Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [16]
It was not until 13 November, in fact, that he records the strictly literary genesis of the tale, the day after an embarrassingly frosty encounter with Mrs Liddell – he had been ‘out of her good graces’ since the hushed-up showdown in June:
Began writing the fairy-tale for Alice, which I told them July 4, going to God-stow – I hope to finish it by Christmas.80
In the diary, as in other accounts, Dodgson makes it clear the story was written for Alice, but there were other influences. In May he expressed his pleasure in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and on 9 July he records a meeting with George MacDonald ‘on his way to a publisher with the MS of his fairy-tale “The Light Princess” in which he showed me some exquisite drawings by Hughes’.81 These contemporary precedents must have encouraged Dodgson to think in terms of working up his own story for publication. If Alice eventually prompted him to think of writing it four months after the golden afternoon, the diaries offer a much less telescoped account of the shift from oral tale to writing than either Duckworth or Alice. They also suggest Dodgson was ripe for the suggestion.
According to the diaries he finished the MS of Alice’s Adventures under Ground on 10 February 1863 and his illustrations for it on 13 September of the following year. He finally sent the book to Alice herself in November 1864. However, by this stage Dodgson was no longer thinking of the manuscript version as the end of Alice’s adventures. By then he had fallen out with Mrs Liddell and was in very strained professional relations with the Dean. In fact after 25 June 1863 he was to see very little of Alice or her sisters82 and when he encountered her in Christ Church quadrangle in May 1865, he noted ‘Alice seems changed a good deal, and hardly for the better – probably going through the usual awkward stage of transition’.83 This was clearly a personally difficult period for Dodgson too. As his dearest ‘child-friend’ began to undergo the ‘awkward’ changes associated with puberty, he himself began to undergo their awkward effects upon himself– and the aftermath of the break with the Liddells. By the time the MS was completed, Alice was already a figure from his past. Everyone had moved on a long way from the golden afternoon.
In October 1863 he met the future publisher of Alice, Alexander Macmillan, to arrange for some of Blake’s Songs of Innocence to be printed for him. Soon, in December 1863, he was writing to Tom Taylor for an introduction to Tenniel:
Do you know Mr Tenniel enough to be able to say whether he could undertake such a thing as drawing a dozen wood-cuts to illustrate a child’s book, and if so, could you put me into communication with him? The reasons for which I ask… are that I have written such a tale for a young friend, and illustrated it in pen and ink. It has been read and liked by so many children, and I have been so often asked to publish it, that I have decided on doing so.84
Greville MacDonald remembers his father George MacDonald being one of those Dodgson consulted and remembers himself, aged six, exclaiming ‘there ought to be sixty thousand volumes of it’. ‘It was our enthusiasm’, he wrote, ‘that persuaded our Uncle Dodgson… to present the English-speaking world with