in magazines.

The Disney animation came out in Japan in 1953 in a subtitled version, and did not do well. Its re-re- lease in 1973 in a dubbed version triggered the Al- ice boom, establishing her once and for all with the name “Alice” (or Arisu), a pinafore, blonde hair, and a headband.

The kawaii (extreme cuteness) culture adopted her as well. In 1974, Sanrio asked Yuko Shimizu for a name for the anthropomorphic white cat with a red bow she designed. Desiring that the cat be British — which was very trendy in Japan at the time — she re- membered the early chapters of Looking-Glass where Alice’s pet was addressed as “Kitty,” and the “Hello Kitty” phenomenon was born. (She is, after all, a cat without a grin, having no mouth to speak of. Or with.) Hello Kitty later went to Wonderland in one of her animated adventures.

We were then treated to images of Alice anime, manga, Detective Alice, the Gothic & Lolita Bible fash- ion magazine, a 2006 videogame called Alice in Crook- edland (rather like McGee’s), a “dating simulation” game called Alice in Heartland (she dates a handsome young man named Lewis Carroll), music videos, and Tokyo Disneyland. Alice is beyond a doubt a cultural icon in Japan.

During the Q&A period, we learned how one il- lustrator misunderstood “March Hare.” Japanese is written with the Chinese alphabet, and the Chinese character that means “moon” or “month” is very simi- lar to the character for “eye,” so instead of a March (three moons, or the third month) Hare, the illustra- tor portrayed a Hare with three eyes! Another memo- rable moment occurred when member Valina Eckley, a tall, blonde young lady dressed as a steampunk Al- ice, asked the co-presenters a question that was not well understood, so she then repeated it in fluent Japanese (she had lived there for many years).

Our next speaker was the effervescent Linda Cas- sady, who founded the annual University of Southern California (USC) Wonderland Award a decade ago. (In 2000, her husband, George, donated the fabulous G. Edward Cassady, MD, and Magaret Elizabeth Cas- sady, RN, Lewis Carroll Collection to the USC Doheny

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Photo by Mark Burstein

2 o o c r

rr

D3

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Linda Cassady

Craig Yoe

Memorial Library, which we had chances to “rejoice in” at our meetings in the spring of 2006 and fall of 2013.)

The Wonderland Award is an annual multidisci- plinary competition that encourages new scholarship and creative work that “explores, explains, analyzes, or interprets the works of Lewis Carroll,” and is open to all graduate and undergraduate students in all fields of study currently enrolled in accredited California colleges and universities (in the early years, only USC students were eligible). Most submissions are from outside the student’s discipline. Scholarly essays, po- ems, fiction, performance pieces, videogames, ani- mation, visual artworks, music, digital compositions, and films have been submitted, among other media. Judges consist of a panel of Carrollians, students, professors, past winners, and even Hollywood screen- writers, who award points for: quality, originality, “the spirit and sensibilities of Lewis Carroll,” and their art- ist statement. In the spirit of “everyone has won, and all must have prizes,” the first prize is $3,000, second $1,500, and up to five others (such as the Jubjub, Snicker-Snack, and Boojum prizes) are awarded.

Cassady showed us many slides and videos of pre- vious and current winners, such as USC graduate stu-

dent Andrew Woodham’s 2014 Lewis Carroll Through Two Lenses, a photographic collage of 244 images (and LEDs) that won for Andrew for the third con- secutive year (the submissions are anonymous, but he has since moved up to be a judge) and the celebra- tory Wonderland Unbound, a 3D projection onto the library’s facade, accompanied by music and live cos- tumed characters.

The Cassady Collection’s dynamic curator and ar- chivist, Abby Saunders, then spoke to us and screened some other winners, including puzzles, games, an installation with motion sensors that looked rather psychedelic, and 2015’s whimsical winner, Curiouser and Curiouser! by Martzi Campos and Yuting Su, an interactive pop-up book with digital sensors and an adjacent computer screen where the reader is tasked to solve a variety of puzzles. The awards and the col- lection are not just there to be admired and used for research; they are associated with a very active com- ponent of curricular engagement in the form of semi- nars, teaching guides, and the like.

Many of the cream of the Wonderland Award crop can be found in their Liddell Books series, The Liddell Book of Poetry (2013), The Liddell Book of Letters (2014), and The Liddell Book of Fiction Parts I and II

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10/29/15

(2015), published by the Figueroa Press of USC — not to mention Callooh! Callay!: A Brillig Look at the USC Libraries Wonderland, Award (2009). The first four are reviewed on p. 56. The imagination and creativity of the students are just, well, awesome, and offer an in- spirational reminder of just how engaging Mr. Car- roll’s works really are.

The next presentation, “Alice in Comicland,” was named after the eponymous book (Yoe! Books/ IDW, 2014). I began it with an illustrated talk about the early days of graphic storytelling, the evolution of comics in the nineteenth and early twentieth cen- turies, and Carroll’s Under Ground as a precursor to what today are called “graphic novels.” (Earlier incar- nations of the genre as newspaper strips and comic books were, and still are, hugely popular, but they still have to fight for respectability.) I then had to run over to Morton Cohen’s to help Andy’s film crew, leaving things in the most competent hands of Craig Yoe, a comics maven who has edited over a hundred books on the subject. Craig came through swimmingly, of course, with a most amusing romp through the histo- ry of Carroll in the comics, particularly as exemplified in Alice in Comicland. It was a fitting and buoyant end- ing to a tribute to our Alice in the popular culture.

Let us bow and give thanks to Joel, Stephanie, Jon, and the many, many others who were involved in conceiving, setting up, and realizing this extraor- dinary event.

As home we steered, a merry crew, we were grate- ful and happy that all of us had contributed in some way to the sesquicenTenniel, even as more exhibits, publications, and events await us through the end of this year (and into next). And then? Well, there’s al- ways Looking-Glass 150 in 2022!

L to R: Members Daina Almario-Kopp and Valina Eckley take in the sights.

Pro. z-z. by Oeff Mallet:

that’s SUPPOSED To be A GREAT- LITERATURE. HALLOWEEN COSTUME?

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Photo by Daina Almario-Kopp

AupecLi of Alice'. Alicel50 Films@NYPLPA

DAVID SCHAEFER

s part of the Alice 150 celebration, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts presented a film series entitled Aspects of Alice, “filmic renderings” (their nomenclature) of Alice, every Tuesday afternoon in October. The films were screened at the Lincoln Center’s Bruno Walter Auditorium, downstairs from the Alice Live! exhibit. The format was shorter films followed by a “feature.” Between sixty and seventy people attended each of the four sessions.

On October 6, the short film was Alice’s First Film Adventures, a documentary I made that turns the ten- minute 1903 Hepworth Alice into a 20-minute pre- sentation. The feature film was the 1933 Paramount Alice. Thirty years made quite a difference in film technology!

The W. W. Young Alice was screened on Octo- ber 13; it was a composite of three films (including the tea-party scene, which many claim doesn’t exist) from my collection. Footage for all of them was shot in 1915, but many of the intertitles are of late-1920s vintage, and one of the films sports a 1927 copyright notice. It was screened with a fine live piano accom- paniment by Makia Matsumura, a composer and si-

lent-film accompanist. The feature was the 1931 Bud Pollard film, the first Alice with sound. This film was called “lost” — while hiding in my movie closet for over thirty years.

On October 20, two films that were thought to be lost were presented. One was the 1910 Edison Al- ice that was discovered in 1976 on 22mm film. The other was Reel 5 of Looking-Glass — a film containing scenes shot by W. W. Young in 1915. 1 was able to pur- chase this reel of 35mm film on the Internet. There are four more Looking Glass reels hiding somewhere! That evening’s feature was Dreamchild, a fictionalized story about Alice Hargreaves’ 1932 journey to New York, preceded by the 1932 Paramount newsreel — the real Alice and the fictional Alice side-by-side.

The series concluded on October 27 with a show- ing of Curious Alice, a film made in 1972 for the Na- tional Institute of Mental Health as part of a drug- education course for elementary schoolchildren. The feature was Jan Svankmajer’s rather wild Alice.

David Callahan, principal librarian of the NYPL- PA Film and Video Collection, organized the series. To David I say a heartfelt “thank you.”

Adriana Peliano

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Photo byjobi Zink

Alice in Philly Land

EMILY R. AGUILO- PEREZ

Entering the Rosenbach Museum and Li- brary immediately makes visitors feel as if they have arrived in Wonderland. In true Alice fashion, there are different ways to go, and no one right order in which to begin exploring. I de- cided to turn left first and visit “Wonderland Rules: Alice® 150.” This section, brilliantly curated by Leon- ard Marcus, features early and rare editions of Won- derland, a number of letters written by Carroll, and collections of more modern adaptations of his story. These included Alice in picture books, film, and even music.

The second part I visited was “Alice in Phillyland: The True-Life Adventures of A. S. W. Rosenbach, Al- ice Liddell Hargreaves, and the Manuscript that Made Them Famous.” Curated by Judith Guston and Eliza- beth E. Fuller, it presents the various transactions that took place to obtain the original manuscript, its re- turn to England, and Alice’s visit to the United States.

Lastly, I entered the room titled “Why Is a Raven Like a Writing Desk? Lewis Carroll’s Riddles, Puz- zles, and Games,” curated by Katherine Haas. This is where a number of Dodgson’s games come to life. In an interactive exhibition where visitors can play games and attempt to solve puzzles and riddles, the

audience experience firsthand Dodgson’s brilliant mind. Rather than just read about the logic games and puzzles he created, visitors to this game room can try Doublets, play Circular Pool, and write backwards (mirror-style), to name a few activities.

A highlight of my visit was seeing up close once again the original manuscript — the holy grail for Carrollians — of Under Ground, which traveled to the U.S. for the first time in thirty years. Although I was fortunate to see it while it was on display at the Mor- gan Library, this time it felt more personal. For start- ers, the room that displayed it at the Rosenbach was not packed with visitors, so everyone had the chance to stand in front of the glass case and look at the beauty that is Carroll’s work. The manuscript stood in the center, with nothing else but some paintings on the wall, including Tweedle-fied renditions of the Rosenbach brothers on each end of the room. Visi- tors were allowed to take pictures of the manuscript, which made it easier to record this grandiose artifact without the need to slyly and inconspicuously sneak a pic. Unfortunately, the original manuscript was at the Rosenbach only briefly, October 14-18.

I strongly encourage all Carrollians who are able to make the trip to Philadelphia to enjoy the exhibi- tion, especially if you can catch one of the 20-plus spe- cial events taking place through May 15, 2016, such as the Lewis Carroll hands-on tour, which I experienced back in January, as part of his 184th birthday celebra- tion. Although some of the information provided during the tour is known to those of us who have read extensively about the author’s life, and Alice in particular, having the opportunity to touch and read some of his letters and to see drawings by Tenniel up close make the experience worthwhile. Other places in Philadelphia are joining the celebration by hosting their own events — for instance, a book discussion of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at Oak Lane Library next January and a talk by Anna Dhody and Dr. Grant T. Liu titled “Medical Oddities of Alice” hosted by the Mutter Museum in March.

Down the Rabbit Hole: Celebrating 150 Years of Alice in Wonderland offers a fascinating combination of arti- facts, pictures, texts, and interactive elements that will delight scholars and fans of Carroll and Alice alike.

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Reflections on Alicel50 Week in New York

JOEL BIRENBAUM

I have spent the last seven years planning, pleading, promoting, and preparing for Alice 150: Celebrat- ing Wonderland. Our week in New York was the centerpiece of our festival, and it was one time when reality exceeded fantasy. Others in this edition of the Knight Letter will discuss the individual events. Here I will present my impressions of the wonders of that whirlwind of a week.

Jon Lindseth, who has been part of this process for the last six years, produced two days of excellence dedicated to translations of Alice. I was sure the ex- hibit at the Grolier Club would be ex- ceptional, but I must confess that I was not convinced that the con- ference would be of inter- est to non- translators.

This was one of several oc- casions where Jon was right, and I was not.

Everything related to Al- ice in a World of Wonderlands — the book, conference, exhibit, and dinners — was superb. None of this would have been as successful without the extraordinary ef- forts put forth by Alan and Alison Tannenbaum.

The “Alice in Popular Culture” conference was in- troduced by Dr. Edward Guiliano, president of NYIT. Dr. Guiliano was quick to accept the idea of celebrat- ing Alice, the book, as opposed to celebrating Carroll on this particular occasion. I was pleased to see how well he framed the events to follow, while tailoring his introduction to the general public. Even so, I was amazed when he stated that the Disney Alice was one of two major events that propelled the popularity and longevity of Alice. The second was Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice. I am not a fan of the Disney Alice, but I agree with Dr. Guiliano’s assessment of its impact.

The Annotated Alice was the book that established my lifelong connection to Alice. The other thing stated in the talk that caught me by surprise was that Alice 150 was a bigger (or did he say better?) celebration than the 1932 New York celebration of the centenary of Carroll’s birth. I am still processing that remark.

The speakers throughout the week exhibited a passion for their topics. They had an audience that could appreciate the vagaries of translating this com- plex book, the approaches to bringing Carroll and Alice to the stage, the variety of ways to illustrate it,

the vast ways it 5 has penetrated s popular cul- o ture world-

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2 wide, and the » many avenues | of collecting. | All of this may have been eclipsed by the performances of Hayley Rushing and Asuka Torto- mari, two young presenters who bode well for the future.

The things that will stay with me forever are those that you can’t control through planning. The atmosphere that surrounded the cel- ebration was created organically by the attendees. There was more interaction than I have ever experi- enced. During the translation conference, I could see the network that we had created expand and tighten. Its international nature was largely, but not wholly, due to the translation conference. There were many speakers of other languages, but for this week the common language was Alice. The appreciation of her diverse aspects was shared by all. We experienced in- creased awareness of Alice by the general public and by insiders. I noticed how often people were smiling, grinning, and outright laughing. They were having fun. This was truly the celebration I had envisioned. I thank all who made this possible.

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Arcane Illustrators: Nils Graf Stenbock-Fermor & Lilo Rasch-Nagele

MARK BURSTEIN

Nils Graf Stenbock-Fermor

You will soon understand why these two illus- trators, whose Wunderlands are virtually iden- tical in size and vintage, are linked.

I first became aware of Nils Graf Stenbock-Fer- mor’s book when I saw its cover on a t-shirt (from OutOfPrintClothing.com) and got curious, as it came from Germany during the “industrial disarmament” phase following WWII. Despite the harsh conditions, it was just one of many editions of Wunderland issued in those years after a long drought. According to Alice in a World of Wonderlands, only one came out in the fif- teen years between 1931 and 1946 (that was in 1940, no listed publisher, illustrated by Lilo Rasch-Nagele), but in the next three years there were nine, including a reprint edition of Rasch-Nagele’s. One can imagine that Nazi Germany had no use for nonsense, especial- ly British nonsense, despite the now humorous title of the translation of Gardner’s Annotated Alice as Alles iiber Alice (Europa, 2002).

Stenbock-Fermor’s book was published by Al- ster Verlag Curt Brauns in 1948, with a translation by R[obert] G[uy] L[ionel] Barrett that was first seen in a 1922 edition from K. Triltsch, illustrated by F. W. Roth. Although British, Barrett saw Wonderland a bit differently; for instance the Hatter, Hare, and Dor- mouse are rendered as the Schuhmacher (cobbler), Osterhase (Easter Bunny), and a Mans (mouse). This gives rise to one of the few pictures (if not the only one) of a hatless Hatter in existence. The illustrations are humorous, and in monochrome.

Stenbock-Fermor was born in 1904 in Riga (Lat- via, but at that time Russia) to a noble Swedish family. He was the son of Wilhelm Constantin, Count ( Graf in German) Stenbock-Fermor and Maria Dmitrievna, Princess Kropotkin.

Following the Russian Revolution, Stenbock-Fer- mor moved to Hamburg, where he trained with Otto Meissner, the first publisher of Marx’s Das Kapital. He then moved on to Berlin and published his first illus- trations, for the magazine Jugend (Youth). During the Weimar Republic he worked as a stage designer for the avant-garde theater director Erwin Piscator, also becoming known for his portraits, caricatures, and set designs for cabarets.

Around this time, he married the illustrator, portrait artist, and costume and set designer Lenore Maria, nee Brennert Losekann (1906-1990), and

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had two sons. After 1945, he lived in Hamburg and illustrated books for Christian Wolff, becoming par- ticularly known for his Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Andersen, as well as a book of caricatures of movie stars for a different publisher. At some point he emigrated to Oregon; sometime later, the couple divorced and he moved back to Hamburg, where he died in 1969.

m

Liselotte (“Lilo”) Nagele was born in Stuttgart in 1914. Her father, Karl, was a painter. After attending the Wurttembergischen Staatlichen Kunstgewerbe- schule, she soon became a much sought-after graphic designer, stylist, and book illustrator. In 1934, while doing the window display of star hairdresser Hugo Benner’s salon, she met Bodo Rasch, its architect; they married in 1940, hyphenated their names, and had two children.

Published by Dr. Riederer in Stuttgart and ac- companying a translation by Karl Kostlin (who tells us in his introduction that the tale was first told to the girls in Dodgson’s rooms “during long winter evenings”), Rasch-Nagele’s finely rendered, colorful drawings for Wunderland are pleasingly detailed and unusually charming. They feature a quite lovely, if a bit over-age, Alice.

Rasch-Nagele was part of a group of artists, art historians, critics, philosophers, publishers, design- ers, photographers, and art collectors known as the Bubenbad Circle. She worked in commercial art until 1950, when she moved to a villa and created fine-art paintings and experimental graphics until her death in 1978. She has been widely exhibited, and is the subject of several books and catalogues, including, in observation of her centenary last year, Lilo Rasch- Naegele: Illustratorin Zeichnerin Malerin (Illustrator, Graphic Artist, Painter) from Arnoldsche.

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J{ Quartic Theory of TWiksl/itiok

JUAN GABRIEL LOPEZ GUIX

WONDERS

The Spanish title Alicia en el pais de las maravillas has much to commend it, not least its pleasing euphony and intriguing numerology. It contains three nouns, three vowels ( a , e, and i), and all three stresses fall on the vowel i: three, like the three young Liddell girls with whom Charles Dodgson was best acquainted, and who are mentioned in the opening poem under the names of Prima, Secunda, and Tertia. There are also three syllables in the name Alicia. So, in all we have four trios, and the title contains twelve syllables, the same number as that of the chapters, as well as the number of poems and songs contained in the book.

However, perhaps we should abandon this seduc- tive but slippery cabbalistic path and instead focus on another peculiarity of the title. This work is so familiar and deeply rooted in our culture that it is easy to over- look the way the title directs the reader’s gaze and at- tention to the marvels that inhabit the land visited by Alice, thereby favoring a reading that prioritizes the book’s fantastic or enchantingly strange aspect. Al- though there is no denying the “fabulous” dimension of the story, it is reinforced by the traditional Spanish title to the detriment of another possible interpreta- tion inherent in the English title, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, or simply Alice in Wonderland.

Aside from the translation pais de las maravillas (land of wonders), “Wonderland” also allows other options such as pais del asombro (land of astonish- ment) or del preguntarse (land of wondering). Small as they are, these changes can have huge consequences: the leap from one land to another involves a shift in emphasis from object to subject, from external won- ders or marvels to individual wondering or amaze- ment. These exegetical possibilities, which are pre- cluded by the usual Spanish title, are inherent in the

Juan Gabriel Lopez Guix’s translation (^Wonderland into Spanish was published in book form by Ediciones B in 2002, and was recently released as an ebook in various formats; this article is a modification of his introduction to the ebook. He also translated and annotated Saki’s satire The Westminster Alice (Alicia en Westminster,

Alpha Decay, 2009) and is publishing monthly, as a celebration of this sesquicentennial year, a series of twelve short texts about the Spanish translations of Alice on the website of the Instituto Cervantes. This present article was translated by Jacqueline Minett.

original English title, and it is legitimate to consider them because they are supported by the many (eight) instances in the original text of the verb “wonder” in the first chapter, where we also find three instances of “curiosity/ curious” and one “surprised.”

The attentive reader in English will detect with- out too much difficulty the anaphoric interplay be- tween “wonderland” and “wonder,” and will connect these and other words to construct a shared semantic field. In Spanish, however, there is no morphological relationship between maravillas (marvels or wonders) and preguntarse (to wonder), a fact that weakens the possibility of such an interpretation.

We are not advocating a modification of the title (the only one that is acceptable) or arguing that one interpretation is superior to the other, since both co- exist in the original and both are equally valid. On the contrary, our aim is to highlight a second pos- sible interpretation concealed by what has become the standard title in Spanish and other languages as a result of the inevitable morphological difference be- tween languages.

In fact, this line of interpretation will be found to be extremely enriching as well as potentially even more complex if we take into account another word contained in the title: the protagonist’s name. Ac- cording to one etymology, the name Alice stems from the Greek aljOeia (aletheia). The prestigious Liddell- Scott English-Greek Lexicon tells us that cdrjOeia meant “truth” (as opposed to “falsehood” in Homeric times and, later, as opposed to “appearance”). Ultimately, it is irrelevant whether or not this etymology is correct, since the formal similarity between the two words is evident. Moreover, a perusal of the renowned Lexi- con is particularly apposite, given that its original au- thor was none other than the father of Alice Liddell. Bearing this etymology in mind, therefore, we might conjecture that the true title of the book — the “meta- title” which, regardless of any translation, lies hidden “through the looking-glass” — should be Truth in Won- derland. Indeed, what best defines Alice’s adventure is her constant wondering, a wondering fueled by a curiosity that is undaunted by rebuffs or disappoint- ment, which enriches readers by teaching or remind- ing them that they should never cease to be surprised and ask questions.

3°

DUALITIES

Such considerations are not mere wordplay or idle speculation, because what is ultimately at stake here is how Alice is to be understood. Traditionally, the trans- lation of A/icchas, to a greater or lesser extent, tended to emphasize (especially when the book is intended for young readers) the aspect of “appearance” and to underplay the aspect of “truth,” to use the terms pro- posed by the etymology put forward by Alice’s father. In this context, “appearance” refers to the fictional element in the story and “truth” to its referential content and its treatment of the linguistic or extra- linguistic reality present in the story, which have been compiled and analyzed in the various studies of the work and its author, particularly by Martin Gardner.

An example will illustrate how this problem is posed in textual terms. In Chapter VII, the Dormouse begins recounting the story of three sisters who live in a very strange well, a treacle-well, to be precise. The traditional Spanish translation opts for the usual present-day meaning of the word “treacle,” translating it as pozo de melaza (molasses or syrup well). However, although the majority of readers of the original English text today may be unaware of the fact, Dodgson’s “treacle-well” refers to a type of well whose waters are thought to have healing properties (this meaning is given in the Oxford English Dictionary) and, in particular, to a well near Oxford which was visited by Dodgson and the Liddell girls on their outings: the well in the grounds of the church of St. Margaret of Antioch at Binsey. In Spanish, the word triaca, used in the first complete Spanish edition of Alicia in 1927, corresponds to the original meaning of treacle as an antidote.

The translation pozo de melaza introduces an el- ement of fantasy that reinforces the “marvelous” nature of the story and completely eliminates the reference to an existing reality. Was there any other option? It is generally accepted that to translate is to choose a meaning, and indeed one has the feeling of being confronted with a choice similar to the one facing Alice when the Caterpillar tells her: “One side will make you grow taller and the other side will make you grow shorter.” Theoretically, we should have two options: one emphasizing the fantastic (syrup), the other prioritizing the referential (the well with its healing waters). Faced with this dilemma, the transla- tor must decide whether to swallow (and administer to his readers) the blue pill of illusion or the red pill of reality, to echo an image used more than a hun- dred years later in the film The Matrix, in which allu- sions to Alice abound.

Having defined this duality, however, the next step is to imagine a translation that, although opting for one reading, does not exclude the other. Without delving into the mysteries of quantum states (as Rob-

ert Gilmore does in his 1995 book Alice in Quantum- land), this challenge should be seen as an attempt to achieve in the translated text a paradox envisaged by the physicist Edwin Schrodinger. Seventy years after the disappearing Cheshire Cat entered the history of literature, Schrodinger devised a thought experiment to illustrate the paradoxical phenomena in the realm of quantum physics. In his experiment, depending on the behavior of a radioactive particle, a cat could mi- raculously be both alive and dead at the same time.

In one sense, it is true to say that the present translation was guided by a similar ideal, by a perspec- tive that could also be described as “quantic” in that it aspires to bring about a duality of overlapping states in which, like Schrodinger’s cat and the Cheshire Cat, a thing and its opposite could be one and the same thing at the same time: simultaneously appealing to both fiction and reality, “appearance” and “truth.” Such is the method applied to the task of translating “treacle-well.” And this is not an isolated case, because a similar grounding of the fiction in extra-narrative elements also occurs at other points in the story, as in the two songs we shall discuss later, and in the transla- tion of the Caterpillar’s retort “Keep your temper” at the beginning of Chapter V.

That chapter constitutes one of the passages that have led to some authors seeing in the work a paro- dy of the mathematical innovations of the Victorian era: the Caterpillar counsels Alice not only to not lose her temper, but also not to lose her proportions (this emphasis on proportion represents the incipi- ent symbolic algebra that was the butt of Dodgson’s scorn). Let these examples suffice as a brief illustra- tion of our attempt to reconcile apparently antagonis- tic states, thereby preserving the element of fable and the wordplay contained in the text without jettisoning its referential load as an inconvenient burden.

CURIOSITIES

The present electronic version presented us with the opportunity to reread the text, to reflect again on the problems and the solutions found, and to make a few (minimal) changes. Although similarities will be found with certain aspects of other translations, it also has a number of characteristics that distinguish it from the work of earlier translators. Although some of these features have been discussed in various ar- ticles and academic and professional forums, it seems appropriate at this point to briefly mention just a few, in the hope that they may contribute to a richer and more complex reading of the work.

The history of the translations of Alice into Span- ish can be divided into two stages, which might be classified as child-oriented, on the one hand, and classic, on the other. In the first, from 1914 to 1970, the book was generally regarded as a work exclusively

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for children; in the second, which began with Jaime de Ojeda’s translation (Alianza, 1970), the book was seen as a literary classic. The principal translations in the first period were those produced by Juan Gutier- rez Gili (Mentora, 1927) and Rafael Ballester Escalas (Mateu, 1952). In the second period were those by Jaime de Ojeda (Alianza, 1970); “Humpty Dumpty,” pseudonym of the publisher Esther Tusquets (Lu- men, 1973), a shorter version, much enlarged and improved upon in successive editions; Mauro Armino (Edaf, 1983); Ramon Buckley (Anaya, 1984); Fran- cisco Torres Oliver (Akal, 1984); and Luis Maristany (Plaza & Janes, 1986).

As no new translation into Spanish had been pub- lished in Spain since the mid-1980s, the present trans- lation was the first to benefit from the new technolo- gies. Thanks to digital research and documentation tools, this translation was able to benefit from source materials that were much more laborious to access using traditional, nondigital means and perhaps be- yond the reach of the book’s previous translators. Al- though the information available on the Internet at the beginning of the twenty-first century was only a fraction of what it is today, it was already sufficient to justify a retranslation of all the classics. The availabil- ity of information online made it possible to conduct highly specific searches to corroborate or refute inter- pretations of the text, with a view to deciding whether a given window of interpretation in the translation was best left open or closed ... or perhaps just ajar.

The results of such investigative work usually go unnoticed by readers, the traces remaining only in the translator’s “kitchen.” In the majority of cases, the translator leaves no telltale sign of his or her efforts. Indeed, the translator typically erases the traces of the path leading to the satisfactory solution once the dif- ficulty has been overcome. Let us take the example of one of the clues hidden in the visual poem of the mouse’s tail (Chapter III), which in fact is made up of four three-line stanzas. The first two are rhyming couplets, and the third, in imitation of a rodent’s tail, is double the length (a verse form one might call a “caudal stanza”). The translation fulfils these for- mal requirements and, as in the original, the “tails” rhyme. However, the visual arrangement of the text in the shape of a sinuous tail does not facilitate the reader’s recognition of that fact. As with the problem posed by the above-mentioned “treacle-well,” the so- lution in this case was found thanks to a traditional exercise in documentation. However, in the case of another of the clues embedded in the visual poem — the number of bends or “turns” in the mouse’s tail (a topic of debate between Alice and the Mouse) — a digital search proved to be a useful complement to the specific searches carried out by traditional means, making it possible to consult images in the original

manuscript and the galley-proofs of the poem sent by Dodgson to the printer. Accordingly, the present translation of the work reproduces the five turns in the mouse’s tail, in spite of the difficulties resulting from the disappearance in digital format of the tradi- tional page as we know it.

Another distinctive feature of this translation is in connection with a couple of songs sung by the characters. The first is “Beautiful Soup,” sung by the Mock Turtle in Chapter X, whose lyrics are a parody on the song “Star of the Evening” by James M. Sayles. The final version owes a great debt to modern digital resources. Although the translation of the song, like that of the other poems in the text, was approached bearing in mind the demands of Spanish versification, and giving all due care to formal considerations (even though that care was graphically concealed in the ex- ample cited above), a satisfactory solution was only found thanks to Internet search methods. Indeed, our fortuitous discovery of the musical score and a small archive containing the tune enabled us to produce a Spanish version that could be sung to the original mu- sic. That discovery also allowed us to make a minor graphic adjustment to the text so that the visual effect contained in the poem (the repetition of the vowels) would not jar with the rhythm of the tune, the stressed vowels being repeated, as in the song.

This version includes another little poem that can be sung to a well-known melody: the song intoned (albeit out of tune) by the Hatter in Chapter VII, “ Ya titilas, rata alada," sung to the tune of a French folk song “ Ah , vous dirai-je, Maman ,” on which Mozart com- posed twelve variations, and which in English goes by the name of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”* For the first time, the present translation also affords Spanish readers the possibility of singing the song in Spanish.

Finally, another of the various novel features of the present translation has to do with an absence. In this translation we have deliberately omitted the word Dios (God), a term that is almost inevitable in the translation of exclamations such as that of the White Rabbit, as early as page 1 of Chapter I, when he frets over being late. Although the inteijection is an unthinking, automatic utterance devoid of any real semantic reference to the divinity, all exclama- tions containing any religious references have been excluded out of respect for the author’s more or less openly expressed religious scruples. The word “God” does not appear in either of the two Alices.

In Through the Looking-Glass, the game of chess described in the story strangely includes all the chess pieces except the bishop, a fact that has been ob-

it is also the tune to “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” “The Alphabet Song,” etc. Christoph Friedrich Bach and Franz Liszt, among others, also composed variadons on the theme.

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served by several authors, among them Isaac Asimov in a short story entitled “The Curious Omission.” Moreover, in an early version of the second part, the flowers in Chapter II were passionflowers ( Passiflora caerulea ), but Dodgson expunged them on discover- ing the etymology of the name and its reference to the Passion of Christ. According to Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, when Dodgson was asked if the end of Looking-Glass was an imitation of the triumphal con- clusion of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim's Progress, the author replied that “he would consider such trespassing on holy ground as highly irreverent.”

Although merely circumstantial evidence, when taken all together, these and other pointers lead us to the conclusion that “God” had been deliberately ex- cluded from Wonderland and that His textual “pres- ence” in the work, therefore, was entirely inappropri- ate. Similarly, neither Gott nor Dieu appear in the first translations carried out under Dodgson’s strict super- vision into German and French by Antonie Zimmer- mann and Henri Bue, respectively. As in other cases, there is no proof (no “smoking gun”) here that con- clusively confirms the hypothesis, but it is a window of interpretation that is open to the reader of the book

in English and deserves to be left open also to the reader in Spanish.

ANNIVERSARIES

This year marks the sesquicentennial of the first pub- lished edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and also a centennial in the Spanish-speaking world. Be- tween November 15, 1914, and January 5, 1915, Alice in Wonderland made its Spanish literary debut. Dur- ing that period, the children’s weekly magazine Los Muchachos, which was published in Madrid, offered its readers an abbreviated version of the work in eight Sunday instalments. The story was illustrated with twenty-six drawings: eight two-tone pen-and-ink draw- ings gracing the covers of the instalments and anoth- er eighteen black-and-white drawings illustrating the text. The illustrator was the painter and draughtsman Fernando Fernandez Mota, a regular contributor to several Madrid-based publications at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twen- tieth. The identity of the translator, however, is un- known.

To mark both, jHjckrrh! (hjckrrh.org) has published this e-version of Alicia en el pais de las maraviUas.

CHRISTOPHER TYLER

-5*

In one of his last letters to his mathematics tu- tor Bartholomew “Bat” Price (who was Master of Pembroke College across the street from Christ Church), Lewis Carroll proposed a solution to the problem of filling space with equal volumes.

Ch. Ch. May 18/97 Dear Master,

Am I right in thinking that space could be filled (barring certain interstices) with equal spheres, each touching 12 others? If so, and if all the tangent planes were produced [ex- tended] until they intersected other tangent planes, would we not exhaust the interstices, and fill space with plane-sided dodecahe-

drons? And if so, would these dodecahedrons have pentagonal facets?

Sincerely yours,

C. L. Dodgson

One can imagine Carroll/Dodgson’s thought process in generating this conjecture. It is well known that six spheres fit around a sphere of equal size in one plane, and that such planes of spheres could nest like offset honeycombs to fill space, implying that 12 spheres are fitting around each sphere in a three-dimensional packing structure. Since there are 12 facets in a regular dodecahedron, it seems a rea- sonable conjecture that squeezing down the space- filling spheres to compress the spaces, or interstices,

33

between them to zero might force them into the do- decahedral shape.

Interestingly enough, this problem had been posed by the great physicist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, in 1887, in what is known as the “Kelvin prob- lem” of filling space with equal volumes with the mini- mum surface area, although Carroll/Dodgson shows no awareness in his letter that it was an established problem. It is, in fact, a deeply challenging question for which no final solution has been proven even to- day. What can be proven, however, is that no regular polyhedra except the cube can fill space,1 although cubes do not do so with the minimum possible sur- face area. Kelvin’s solution, which was known as the “Kelvin conjecture,” implied that Carroll’s intuition that regular dodecahedra would not fill space was in- correct, and that the facets of polyhedra that would do so were not pentagonal. Kelvin found a space- filling structure consisting of equal truncated octo- hedra, or 14-sided polyhedra with alternating square and hexagonal faces. It was widely believed for over a century that this “Kelvin structure” was the optimal solution to the problem of filling space with minimal surface area.

However, in 1993 an alternative solution was found that largely validates Dodgson’s intuitions. On reading his query, one tends to assume that he is re- ferring to regular, identical polyhedra. In fact, how- ever, he does not specify that the dodecahedra should be identical or that their pentagonal facets should be regular, leaving open the possibility that his conjec- ture could be met by irregular figures. Such a solu- tion, found nearly a century later by Dennis Weaire and Robert Phelan,2 uses two kinds of cells of equal volume. One is the dodecahedron proposed by Car- roll (with 12 pentagonal, though irregular, facets), while the other is an irregular polyhedron with 12 pentagonal and 2 hexagonal facets. Carroll’s conjec-

ture could thus be said to have been 92% correct (in specifying the shape of 24 of the 26 required facets). The total surface area of this filling scheme is about 1% less than that of the Kelvin structure, although it still has not been proven that this is the optimal solu- tion to the problem.

The original question of filling space goes back to Aristotle, who thought it could be done with regular tetrahedra. (It can be done with triangular prisms, which have three rectangular faces, but not when all faces are triangular.) Carroll’s question of filling space with spheres dates back to Isaac Newton in what is known as the “sphere-kissing” problem. In 1694, Newton proposed that the number of spheres fitting around each sphere was 12, in correspondence with the astronomer David Gregory, who pointed out that the space available would actually be sufficient to accommodate 13 spheres, if a suitable arrangement could be found. It was not until 1953 that a complete proof was produced that validated Newton’s (and Carroll’s) intuition that no arrangement would per- mit more than 12 spheres. It is indeed curious that such packing, which is regular in two dimensions (cir- cle packing, which is densest on a hexagonal lattice) becomes irregular in three dimensions (the densest sphere packing does not conform to a regular lat- tice), giving rise to this array of mathematical prob- lems, which are still challenging mathematicians to this day. But this is one of the surprising properties of mathematics in general, that the simplest questions can generate arcane curiosities that take centuries for even the sharpest human minds to fully grasp.

1 Gardner, M. ( 1 984). The Sixth Book of Mathematical Games from Scientific American. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1 83^4.

2 Weaire, D. and R. Phelan (1994). “A Counter-example to Kelvin’s Conjecture on Minimal Surfaces,” Philosophical Magazine Letters 69: 107-110.

Bizarro Dan Piraro

o

CO

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Leaves ynom rhe Deaneny Ganderi

In the course of this Alice 150 year I have had several conversations with Carrollians about the exact date of Alice s publication in late 1865, and no one seemed to be able to name a day with any con- fidence. We know, from an entry in the diary, that Lewis Carroll received his copy on November 9, but the date an author receives his first copy is rarely the same as the publication date (consider The Hunting of the Snark, which was supposed to have a publica- tion date of April 1, yet Carroll received his copy on March 29). Today major publishers set pub- lication dates months ahead of time, print them on galleys, and publicize them in advertising, but pinning down a nineteenth- century publication date can be a little more tricky. We must first agree to state that the so-called “1865 Alice ’’ printed earlier in the year was not published (until the sheets came out in 1866 under the D. Appleton imprint). The date

of publication is the date that a book is “made public” — that is, the date that a member of the general public can buy (and receive) the book from the publisher, distribu- tor, or bookstore. That never hap- pened with the first printing of Alice. Several news outlets in the U.S. celebrated publication day for Alice as November 11, and as I began to investigate, there seemed some logic to this choice. At least two British newspapers listed Alice among “New Books” on that date. But books are often mentioned in the press as new when they are still forthcoming (and Bell’s Weekly actually mentions Alice in a column called “Literary, Musical, Scientific, Fine Arts, and Dramatic Gossip” on November 4). What I wanted was a definitive statement of publication date, preferably from the publishers themselves.

I found just such a statement on the back page of The Examiner for November 18, 1868. A full column

advertisement signed “Macmillan and Co., London” begins:

This day is published, crown 8vo, cloth, price 7s.

6d„

ALICE ADVENTURES in WONDERLAND.

A Tale for Children. By Lewis Carroll. With Forty-two illustrations byjohn Tenniel, Engraved by Dalziel Brothers.

Slight variations of this advertise- ment (but both with the heading “This day is published”) appeared on the same day in the Army Navy Gazette and Bell’s Weekly Messenger.

I found it interesting that this called Alice “A Tale for Children” (which description does not ap- pear on the title page) and that the so-called six shilling edition began life costing 7/6, but mostly I rejoiced in a definitive statement and a cause to celebrate Novem- ber 18 as publication day of Alice. Charlie Lovett Winston-Salem, N.C.

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%

In our book Alice in a World of Wonderlands: The Translations of Lewis Carroll’s Masterpiece we in- cluded material about Alice in 174 languages. We now know of two more languages that were published after our book went to press, and we have ten new ones in translation.

You may not have thought of yourself as a resource for this global project, but if you have computer search skills you could be one. If you would like to help recruit Alice translators, please email me, Jon Lindseth, atjalind seth@aol.com for complete de- tails. During the six years of com- piling our book we learned how to do this and can teach you. You can make the task fit your schedule, as there is no deadline.

Alice is a world-wide phenom- enon, but there is still much to do since, according to Ethnologne, there are 7,102 languages spoken in the world and thousands of dia- lects. This means there are many Alice translation opportunities, and you can help make a difference.

One of the most important out- comes of the Alicel50 project has been reaching people involved in saving minority and endangered languages. We want to continue this success! Please let me hear from you.

Thank you,

Jon Lindseth jalindseth@aol. com

As Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is translated into obscure and even imaginary lan- guages, it is even curiouser and cu- riouser that little attention is paid to translating Alice’s tales into Lewis Carroll’s second language — mathematics. While writing Alice in his spare time, Charles Dodgson (his non-pen name) maintained his day job as a prominent and leading mathematician. It was in this later Victorian period that leading math and physics thinkers raised questions that had no an- swers in the Newtonian construct. Eventually these questions led to Einstein’s breakthrough special theory of relativity in 1905 and further developments including the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Now we speak of going down the wormhole into a mysterious world that defies Newtonian phys- ics, where once Alice went down the rabbit hole into a mysterious world that had much the same effect. Now we speak of quantum particles being in two places at once or even Schrodinger’s cat being alive and dead at the same time, long after the Cheshire Cat’s grin was magically displaced from its body, and the executioner and the King and Queen of Hearts argued about whether a disembod- ied head can indeed be beheaded. And now we accept the Lorentz transformation that alters the apparent size of objects as they approach the speed of light, just as Alice once appeared to be nine feet tall.

It is difficult not to believe that Lewis Carroll’s prescient writ- ings were somehow guided by his thoughts from his day job.

James Renner

Tampa, FL

[This letter first appeared in the Wall Street Journal under the title “Lewis Carroll: A Pioneer of Quantum Phys- ics” on November 5, 2015, and is re- produced with the author’s permission.]

m

Yet again a significant literary foreshadowing that occurs early in Wonderland has been overlooked. I refer of course to the floral refer- ences, both in the prefatory poem and in the early lines of the text, when Alice considers making a daisy chain. Given her sleepiness, it is likely that if she had in fact taken the trouble of getting up and picking the troublesome (a characterization fulfilled in TTLG) daisies, it would have been a short chain indeed, suitable for wear- ing on the head, thus presaging the golden crown with which she is eventually awarded in Looking- Glass.

In the language of flowers we find that the daisy symbolizes “in- nocence and gentleness.” One may dispute whether the shrill be- havior of the pink daisies who turn white is out of character, or if the color change simply emphasizes their purity. Whether it also refer- ences Alice’s is a difficult point, as the color change is effected by her uncharacteristically threatening behavior (note however that later Alice has no compunctions about picking the rushes). But we must remember that she is driven to it by her altruistic desire to help the Tiger Lily. Alice is the kind, polite child who deserves her crown.

Dr. Bernard Fernly Boroers, BA, BFA, BM, BS, MA, MFA, MBA, MS, MAcc, MBA, MBT, ME,

MIN, MHA, MM, MMM, MPA, MPAS, MPH, MPL, MPP, MPQ; RED, MCM, MSQW, DDS, DM,l)PA(l PhD, DDS, MD, DVM, DoD, LLP, AAS, AS, DDPD, DPT, EdD, JD, MD, PhamD, PHD Beethoven, California

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You used to be much more ... muchier. You’ve lost your muchness.

Victoria Finan, ‘“Off with their heads!' - the 10 greatest quotes from Alice in Wonderland, ’’The Guardian (UK), April 4, 2015. (It’s from the Burton movie.)

m

The boating party did not return from this memorable expedition of discovery until nearly half-past eight. If that seems a little late for young ladies of six, eight, and ten years, ...

Warren Weaver, Alice in Many Tongues (1964). (They were, in fact, eight, ten, and thirteen.)

m

A docent at the Rosenbach made repeated references to the famous river journey “on the Seine.” Quite a tour.

m

Congratulations on a not special day.

Tioeet sent by Disney fapan on August 9. Intended as a fapanese translation of “ A very merry unbirthday to you, ” it backfired severely, as it happe?ied to be the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki.

The [autism] spectrum is so wide that actually almost anyone can be on it. . . . People on it . . . can pose for pictures and act in movies. They are Steve Jobs, Albert Ein- stein, Lewis Carroll, Andy Warhol. They are sharing elevators with

you and cooking your food. Maybe they’re even marrying you.

Eli Gottlieb, Best Boy, Liveright, New York, 2015.

HI

And if you go chasing rabbits And you know you’re going to fall

Tell ’em all who got a smokin’ caterpillar

Has given you the call.

“White Rabbit” by Grace Slick, according to the original sheet music (1967).

m

“Faster, Faster,” the White Queen cried.

Andrew Hodges, The Enigma, Walker, Burnett Books, London,

1 983. Carollian references abound; fortunately most of them are more accurate than this one.

It’s a decades-old conundrum, and Tao has recendy been working on an approach to a solution — one part fanciful, one part outright absurd, like some lost passage from “Alice’s Adventures in Won- derland.”

Gareth Cook, “Higher Power, ’’The New York Times Magazine, July 26, 2015

HI

...because I am staring at the abyss of questions that is Alice, and it’s impossible to tell just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Shane Kuhn, The Intern’s Handbook, a Thriller, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2014

HI

. . .Anders had to remind himself that they’d all gone through the looking-glass: Middle East hawks might now pose more of a politi- cal threat to the president than Middle East doves.

Thomas Mallon, Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years, Pantheon Books, New York, 2015

HI

“Unlike the White Queen, I can’t think of six impossible things be- fore breakfast.”

Ruth Rendell, End in Tears, Crown Publishers, New York, 2005

Lewis Carroll took the nineteenth century into a dream world that was as startling as that of Bosch, but built on reverse principles. Alice in Wonderland offers as norm that continuous time and space that had created consternation in the Renaissance. Pervading this uniform Euclidean world of familiar space-and-time, Carroll drove a fantasia of discontinuous space-and-time that anticipated Kafka, Joyce, and Eliot. Carroll,

the mathematical contemporary of Clerk Maxwell, was quite avant- garde enough to know about the non-Euclidean geometries coming into vogue in his time. He gave the confident Victorians a playful fore- taste of Einsteinian time-and-space in Alice in Wonderland. Bosch had provided his era a foretaste of the new continuous time-and-space of uniform perspective. Bosch looked ahead to the modern world with horror, as Shakespeare did in King Lear, and as Pope did in The Dun- ciad. But Lewis Carroll greeted the electronic age of space-time with a cheer.

Marshall McLuhan, Under- standing Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1964

HI

fanny: It will be in March. HONORINE, HER MOTHER: A good month, the month of the March Hare.

Fanny, the second film in Marcel Pagnol's “ Fanny” Trilogy, 1932

37

3V ings

rj,e w Kinng Desk

OF STEPHANIE LOVETT

Never has there been a time that the presi- dent’s column was more aptly named! I have done nothing but rave about Alice, Lewis Carroll, Alice 150, and the LCSNA all year — to inquiring journalists, the public, social media users, fellow Carrollians, unwary strangers, patient friends, and even more patient family. Now, I have some more raving to do:

First, I have to rave about the people who made Alice 150 such a marvel! All of the brainstorming, planning, collaborating, commu- nicating— all of that takes vision, and all of that takes time. Whether it’s something huge like Joel Bi- renbaum talking with museums, libraries, and collectors, starting back in 2008, about what major exhibitions they would mount in 2015; a medium-sized effort like having an Alice 150 booth at the Brooklyn Book Expo; or one small event like having a special LCSNA tour of the Morgan exhibition, ev- erything requires someone envisioning what could be possible, and then collaboration among a group, and then the many, many emails, calls, trips, and so on, necessary to make an idea into a reality.

As I said at NYIT, I hesitate to thank certain peo- ple publically, for fear of implying that other people’s work was not valued; nevertheless, we all should be raving about the vision, the wisdom, and the un- imaginable labor of Joel Birenbaum, Jon Lindseth, and Alan Tannenbaum, to whom we owe the once- in-a-lifetime privilege of five days of superlative Carrolling. Beyond the conferences themselves, of course, Joel has brought into being and coordinated months and months of Alicel50 events, and Jon and Alan created the landmark book and exhibition be- hind the Grolier conference days. We are extremely grateful to Edward Guiliano, who was generous in ev- ery way as our host at NYIT and whose opening talk put words to what we all felt happening around us. We owe Griffin Miller and Anita Cotter our thanks for all the logistical, material, and communications fac- tors that happened as if by magic. The LCSNA called upon our secretary, Sandra Parker, and our treasurer, Ken Salins, far more than usual, and we appreciate

their help so much. Thanks and more thanks are due to the many donors, large and small, who responded to the financial needs generated by the LCSNA’s gift of Alice 150 to the world.

We also owe a towering debt of gratitude to all of the week’s speakers, whose phenomenal presen- tations shook up our thinking, showered us with information, entertained us, and pointed us in new directions. The research, the writing, and the craft- ing of the audiovisual components all add up to a monumental undertaking. As if that weren’t enough, the illustration symposium members collaborated for months to develop their presen- tation; Charlie Lovett gave multiple presentations at different venues that week; and many presenters traveled long distances to be with us, including (and just for example) Keira Vaclavik, Hayley Rushing, Adriana Peliano, Nilce Pereira, and Stefania Tondo.

Rather than rave further about Alice 150 Week (you can read all about that herein), or about the many other wonderful events, exhibitions, publica- tions, and more, of the year (I hope you’ve been fol- lowing those as they’ve unfolded on our social media; we’re talking about how to archive them), I want to rave a bit about the most transformative aspect of Alice 150 for me. The book, the exhibi- tion, and the conference that compose Al- ice in a World of Wonderlands changed my understanding of why and how Alice is important, of what it means to study Al- ice and Carroll, and of what community I belong to. Previ- ously, I suppose I had thought of translations as novelties or ancillary items, an attitude I can excuse only by guessing it was formed by being a collec- tor back in an era when global

38

communication and commerce were much more dif- ficult. How I hadn’t woken up to reality — since I now routinely interact with South American, European, and Asian Carrollians online — I do not know, but it took reading AWW and then being in the room at the Grolier Club and having the global Carroll com- munity come to life around me to get it through my head that I, and perhaps other English-only Carrol- lians, had been seeing as primary what in fact is only a small fragment of what has happened to Alice since her publication. The global Alice community IS Alice, and really joining that community is the best thing that happened to me in a wonderful year of celebra- tions and revelations.

Lastly, I hope that the new and newly involved LCSNA members, and all of us who were so inspired and dazzled and invigorated by Alice 150, will contin- ue the talking, listening, and community-building this spring at the University of Maryland. Several mem- bers in the Maryland/D. C./Virginia area are hard at work planning a multi-day meeting on the weekend of April 16, featuring the Imholtz exhibition at Uni- versity of Maryland, Matt and Wendy Crandall Disney- ana, a program of speakers, and social events. You’ll receive a meeting notice in March, but start saving your personal days now, because you will want to be part of everything they are creating for us! Rave on!

7^

I ftM THE EGGMftN

MARK BURSTEIN

ewis Carroll was, of course, the first to pop- ularize the notion of the nursery-rhyme Humpty Bumpty as an anthropomorphic egg, so there is little doubt as to who the Eggman re- ferred to in the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus,” the B-side of “Hello, Goodbye” and a part of the Magical Mystery Tour (1967), is.

Much has also been said about the “Alice in Won- derland quality” of the Beatles’ “Cry, Baby, Cry,” not to mention the entire Sgt. Pepper album (where Car- roll appears as part of the throng on the cover) . Adam Gopnik recently reminded us of

... the reproduction of the White Queen’s ris- ing cry of “Better, better, better!” as the climax of the most successful of all Beatles singles, “Hey, Jude.” Lennon and McCartney’s obses- sion with the Alice books is familiar to all Beatlemaniacs. “I was passionate about ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and drew all the characters. I did poems in the style of the ‘Jabberwocky.’1 I used to live Alice,” John said once.2 Paul’s enthusiasm was equally intense.3

With that in mind, I thought I’d collect a few quotes on the subject.

In discussing the origin of the song “I’ll Get You,” the “B” side of “She Loves You” (1963) with biogra- pher Barry Miles, Paul said:

To me and John, though I can’t really speak for him, words like “imagine” and “picture” were from Lewis Carroll.1 This idea of asking your listener to imagine, “Come with me if you will...,” “Enter please into my ...,” “Picture yourself in a boat....” It drew you in. It was a good little trick that. Both of us loved Lewis Carroll and the Alice books and were fasci- nated by his surreal world, so this was a nice song to write.”5

Answering a question in 1965 about his influ- ences, John said:

Oh, Lewis Carroll. I always admit to that be- cause I love Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. But I didn’t even know he’d written anything else. I was that ig- norant. I just happened to get those for birth- day presents as a child and liked them. And I

39

usually read those two about once a year, be- cause I still like them.6

Interview with John and Yoko in Playboy (January 1981):

playboy: Where did Lucy in the Sky come from?

JOHN lennon: My son Julian came in one day with a picture he painted about a school friend of his named Lucy. He had sketched in some stars in the sky and called it Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Simple.

playboy: The other images in the song iveren ’t drug- inspired ?

lennon: The images were from Alice in Wonderland. It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty Dumpty. The woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep and the next minute they are rowing in a rowing boat somewhere and I was visualizing that.

playboy: Were you able to find others to share your visions with?

lennon: Only dead people in books. Lewis Carroll, certain paintings.

playboy: What about the ivalrus itself?

lennon: It’s from The Walrus and the Carpenter. Alice in Wonderland. To me, it was a beautiful poem. It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles work. Later, I went back and looked at it

and realized that the walrus was the bad guy and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, s**t. I picked the wrong guy. I should have said,

I am the carpenter. But that wouldn’t have been the same, would it? (Singing) I am the carpenter . . .?

To complete the set, let us also remember that Ringo Starr portrayed the Mock Turtle in Irwin Allen’s TV miniseries (1985), opposite Sid Caesar’s Gryphon. And the refrain on George Harrison’s Grammy-nom- inated “Any Road” — “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road’ll take you there” — was essentially a paraphrase of the exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat.7

Goo goo g ’joob.

1 His surreal, nonsensical wordplay-filled poems and stories in In His Own Write (1964) and A Spaniard in the Works (1965) certainly match this description.

2 LIFE magazine, Sept. 13, 1968.

3 Adam Gopnik, “Who Can Be Finished with Alice?” in the “Page Turner” column of The New Yorker website, October

11, 2015.

4 The song begins, “Imagine I’m in love with you / It’s easy ’cause I know ...”

5 Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now (1997) .

6 BBC radio interview broadcast on July 3, 1965, as part of “The World of Books.”

7 Written in 1988, “Any Road” was released on Harrison’s posthumous album, Brainwashed (2002).

The picture sleeve for the US version of “ The Ballad of John and Yoko, ” released by the Beatles as a 7”-single in May 1 969

4°

3n Jfflemoriam

The love affair began in the spring of 1935, when his fifth-grade teacher, a lovely blonde actress named Kathleen Sherman, was playing Alice and the White Rabbit in a local Children’s Theatre production in San Fran- cisco. It continued in college, where he wrote papers on Carroll’s works, comparing them to the worlds of Al- dous Huxley and the odd philosophy of Henry Ford. In 1974 in a bookstore in Portugal on one of his frequent world travels, he decided to memori- alize his trips by buying a local copy of the same book in every country he visited. Naturally, he chose Alice (in this case Alice no Pais das Maravilhas published by Edi cades Mel- horamentos).

This somehow grew into The Burstein Col- lection of Lewis Carroll, housed first in The Al- ice Room in his Sea Cliff digs in San Francisco, and currently under my curatorship in Petalu- ma, a few miles to the north. Together we also founded the West Coast Chapter of the LCSNA, authorized by Peter Heath, which lasted from 1979 to 1984. It was notable for hosting the first national LCSNA meeting (April 7, 1984) not held on the East Coast, paving the way for so many others. Sandor also served as LCSNA president and editor of the Knight Letter from 1983 to 1984.

Sandor was the author of an important se- ries of articles on the “Alice in Wonderland Syn- drome,” as well as many other contributions to Jabberwocky, The Carrollian, Knight Letter, and oth- er journals. His delightful sense of humor and keen intelligence always pervaded these works. His correspondence through letters and, later, emails, was treasured by its recipients.

For thirty-five years, one of the great de- lights of his life was attending our meetings,

from the late ’70s to the one held at the Internet Archive in San Fran- cisco in 2011, where he was presented with a Proclamation by August Imholtz (printed in KL 86:3) thanking him for, among other things, “build- ing a lasting bridge from his child- hood of yesterday to his descendants today and to all his friends, always as a moving cause.”

In addition to his Carrollian “creds,” he led a truly wonderful life. A graduate of the University of Cali- fornia at Berkeley (where he met my mother, Esther) and Stanford Medical School, he became a well-respected and much beloved physician, an enthusiastic participant in bibliophilic organizations such as the Rox- burghe Club and the Book Club of California, a late-life student for many years at the Fromm Institute, and an ardent traveler. The son of a rabbi, his religion was quite important to him. Music, too, was a passion, and he was the physi- cian who traveled with the San Francisco Sym- phony on many of their world tours.

Sandor was married to his “beloved bride,” Beth, for a few days short of fifty years, and adored her always. A warm and loving family man, he produced a son and a daughter, Jan, and rejoiced in his two stepchildren, seven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, all of whom he cherished; his best friend through- out his life was his sister, Merla.

Gracious, charismatic, handsome, brilliant, and extraordinarily funny, Sandor graced this earth for ninety-one years. I thank him for pass- ing on his love of Alice — and of all books, for that matter — and too much else to possibly enu- merate. Dad, I believe I speak for the entire So- ciety when I say we’ll miss you terribly.

Sandor Burstein, M.D. September 26, 1924 - November 21, 2015

Remembered by Mark Burstein

41

THROUGH

a YHOowaaaaAj, darkly

Clare Imholtz

Misprints are fun for collectors (though not necessarily for read- ers). Misprints involving mirror writing are extra fun. Some years ago, August and I noticed that the ubiquitous 1946 Random House boxed “Special Edition” set of Wonderland and Looking- Glass — the one you see on eBay all the time, though some sellers ask $500! — exists in two states. In one, in the Looking-Glass volume, there is a major printing error:

The first verse of the Jabberwocky poem is NOT printed in mirror writing. We assumed that other collectors were aware of this (we even thought we had discussed it with a few friends), and we didn’t think much more of it until a few months ago, when Selwyn Good- acre sent a query to several collec- tors. Selwyn wrote,

My son, Mark, at Duke University has a colleague, Dr. Joel Marcus. Happily, he has been reading my book Elucidating Alice, and it inspired him to reread Through the Looking Glass. Here is his comment: “When I got to Jab- berwocky,’ I saw that the first rendering of the poem is not in mirror-image. (No wonder I didn’t get the joke when I was a kid!) I wondered how rare that is, and also why it happened. Did the printer think the mirror-im- age rendering was a mistake?”

Selwyn noted that the error makes nonsense of Alice’s com- ment that follows, and asked if anyone was familiar with any other misprinted “Jabberwocky”s.

Our collective answer was no, we have not seen this error any- where else.

The Random House Special Edition actually is special. It was designed by George Salter, and the Tenniel illustrations were delicately colored by Fritz Kredel. According to Modern Library ex-

Carrollm Notes

pert Barry Neavill, the books were originally intended to be issued as a single volume in the Illustrated Modern Library series, but were diverted by Random House to the Book of the Month Club. The books were offered free to new subscribers, with a retail price quoted of $5.00. But were any sold at retail? I can’t see any evidence that any were sold, and yet with the number of copies around, one would wonder whether they might have been.

How there came to be two states, and which is the first, is a mystery. Logically, the misprinted verse would have been the first printing, then corrected. In the two Imholtz sets, there are a few other differences. The binding of the misprinted set is much brighter. Strangely, the internal illustrations are brighter in the

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Wonderland volume from the misprinted set, but less bright in the Looking Glass. Another biblio- graphical nightmare! (They only do it to annoy and because they know it teases!) Furthermore, the 1965 Random House “Centennial” reprint differs in several ways from the 1946 editions, but the initial stanza of “Jabberwocky” is cor- rectly printed in mirror writing.

I know of one other reversal misprint relating to “Jabberwocky.” On March 9, 1875, Dodgson wrote to Alexander Macmillan about his idea (never realized) for an Alice puzzle book, offering a choice of titles, all neatly lettered in capitals: Alice’s puzzle-book, the won- derland puzzle- book, etc., the last and best being jabberwocky

AND OTHER MYSTERIES, BEING THE BOOK THAT ALICE FOUND IN HER TRIP THROUGH THE LOOKING- GLASS ). But then Dodgson added a postscript on the back with the word Jabberwocky reversed. Un- fortunately, in Lewis Carroll and the House of Macmillan, the excellent volume of Dodgson-Macmillan correspondence edited by Morton Cohen and Anita Gandolfo (Cam- bridge University Press, 1987), the postscript itself is misprinted, with the word “Jabberwocky” printed normally, and everything below it transferred into mirror image (p. 108).

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A CANTAB CONFAB

Cindy Claymore Watter

One of the side trips of the University of Cambridge’s Homer- ton College “Alice’s 150th” confer- ence was a junket to the Graham Robertson Room of the Fitzwilliam Museum. Curator Jasmine Jagger (a Cambridge PhD candidate studying Edward Lear and nonsense literature) showed us a small but very choice collection of Victorian and contemporary objects with a Carrollian theme. The first was Carroll’s famous letter to Mr. A. L Moore (July 24,

42

1896) asking if her girls could come to tea or dinner singly or only as a group: “I know of cases where they are available in sets only (like the circulating-library novels), and such friendships I don’t think worth going on with.” He continues and asks if the girls are “kissable.”

Also in the exhibit was a pencil sketch by Tenniel, a Punch cartoon using the Tweedles to poke fun at political leaders. This was unusual because very few of his prelimi- nary sketches for his cartoons have survived. There were some other, more contemporary political car- toons. Ronald Searle had lots of fun with Maggie Thatcher.

There was wonderful original art by Arthur Hughes from George MacDonald’s 1871 fantasy novel At the Back of the North Wind. We also watched as Jasmine turned the pages of Edward Lear’s notebooks, and once again marveled that Car- roll and Lear never met. A remark- able watercolor by Richard Doyle of a tiny Titian-haired fairy’s head, could have been used as a cover for either of the Alice books.

Ms. Jagger also attended Trin- ity College, Oxford, and published a paper with the LCS(UK) on “The Child’s-Eye View in Illustrated Texts of Lewis Carroll.”

5i£

ALICE IN SUNDERLAND

Sharing only a name with Bryan Talbot’s graphic novel, this year’s Alice-themed incarnation of Mike’s Maze was in a different Sunderland — this one in Mas- sachusetts. “The game challenges Wonderland explorers to assemble their croquet team and flamingo mallets on their way to the Queen’s Croquet Match! Maze- goers must muster their knowl- edge of Carroll’s classic children’s story to successfully ace acres of trivia and come out with a coveted farm prize! Just try not to lose your head along the way...”

Past years’ honorees include the Mona Lisa, Babe Ruth, “Bert” Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Salvador Dali. Warner Farm, founded in the 1720s, is one of

the longest-running family farms in New England, now growing sustainable produce. It annually features Mike’s Maze, an eight- acre corn maze open weekends and holidays September through October. At about 340x1000 feet (100x300 m), might this be the largest Alice image ever made?

Linda Bennett Tammy Bevins Charles Brown David Brown Thomas Ryler Burton Alice Cash Deborah Carter Raul Contreras James Crawford Hank Edenborn Victor Fet Angelo J. Galluzzo

Luc Gauvreau Stephen Hoberman Stephen M. Kahnert Mark Lane Steven Latour

Jessica I. Luke Barbara J. Nedd Neil Raiford Joannes Savenije Fred Scher Jodie Skeris Mark Stevens Stefania Tondo Lauren Turner John Tyler J.J. van Rijswijk

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Photo by Jess Marsh Wisseman

Between the more than fifty (!!)“ 150th Anniversary ” titles coming out this year and the many reports of Alicel50 activities occupying far more space than usual, we simply cannot review all the books that we would like to in this issue. Please forgive us; Knight Letter 96 will carry reviews of Alice in a World of Wonderlands, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Decod- ed, several novels including Gregory Maguire ’s After Alice, and many neiv illustrated editions. - Ed.

IK

The Annotated Alice: 150th Anniversary Deluxe Edition Martin Gardner, editor Expanded and updated by Mark Burstein W. W. Norton, 2015 ISBN 978-0-393-24543-7 Cindy Claymore Watter

Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice, first published in 1960, paved the way for a newer under- standing of Lewis Carroll and the Alice books. Before its publication, Carroll’s classics did not appear in the literary canon; afterwards, Car- roll’s works were accepted as part of Victorian literature, suitable for serious academic study. Gardner edited three editions of The Anno- tated Alice before his death in 2010. He also produced a supplement for the Knight Letter (issues 75 and 76). The current 150th an- niversary edition, expanded, art- directed, and updated by Carrol- lian scholar, collector, and LCSNA president emeritus Mark Burstein, is wonderful — a lavish produc- tion, with new material, including a remarkable collection of color illustrations.

All of Gardner’s introduc- tions to the earlier editions are included, as well as the Knight Letter supplements. They are very instructive, as indicators of the growth in knowledge about Won- derland and Looking-Glass, and as evidence of Gardner’s delightful personality. He responds to read-

ers, he corrects himself as new information or evidence is pre- sented, and he always gives credit to his contributors. In fact, Martin Gardner is a model of gracious academic integrity.

In the first edition, Gardner addressed the question of whether the joy of reading Alice would be diluted by having too much of it explained. He answered it: “But no joke is funny unless you see the point of it, and sometimes the point has to be explained.” He even confessed, in More Annotated Alice, that he had misinterpreted Shane Leslie’s famous essay claim- ing that the Alice books were an al- legory of the Oxford Movement, a Victorian religious controversy. He hadn’t realized that the essay was satirical. Burstein declares that The Annotated Alice volumes could be described as “crowdsourced ( avant la lettre ) ” and a “palimpsest,” as Gardner kept notes, corrections, and his readers’ contributions, and the book was ever changing. Gardner was even good-humored when scholars and other enthusi- asts had outlandish notions. One such was that there was a romantic attachment between Lewis Carroll

and Lorina Liddell, the mother of Alice; another was that Carroll was an unpleasant character — a cad! — in a roman a clef by Anne Thac- keray. While Gardner dismissed the ideas, he clearly enjoyed the discussion.

In his “Preface to the 150th An- niversary Deluxe Edition,” Burst- ein points out that when Gardner constructed The Annotated Alice, in the pre-digital age, research was conducted in libraries, uni- versities, personal collections, and letters sent by post. There were no Lewis Carroll societies, no collec- tions of his letters, no complete published diaries, no journals of Lewis Carroll scholarship, no mag- isterial biographies, no massive collections of his photos. It is not an exaggeration to say that Martin Gardner started a movement.

This edition contains dozens of new notes. They are incorpo- rated gracefully, without creating a jumble of marginalia that would make the book difficult to read. The serious scholar can find what she or he needs, and the casual reader will enjoy dipping into it. The Annotated Alice's notes have always had eclectic sources — a thirteen-year-old playgoer notices the similarity between Carroll’s Duchess and Pozzo in Waiting for Godot (75), George Harrison uses a Wonderland misquotation in a song (79), an eminent Carrollian passes on the information that his grand- daughter has observed that Ten- niel’s lobster has his feet placed in ballet’s first position, and another Carrollian contributes that all five positions are in Wonderland (124). Jacques Pepin is even mentioned as a confirmation that fish do, sometimes, have their tails in their mouths (121). This is all great fun, and it demonstrates the nonhier- archical world of Carroll criticism. That is appropriate, since the out- wardly conventional Charles Lut- widge Dodgson created, as Lewis Carroll, anti-authoritarian works.

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The notes also make the reader understand why the work is so appealing, after all these years. While the grownups are puzzling over Anglo-Saxon attitudes, math- ematical references, and what “blacking” might be (by the way, Gardner’s notes on mathematics are easily decipherable, even by a math dunce), children love the strangeness of another child who boldly enters an alternate world.

In this world, the combination of the known and unknown has one constant: The grownups are still insane. The child Alice asserts herself, however; authority figures, in the end, have less power than she does. She can even help them, as in Alice’s interaction with the feckless but kindhearted White Knight.

Children also appreciate the humor — even in the death jokes — and the satire of the mysteriously elaborate social rituals. Everyone experiences social failure at some time, and the rules that govern a party can be frustratingly opaque. Carroll makes fun of snobbery, which most children appreci- ate, with the satirical portrait of Humpty Dumpty claiming he isn’t proud (shortly before he falls).

For all the scholarly references, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are still children’s books.

To call this volume “deluxe” is not an understatement. It is beau- tifully designed, and the quality of the printing is superior. Burstein states that the Tenniel images were taken from the re-striking of the Dalziel brothers’ original plates. (These plates were found in 1985, in a bank vault, where they had probably been hidden since World War Two.) Burstein adds that he hopes readers enjoy the selection of pictures, as “we were looking for variety, authenticity, and creativity above all.” In that they succeeded. The pictures in this edition will inspire many conversations, from

Mahendra Singh’s brilliantly sunset-colored illustrating of the famous boat ride that introduces “All in the golden afternoon,” to Adriana Peliano’s surreal interpre- tation of Tenniel’s Alice (and Car- roll’s camera) in a kaleidoscopic collage that prefaces the “Alice on Film” index. For readers who really want it all, there is even a tiny facsimile of the page of Chep- mell’s History quoted ineffectually by the Mouse after the caucus-race (35).

Pictures can add to our knowl- edge of Carroll’s work habits and attention to detail. Most Carrol- lians know that the initial printing of The Nursery A lice was rejected because of the color printing, which Carroll thought “far too bright and gaudy.” On page 99, the reader can see why Carroll was so critical: the Queen of Hearts has a violently red complexion that may suit her personality, but is not aesthetically pleasing. Carroll wasn’t just a fusspot — he made a sound business decision. (Similarly, the first printing of Wonderland had been recalled because of ink bleed-through.) Like another famous Victorian, Carroll’s tastes were simple — he only wanted the best.

Burstein includes Tenniel’s cover cartoon from a Punch collec- tion of 1864, which is a curiosity. This was more than a year before Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland appeared, yet there is an unmis- takable Alice, hanging a wreath around the neck of the British lion (20). Wonderland and Look- ing-Glass Land would provide fod- der for other political cartoonists, but Tenniel knew a good thing early on.

Burstein also adds a wonder- fully funny picture of Humpty. (This book is the easiest way to see it, unless Leonard Marcus and the New York Public Library revive their acclaimed children’s litera- ture exhibition from 2013-2014.) Here the rotund friend of royalty is lounging on a wall, merrily

quaffing from a golden goblet — or egg cup? — as big as he is. In the next panel, he is falling, arms and legs poking helplessly up in the air (246). It dates from 1843, and is believed to be the first time Mr. Dumpty was drawn as an anthro- pomorphic egg (he was previously a cannon, which makes sense of all the king’s horses and men sent to repair it). The drawing was from Christ Church, which may have been where Carroll saw it.

Also included are the sup- pressed “Wasp in a Wig” chapter, facsimile pages, a biographical list of the illustrators whose works are in the book, information about Lewis Carroll societies, selected references, and an updated film list (noted above). This lovely edi- tion of The Annotated Alice will be the standard for some time. It is a grand tribute to Martin Gardner as well as Lewis Carroll.

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: 150th Anniversary Edition Illustrated by Salvador Dali Princeton University Press ^MoMath, 2015 ISBN 978-0691170022

Mark Richards

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Dali’s suite of Alice illustrations was relatively unknown and rarely seen, having been published only in a lavish oversize edition, housed in a clamshell case, of 2,700 copies in 1969. Reproduced sporadically and never completely thereafter (and usually rather poorly printed, at that), it remained a privilege to ever have the chance to see them.

Once they started to appear on various websites, they became accessible and more well-known, certainly, but the poor quality of the scans, low resolution, and sim- ply terrible colors have not helped matters.

No doubt, things will change now that we have this new edition that incorporates all thirteen of Dali’s illustrations. (This should

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I50TM ANNIVERSARY EDITION ILLUSTRATED BY SALVADOR DALI

not stop you from taking the op- portunity to see a copy of the original 1969 edition if you can, or even buying one if you can afford it. But then, neither should seeing or owning a copy of the original edition prevent you from acquir- ing this new book!)

The book comes with two intro- ductory essays, which I will discuss in a moment, but let us, first, con- sider this simply as a new edition of Alice.

This is a beautifully produced book — the design, typesetting, print quality, paper, and binding are all handsome. And it is very kindly priced at just $24.95, list.

The original dozen main il- lustrations, one per chapter, were gouaches reproduced by an elaborate process called heliogra- vure, each in six to twelve colors, overprinted with a woodcut in black ink. Given that complexity and the fact that the originals were much larger, the illustrations in this edition are remarkably well reproduced. It would be hard to recommend this edition to a child wanting to read Alice for the first time, but any adult wanting ready access to Dali’s illustrations will be delighted with it. I always felt that the text in the original edition was unnecessary, and that it was an indulgence to publish the work as an edition of Alice instead of a simple suite of prints. However, having the text and illustrations in

this new edition is actually rather convenient. Referring to the words while examining the illustrations they inspired is a lot easier in an edition like this than in the origi- nal portfolio. (Except, of course, that we do not know whether Dali worked from an English text or, perhaps, from Spanish or French — a nice little research job there for someone!)

The bonus in this edition is the pair of introductory essays. Mark Burstein begins with a fast-paced ten-page background, drawing connections between Carroll and surrealism, linking Alice, Carroll, Dali, and Disney, and explaining the origin and development of Dali’s skipping girl, who appears in all the illustrations and repre- sents Alice (among other things!). Very nicely written and illustrated.

Professor Thomas Banchoff adds another fourteen pages, in which he uses his own friendship with Dali as a framework for draw- ing out fascinating details about the artist and, in particular, his interest in mathematics — thus completing the circle by referring back to Carroll. Again, the piece is well illustrated.

This is fascinating stuff. Rarely have I read an introduction to an edition of Alice with such insights. Both pieces would stand alone — well — as articles in a scholarly journal, but they carry more of a punch by being here.

The Acknowledgments at the back make it clear that Burstein is responsible for very much more than just his introduction, having worked for decades to get a trade edition published. I suppose it is true that almost any edition of Alice reproducing Dali’s illustra- tions would be welcome, but it is deeply satisfying that Burstein was able to use his influence to make this such a wonderful book.

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The Pamphlets of Lewis Carroll, Volume 5: Games, Puzzles, & Related Pieces Christopher Morgan, Editor LCSNA and University of

Virginia Press, 2015 ISBN 978-0-930326-02-9

Cindy Claymore Watter

The worlds of high, middle, and low culture have joined in cel- ebrating the 150th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This glorious work of Victorian anarchy in all its paradoxical mag- nificence has caused many en- thusiasts to try to psychoanalyze a gentleman — better known as Lewis Carroll — who is very busy being dead. Some of these attempts may well be accurate, some are amus- ing, and some are outrageous. It is not enough for the serious Carrol- lian scholar — and these days that can mean anyone who has actually read the Alice books — to say, as one did recently: “No, he wasn’t. No, he didn’t.” One must have proof, and it’s not as if one can exhume the poor fellow and talk to him.

Read Games, Puzzles, & Related Pieces instead. This collection of brainteasers, many not published since the nineteenth century, is the result of relentless burrowing in libraries, archives, museums, and private collections. Many of them were published originally in magazines in a weekly format, which allowed Carroll to interact with his readers. Carroll’s direc- tions on how to play the games and explanations of the solutions show how talented he was at clari- fying difficult concepts. Here also he is revealed as charming, cheer- ful, punctilious, witty, and engag- ing— as well as pedantic, fussy, arbitrary, sarcastic, and despairing. (This last was when he had to deal with members of his public who protested his rules and cleverly found loopholes in them.) Dodg- son also appears to be responsive and social, which may lay to rest the perception of him as a stutter- ing anchorite.

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But to begin at the beginning: Carroll loved puzzles, magic tricks, and all sorts of games, from child- hood on through his entire life. Over the years he published some of them in pamphlet and book form, submitted some to maga- zines, and often put puzzles in letters to friends. According to edi- tor Christopher Morgan (whose wonderful talk to the LCSNA on Carroll’s magic tricks a few years ago helped propel this book into being), Lewis Carroll intended to publish his games in a single volume. He mentioned it publicly several times. As late as five years before his death, in the preface to Sylvie and, Bruno, he set a puzzle for his readers, and stated, “I will publish the answer to this puzzle in the Preface to a little book of ‘Original Games and Puzzles,’ now in course of preparation.” Morgan even includes a drawing by Car- roll that is a design for the book’s cover, now this book’s frontis- piece. The picture, which is at the Huntington Library in California, shows a little girl reading a book by the ocean, next to a tree. The tree’s trunk has a rabbit-shaped hole through which one can see the ocean. (Carroll’s healthy sense of commercial possibility is evident here.) Morgan states that Carroll found negative images “fascinat- ing,” and one appeared in The Hunting of the Snark.

The first sections of Games, Puzzles, & Related Pieces contain card games and a recreation called “Castle Croquet.” Of course, a very wild game of croquet (everyone lets the Queen of Hearts cheat) figures in Wonderland-, however, croquet was a generally quiet game, suitable for the Liddell girls to play at Christ Church. It was a new game at that time. Carroll wrote a couple of sets of rules for croquet, the second set easier than the first, apparently at the request of the Liddell sisters. Carroll’s Castle Croquet is played with eight

balls; half are called “soldiers,” and half are called “sentinels.” The peg and arches are called “castles.” The object of the game is to move one’s soldier and sentinel through the other players’ arches (this is called “invading”), go around them all, and return to one’s own arch. There are rules about taking prisoners, and all in all, it seems like more fun than the typical cro- quet game. Carroll gives “Advice to the Player,” including the pros and cons of different tactics. This shows the patient teacher aspect of his personality.

The rest of this section includes “Puzzles from Wonderland” with answers; instructions on how to keep a letter-register (adapted from “8 or 9 Wise Words”); and such curiosities as “Circular Bil- liards” (yes, the billiards table was circular, but no, Carroll did not say why it was an improvement), co-operative backgammon, a cube/string puzzle, and a game called “Lanrick” that employed a chess board. However, it is with“Doublets” and “Syzygies” that Lewis Carroll reached his interac- tive apex.

“Doublets” are known today as “word ladders” and involve taking two words of the same length — say, “DOVER” and “PARIS”— and link- ing them using a word sequence that is different by one letter only — vide DOVER-cover-coves- caves-cares-pares-PARIS. You can- not rearrange link-word letters. The fewer the link words, the higher the score. And one other rule: The words can’t be outland- ish, but must be “admissible” — Carroll’s term. (Carroll’s notion of “admissible” caused some conflicts with the contestants.) Here is Car- roll’s explanation of the rules, in a letter (1896):

To solve a Doublet, you must change one letter only, in the first word, making a real word; then change one letter only in this new word, and so on till you get to the second word. The intermediate

words are called “Links,” and the whole thing a “Chain.” The fewer the Links, the higher the Score. The rule for scoring is “Take the square of the number next above the letters in each word, and de- duct 2 for every link.”

Morgan calls this description “a model of concision.”

“Doublets” ran in Vanity Fair from March 1879 to April 1881, weekly. Readers would send in their solutions, and they were scored by someone named “CHOKER,” who may have been Lewis Carroll or maybe T. Gibson Bowles, the publisher. They might even have shared scoring duty. Right away a problem emerged, and Carroll wrote to a friend about it: “We are getting into ter- rible difficulty about ‘admissible’ words. Only yesterday the Editor sent me a batch of remonstrances to read. The only way out seems to be to issue a Glossary, which I am now preparing.” Soon a list of inadmissible words ran, and “CHOKER” wrote a slightlyjabber- wockian response to the competi- tors, using most of the inadmis- sible words in it: “CHOKER is in a state of complete pye. He feels that there must be a stent to the admission of spick words. He is quite unable to sweal the chaffy spelt, to sile the pory cole, or to swill a spate from a piny ait to the song of the spink.” Among the forbidden words on the list are “chock,” “mold,” “slick,” “swill,” “spank,” and “spate.” No squalor, colloquialism, or vulgarity was permitted, apparently. CHOKER called it “usual and correct Eng- lish,” or “universally understood ... in good Society.”

In 1880, Carroll changed the rules — simplified them, probably made the entries easier to score, and doubtless confused his con- testants.

Carroll and/ or Bowles spent a great deal of time on the re- sponses, clearly:

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. . . CHOKER begs leave to say that the words “bosh,” “damned,” and “teats” are inadmissible. . .

... In reply to “Crusty Crit- ics,” “R.H.A.,” “Crede Cornu,

“ “Marina,” “Rampant Virtue,” “Garnet,” “Barbachlan,” and “H.Z.H.,” CHOKER begs leave to say that the words “Plat,” “Pert,” and “Bun” are not contained in the Glossary. . .

. . . CHOKER begs leave to say that among the words which he has treated as inadmissible in the answers published this week are: Bret. Brant. Creat. Crope. Fred. Feld. Grewn. Gleen. Gians. Graip. Gree. Rae. Tern. Toot. Treen. Tren. Trass. Ween.

No wonder Carroll ended this competition, which was success- ful, after two years. Besides all the work involved in keeping it amusing and educational, he had to deal with contestants who may have been under the influence when they filled out their entries.

His next foray into word games, “Syzygies,” lasted from July 23, 1891, to June 3, 1892. These ap- peared in The Lady , also edited by T. Gibson Bowles. While similar to “Doublets,” this game is more complex. The name “Syzygies” comes from two Greek words and means “yoking together.” In the game, a “syzygy” is one or more let- ters standing together in the same order, common to both words (e.g.: door/poor). The idea was to link together two words with a series of words, with every two consecutive words having a syzygy. The first example Carroll gave was: DOOR-(oor)-poorest (res)- resound-(und)-undo (ndo)-WIN- DOW. Carroll decreed that “The words used as links must be ordi- nary words given in dictionaries,” and we can see what problems will arise right here. The score was calculated by adding together the number of letters in the longest syzygy and seven times the number in the shortest (“If seven maids with seven mops . . .”). Next, a

point would be deducted for every link (the object was to have as few as possible) and every letter that was not a syzygy. A syzygy could not appear in the same place in two words. “Handsome” and “some- where” are acceptable; “hand- some” and “troublesome” are not. (His first puzzles were to construct a word chain that changed a CON- SERVATIVE into a LIBERAL, and one that got a VERDICT from the JURY. The prize was substantial — ’’One Guinea.”

By the third column, Carroll was changing the rules, which confused the readers and made the entries — and there were many — more difficult to score.

He also began to receive the usual complaints about what constituted an “ordinary” word. (No Ameri- can spellings were permitted.) He answered, often in great detail, his readers’ queries, giving examples to support his ideas. Here we see the careful instructor who pays attention to detail.

On September 1, 1891, Carroll notes in his diary:

Sent another set of rules to The Lady and postponed Prize Competition till they come into force; as the competitors have found out the “dodge” I lately foresaw, of getting a very large “maximum” Syzygy by dragging in a pair of very long words. This would eliminate any real skill . . .

His contestants had discovered thesauri tis.

Morgan lists some of the amus- ing names of his contestants, many clearly inspired by Carroll’s liter- ary works: Snark, Cromer Crab, Boojum, Tortoise, The Giddy Shrimp, Cheshire Cat, The Walrus, White Queen, Jabberwock, Phan- tasmagoria, Vital Spark. The byline of “Lewis Carroll” on the column clearly attracted clever, creative people. Sometimes their power of invention was too much for Car- roll. After only a few weeks into the competition, Carroll printed a stern warning to his readers:

I warn all whom it may concern that I will have no mercy on words that are never used in or- dinary conversation, and would not be understood if they were (here are a few that have been sent in: serai, edelite, morling, vellon, entonic, eben, lere. What a cheerful tea party it would be where such words are bandied about!).

Speaking of tea parties, in an ear- lier column he had announced that hyphenated words like “tea- table” were not allowed. Morgan points out that all of the above forbidden words are in the OLD, except for “serai,” which is in Merriam-Webster. That was not good enough for Carroll, because “All words are given in dictionaries”

(as he declared in The Lady on September 3, 1891). One must dis- criminate. To be fair, he rescored entries when he was convinced a word (such as “salsify”) was “ordi- nary” enough.

Keeping up with a weekly col- umn, creating, scoring, explain- ing, and responding to his enthusi- astic but often recalcitrant readers finally took its toll, and Carroll ended the column after ten and a half months. He was at a stage in his life — not many years before his death — where he was trying to wind up several projects, and he never was able to compile all his puzzles into a book. But now we have this one.

The last section, “Miscellany,” contains some additional material: “Games and Puzzles of Carroll’s Time,” “Doublets after Carroll,” and a Postlude in which Jeremiah Farrell presents several new word games and magic tricks inspired by Carroll’s creations, bringing the book very much up to date.

Christopher Morgan is to be commended for his painstaking research, which will introduce many readers to Carrolliana that has not been available to the gen- eral public. In addition to particu- larly gracious acknowledgments,

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he includes an excellent bibliogra- phy and index. Morgan’s affection for his subject is clear, and adds to the reader’s great pleasure in this very entertaining addition to the Pamphlets series.

m

The Photographs of Lewis Carroll:

A Catalogue Raisonne Edward Wakeling

University of Texas Press, 2015 ISBN 978-0-292-76743-0

Cindy Claymore Watter

It was a happy coincidence that two of Lewis Carroll’s close as- sociates— his uncle Skeffington and his Oxford friend Reginald Southey — were early adopters of the newest technology, the cam- era. They introduced Carroll to the production of these images of light and shadow, and he was launched on a fascination that lasted for twenty-five years, until he gave it up in 1880. Edward Wakeling’s The Photographs of Lewis Carroll: A Catalogue Raisonne has a short history of Carroll’s career in photographs, and small reproduc- tions of over 900 images. It also contains information about the photographs — the title, subject, date, place, present collection, album, dimensions, provenance (including auction history), and relevant diary entries. Wakeling was doubtless helped by Carroll’s record-keeping, but this book required a great deal of research and visits to collections public and private. It is as accurate and as complete a record of his pho- tographs as has ever been con- structed. In short, this book is a monumental production.

It’s also engrossing. Carroll has often been called the best pho- tographer of children of the Vic- torian era, but one can see he was interested in all sorts of subjects from the beginning. The very first photographs he made have not been located, but the first images in the book are two “assisted self- portraits” (or “selfies,” to use the

modern locution). Photograph 0043 is quite striking: a full-face, straight-on portrait of two women. The length of the exposure time made it was difficult for a photog- rapher to get a relaxed expres- sion from his subjects — hence the three-quarter views, the downcast eyes, the general lack of mirth in most photographs of that period. But this one (possibly Mrs. Lock- hart and her daughter) looks natu- ral. These early pictures include photographs of Carroll’s younger brothers and sisters, images of Croft (his childhood home), and his father, a most dignified person- age. One can even see his interest in fancy dress photography — he photographed his cousin in Arab garb (0150).

Some readers of this excellent work will be surprised to realize that Lewis Carroll’s muse, Alice Pleasance Liddell, was a subject for the camera before she was a char- acter in a book. Carroll met Alice (and Ina and Edith) when he and Southey went over to the Christ Church Deanery to photograph the Cathedral with Southey’s cam- era. They tried to take pictures of the girls, but apparently the results were not successful. However, the friendship that inspired the Alice books certainly was.

Wakeling describes the photo- graphic process — the coating of the glass with chemicals, the inser- tion in a very heavy camera, the lengthy sitting time, the darkroom procedures. So many things could go wrong, and often did. (These challenges were also humorously chronicled by Carroll in his satiri- cal poem “Hiawatha’s Photograph- ing.”) Carroll was a perfectionist, who recorded his photographic failures as well as successes. In his diary in 1856, he writes “...it is my one recreation, and I think should be done well.”

Carroll is most well-known for his photographs of children. Given that many photographers of the era put their juvenile sub-

jects’ heads in iron clamps to make them sit still, it is no wonder that Carroll’s works are regarded highly for their natural appear- ance. Alice Liddell Hargreaves recalled much later that he told stories to her and her sisters to keep them entertained (although Wakeling notes that in several photographs Edith Liddell looks none too pleased to have her pic- ture taken). There are those who believe Carroll’s interest in pho- tographing young girls is suspect. Wakeling’s response is that boys make up one-quarter of his pho- tos of young children (boys were often away from home, at school), and the photos were all taken with parents’ permission (and often at their request). He also asserts:

Children were seen as close to angels, and the high infant mor- tality rate caused many parents, particularly those who could afford it, to wish to obtain some permanent image of their child either as a painting, sculpture, or photograph, on the chance that their infant would not survive beyond childhood.

Some of Carroll’s earlier photo- graphs are of students at the Twy- ford School, run by the Reverend G. W. Kitchin (father of Xie, later a favorite child subject). While these were perfectly brought up young boys, here (0392) they

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look like an aggregation of Artful Dodgers.

Wakeling addresses the famous “Alice as Beggar Maid” (0354) pho- tograph in terms of its relationship to the Victorian sensibility:

The Victorians were class-con- scious, but found it difficult to comprehend the depths of de- spair that poverty brought to the lower classes. In order to rational- ize the situation, it was common to sentimentalize the individual while ignoring the circumstances. . . . Many writers and artists used beggar children in their work to feed the sentimental appetites of the upper classes, and Carroll was no exception. ... It is, neverthe- less, an extraordinary picture.

He adds that Carroll’s photo of Alice in her best dress (0356) heightens the contrast between the lower and upper social classes.

Carroll actually had an enor- mous range of subjects. In his way, he was as much a lion-hunter as Mrs. Liddell: He photographed many of the great people of his day. He was not above pestering them, in fact. One such case was Tennyson. In the family picture (0310), the poet laureate looks a bit wary. However, it is a wonderful domestic scene.

Carroll loved going to the the- ater, and there he found photo- graphic subjects in the child ac- tors. Members of the Terry family were favorites. Photograph 1331, of Ellen Terry (Watts) and her young sister Florence, is remark- able. The marriage of Ellen Terry and the much older G. F. Watts had broken down, and Terry’s direct gaze over her sister’s bowed head is poignant in the extreme.

Carroll’s subversive humor is evident in some pictures. His pho- tograph of Reginald Southey, sol- emnly standing next to a human skeleton that is being saluted by a monkey skeleton (0219) is hilari- ous, especially given the excite- ment over Charles Darwin at that