A Blog of Bosh

Starting on 6 June 2005 BBC Radio 4 will be broadcasting a series of programmes in which contemporary writers give a twist to Alice in Wonderland. You will be able to listen to them on the web for a week from the Programme Info page.

Still available for the next two days the broadcast for Tuesday, 31 May:

Writer and historian Jenny Uglow, author of A Little History of British Gardening, introduces an extract in which Alice encounters The Garden of Live Flowers from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Read by Patience Tomlinson.

Thanks to A Wasp in a Wig.

I have just received Justin G. Schiller Ltd.’s Spring Miscellany catalogue (no. 53) and among the many interesting items listed is an “original ink Manuscript lesson for teaching Logic, conceived in diagram format and dated by Dodgson in the upper right corner ‘5/3/94.'”

On 5 March 1894 Dodgson wrote in his diary:

Gave two Lectures in Logic, one at the High School, to the girls, at 2: the other to Miss Soulsby and four mistresses as well as Edith Lucy and Miss Scott, at 8 p.m.

More from the catalogue entry written with Edward Wakeling’s assistance:

Dodgson here is explaining in a simple way the logic terms “mutually exclusive” and “exhaustive”, as well as their converses. He uses a visual example of books on shelves to get his points across… The term “Universe” in this lesson means every known book that exists…

The MS was once part of the inventory of Blackwells of Oxford, who attended the dispersal auction sale of Dodgson’s library and effects in 1898, and they might have acquired it at this time, perhaps inside one of Dodgson’s books as a page-marker.

From the opening page of Carroll’s section at the Family Records Centre:

Lewis Carroll, the author of the Alice books, is probably Britain’s best known writer of children’s fiction. Less well known is the ‘other’ Lewis Carroll, the mathematician, churchman, photographer and Student of Christ Church College, Oxford, who was more familiar to his friends and colleagues as the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

This exhibition tells the story of his life, from his birth at Daresbury, Cheshire, through his long years at Christ Church to his quite sudden death at his sisters’ house in Guildford.

The story is illustrated using documents from the Family Records Centre, The National Archives and elsewhere.

The site also includes an exhibition on Ellen Terry, a famous actress who was also one of Charles Dodgson’s so-called child friends; also see this short biography of Terry at About.com.

Lewis Carroll – In His Own Account by Jenny Woolf (Jabberwock Press, 2005) is an annotated transcription of Dodgson’s bank account from 1856 to 1900 (two years after his death) and shows that Carroll was in the red for most of this period, thus contradicting “his reputation for financial sharpness” (Jenny Woolf’s piece on the book in the Times Literary Supplement, “Sounds and Sense”, no. 5315, 11 February 2005, a generous excerpt is available through Blogcritics.org).

The book also shows that, notwithstanding the overdrafts, he was generously helping both individuals and institutions, most notably those concerned with “the plight of the many women and children who were trafficked and abused by the Victorian sex trade” and is therefore relevant to the ongoing war over his sexual preferences (see also): “these donations were not made for show, but were kept entirely private.”

Also see an interview with Jenny Woolf in the Camden New Journal and a short post at A Wasp in a Wig.

Jabberwock now has a page which provides errata, new information and “other useful comments” about the book.

The original manuscript of ‘Alice’s Adventures Underground’ given to the real Alice – Alice Liddell – by Lewis Carroll as a Christmas present in 1864, is the basis for a new website at http://www.aliceinoxford.net/play.htm. ‘Journeys to Wonderland’ takes children on a multimedia journey, shedding light on Alice’s adventures and telling the stories of Lewis Carrol and the real and fictitious Alices along the way. The website is a partnership between the British Library, Museum of Oxford and South East Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (SEMLAC).

From the BL’s Press Release showing a nice colour reproduction of the first page of Carroll’s manuscript.

The Alice in Oxford site’s main feature is a profusely-illustrated presentation of the story and all the people and places connected with its creation, with activities such as “Make your own Pool of Tears” or “Make a fun ‘Off with your head game'”, but it also includes short biographies of Carroll and Alice Liddell as well as information on Oxford.