Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass - Lewis Carroll [4]
So many translations of Alice into other languages have been made that mathematician and Carroll collector Warren Weaver wrote an entire book about them, Alice in Many Tongues (1964). So many plays and musicals were based on Alice that Charles C. Lovett covers their history in Alice on Stage (1990). A checklist of motion pictures about Alice, by David Schaefer, will be found at the back of the 1999 Norton edition of my Annotated Alice.
Many biographies of Carroll have been written, and several book collections made of his correspondence. A two-volume expurgated edition of Carroll’s diary, edited by Roger Lancelyn Green, appeared in 1954. An uncut edition of the diary, edited by Edward Wakeling, is now being issued in many volumes. Alice Liddell has her own biography, The Real Alice (1981), by Anne Clarke.
Aside from his books about mathematics and logic, and collections of his poetry, Carroll wrote two other fantasies. A long novel about two fairy children was published in two volumes: Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893). His great nonsense ballad The Hunting of the Snark, illustrated by Henry Holiday, appeared in 1876. You’ll find its history, along with numerous footnotes, in my Annotated Snark (1962). The ballad tells of a crew of bizarre adventurers who set sail to find an elusive monster called the Snark. It also was illustrated by Peter Newell, as well as by many other artists since.
Carroll’s long comic poem Phantasmagoria, about a friendly ghost, was recently published by Prometheus Books. Several books deal with Carroll’s writings about puzzles and recreational mathematics, including my Universe in a Handkerchief (1996). For a detailed and annotated bibliography of all of Carroll’s writings, the classic reference is The Lewis Carroll Handbook, by Sidney Herbert Williams and Falconer Madan, revised and updated by Roger Green in 1962. Other bibliographies, essay collections, and critical studies of Carroll’s work are far too numerous to mention.
The Lewis Carroll Society of North America publishes a news bulletin entitled The Knight Letter, and sponsors two annual conventions. In England, an older Lewis Carroll Society, founded in 1969, issues a scholarly periodical, The Carrollian (formerly Jabberwocky ), edited by Anne Clarke Amor, and a newsletter called Bandersnatch. A Canadian Carroll Society publishes White Rabbit Tales, its newsletter, and there is a recently organized Carroll Society of Japan. Carroll has an extensive following in Japan, where some sixty editions of the Alice books are currently in print!
You won’t find the Alice books reprinted in Mortimer Adler’s set of The Great Books of the Western World, but I venture to state the following: It is permissible today to consider a person educated if he or she has not read, say, Das Capital, or books by Hegel and Freud, or indeed more than half the volumes in Adler’s series. On the other hand, I would not consider a person educated who has never read Carroll’s Alice books. Among the great characters of imaginative literature, Alice has become as immortal as Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn, Captain Ahab, Sherlock Holmes, and Dorothy Gale of Kansas. If you are not yet acquainted with Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and behind the mirror, read on and enjoy!
—Martin Gardner Hendersonville, N.C.
All in the golden afternoon
Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars, with little skill,
By little arms are plied,
While little hands make vain pretence
Our wanderings to guide.
Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour,
Beneath such dreamy weather,
To beg a tale of breath too weak
To stir the tiniest feather!
Yet what can one poor voice avail
Against three tongues together?
Imperious Prima flashes forth
Her edict “to begin it”—
In gentler tones Secunda hopes
“There will be nonsense in it”—
While Tertia interrupts the tale
Not more than once a minute.
Anon, to sudden silence won,