The Red King's Dream: Lewis Carroll in Wonderland

by Jo Elwyn Jones (Author), J.Francis Gladstone (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1995

  $3.25

  Through tireless searches in archives and some very astute deductions these two ex-BBC television production executives have exposed a new dimension to Lewis Carroll's ALICE IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS - first that the characters are closely based on real people, and second that he wrote the books as satire, to tell his comtemporaries at Oxford what he thought about declining moral and academic standards in the 1860s. Carroll (the Rev. Charles Dodgson) -besides being a collector of little girls, a brilliant mathematician, a superb photographer and an impoverished don at Christ Church College - was acquainted with the great and the good of his day, (Tennyson, Darwin, Ruskin, Jowett among them), and poked fun at them in their thinly disguished roles in the absurd adventures he created for Alice Liddell.

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $5.81

  The quest began when the authors discovered a strange link between Lewis Carroll and their forebear, Prime Minister Gladstone. It led them to re-examine Carroll's diaries and search out his little-known photographic portraits of the celebrities he recorded meeting - such as Huxley, Faraday, Tennyson and Ruskin. By visiting the places that Carroll frequented, they unravelled a code whereby the Oxford mathematician laced his Alice stories with clues to his scurrilous views on the great and the good of Victorian England.