AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Edith alice in wonderland cartoon12/26/2023 ![]() ![]() (“What is the use of a book,” Alice wonders early in the tale, “without pictures or conversation?”) The dedication, embellished with curling green vines, reads, “A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer Day.” When I saw the show, which runs until the end of December, the little book had been flipped open to reveal a page featuring one of Dodgson’s illustrations of Alice. Carefully hand-lettered and illustrated by Dodgson in fine, spindly pen, the care he has taken in weaving the drawings into the minute text is evident. The last page featured a small photo of Alice’s face and, underneath, a portrait of her that Dodgson had drawn by hand.ĭodgson’s original manuscript, on loan from the British Library, is a strikingly beautiful and strange object, the cover decorated with a border of unruly wildflowers, like an overgrown garden. (The real story may be less neat: the weather on July 4th, 1862, the day of the boat trip, was “cool and rather wet,” according to some sources.) Alice asked Dodgson to write the story down for her, and, on Christmas, 1864, he handed her the finished manuscript, then called “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.” He was meticulous it had no mistakes. The legend goes like this: one blazing-hot day on the river, the children demanded entertainment and Dodgson obliged, spinning a fantastical tale as they went along. It is meant to evoke the now famous day that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who later adopted the pen name Lewis Carroll, rowed up the Thames with his friend Robinson Duckworth and the three Liddell sisters, who were neighbors of his: Lorina, Alice, then ten, and Edith. The show begins down, down in the vast subterranean space of the Sainsbury Gallery, inside a room filled with the sounds of oars hitting the water. Slipping inside a museum after months of the U.K.’s strict lockdown felt, even masked and distanced, like a revelation everyone there was buzzing. The origins of Alice’s tumble into Wonderland and its long cultural afterlife-everything from Carroll’s tentative first sketches to cheery, Alice-themed advertisements for Guinness and tomato juice produced a hundred years later (“Welcome to a Wonderland of good drinking!”)-are the subject of a beguiling new exhibition, “Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser,” at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London. “How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards!” ![]() “I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth!” she frets. The hole is lined with shelves (naturally), and she plucks a jar of orange marmalade from one as she passes. ![]() Would the fall never come to an end?” Carroll writes, as Alice plunges down the rabbit hole. In the morning, when other books have had their coffee and sobered up, Carroll’s works remain dreamlike and stubbornly nonsensical. This is especially true of Lewis Carroll’s still trippy “ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” from 1865, and its even odder sequel, “ Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There”-both of which I’ve been reading late at night. At a certain hour, reading becomes a psychedelic experience. They will filter into your dreams in surreal, and not unpleasant, ways. The sentences will begin to bend and blur together. If you wait long enough-if you are tired enough-something magical will unfold. In the long predawn hours, I’ve read histories of very old buildings minor gods remote, half-forgotten conflicts-and retained practically nothing. Generally, the duller the words the better. Insomnia is lonely-and often infuriating-and it’s a comfort to look at words on a page. Lately, when I can’t sleep, I take a book to the sofa and turn on a reading lamp. Art work by Peter Blake / Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum The origins of Alice’s tumble into Wonderland are explored in an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |