Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: 150th Anniversary Edition: Celebrating Lewis Carroll's North East Connections

By Lewis Carroll

"This very pretty and funny book ought to become a great favourite with children. It has this advantage, that it has no moral, and that it does not teach anything."
-- The Sunderland Herald 25 May 1866

A century and half after its original publication, Lewis Carroll's fantastical, phantasmagorical Wonderland is still endlessly fascinating to both children and adults. Quizzical Alice and the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter and the tyrannical Queen of Hearts, and their dreamlike world of teacups and mushrooms are universally beloved - but less well known are their roots and origins in the north east, which inspired Carroll's creativity and imagination throughout his life.

Produced to mark the 150th anniversary of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, this beautiful new edition explores Carroll's life and connections with the north east, from his holidays at Whitburn and Southwick to the inspiration he found in Sunderland, Ravensworth and Penshaw. Follow Alice once again down the rabbit hole to celebrate Carroll's own enchanting dreamworld, and the unexpected places he discovered it in.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookPartnership
• Release date: Mar 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781909486140

Book preview

Chase House

4 Mandarin Road

Rainton Bridge

Houghton le Spring

Tyne and Wear

DH4 5RA

Paperback ISBN 978 1 909489 13 3

Ebook ISBN 978 1 909486 14 0

Introduction © 2015 by My World

This 2015 edition published by My World, an imprint of Business Education Publishers Limited.

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Cover design by courage, UK.

Printed and bound by Martins the Printers Ltd, UK.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulate without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

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One hundred and fifty years after the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice’s story and that of her creator have long since entered popular mythology. The tale of Wonderland’s creation in a single idyllic moment – the famous ‘golden afternoon’ of July 4th 1862, when Lewis Carroll and his friend Robinson Duckworth took the three young Liddell girls out boating on the Isis, and Carroll spun the story that would become Alice in Wonderland – has inspired endless analysis, scrutiny and speculation.

Like so much else in Carroll’s life, this event has been mythologised out of all proportion. Duckworth – the ‘Duck’ to his ‘Dodo’ in the Caucus-race scene – having initially lamented his lack of record of the famous day, eventually gave a detailed and highly romanticised account of the trip thirty years later. In Alice Liddell’s own version, recounted seventy years later in an article written by her son Caryl, the story was told not in a boat but a field – and according to the official Met Office records, far from the drowsy heat-soaked afternoon of lore, the weather for Oxford on the 4th of July was cool, grey and rainy. In fact, the creation of the story carried on long after that day’s trip – in a diary entry over a month later Carroll refers to being made to carry on with ‘my interminable fairy-tale of Alice’s Adventures’

Carroll himself said of Alice in Wonderland that, ‘In writing it out, I added many fresh ideas which seemed to grow of themselves upon the original stock; and many more were added when years afterwards I wrote it all over again for publication.’ The adventures were eventually published two years later as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a very different story from the original tale spun for the private amusement of the three Liddell sisters. The original manuscript as presented to Alice Liddell had been a slim volume of only four loose chapters, full of private jokes and without many of the now iconic scenes such as the mad tea party.

Whilst 1856 was certainly the catalyst for the book’s creation, there can be no doubt that the material for it had been collected throughout the author’s life. Carroll was a great collector of scraps, creating his stories out of bits and pieces that came to him, influences from various memories and events and recollections of stories told earlier.

The popular picture of Lewis Carroll, and one that has been reinforced by retrospective biographies and speculation, is of an awkward, shy academic permanently enshrined in his Oxford tower. In reality, however, much of Carroll’s life was spent in the north, where he formed some of his happiest memories and which strongly marked his creative output, not just in Alice in Wonderland but throughout his works.

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Born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in 1832, Carroll spent his early childhood in Cheshire, where his father was a country clergyman. Their parsonage – and his father’s income – was small, and the village quiet and isolated; though the family was a close one and his childhood was not unhappy, it was certainly restricted. Lacking the money for schooling, the young Carroll was educated at home.

When he was eleven the family’s fortunes changed. Reverend Dodgson was given a new living, and the whole family moved north to the spacious Rectory at Croft-on-Tees. This is the idyllic period of Carroll’s childhood that he would for ever afterwards yearn back to, characterised by games, imagination, creativity and companionship. He was the third of eleven children, mostly sisters, and delighted in his brood of siblings – the ‘children of the North’, as he referred to them in an early poem. The eldest son, he was a natural leader and entertainer, writing plays and poems, performing conjuring tricks and marionette shows to amuse the family. Carroll was particularly fond of his sisters – the youngest of whom, Henrietta, was eleven years his junior – and his affinity and affection for them was mirrored in the many ‘child-friendships’ he formed during his later life.

Among strangers and grownups the adult Carroll could be stilted and tedious, the stereotypical Oxford don; Virginia Woolf called him ‘prudish, pernickety, pious and jocus’. Amongst his family and his young friends, however, he was witty, impish and fantastical, delighting in nonsense and storytelling. Whenever possible he escaped the strictures of Oxford life and returned to the north, particularly to visit his cousins the Wilcoxes who lived at Whitburn. His attachment to the region was later cemented when his favourite sister Mary, his lifelong confidant and advisor, married Reverend C. S. Collingwood and moved to Southwick Rectory, spending over thirty years on Wearside.

Carroll was fascinated by the history and legends of the region, which fired his creative imagination. ‘Jabberwocky’, which appears in Through the Looking-Glass, was actually from many years earlier; the nonsensical first verse had been written at Croft as a parody of Anglo-Saxon verse, but the rest of the poem was composed at Whitburn during a family game of verse-making. The tale it tells was inspired by the story of the Lambton Worm, one of the most famous and ancient British legends of dragon lore, and combines two popular versions of the myth. The ‘beamish boy’ of ‘Jabberwocky’ refers to the lands at Beamish, which were owned by the Liddells of Ravensworth. Carroll used the epithet again years later in ‘The Hunting of the Snark’, in which a character is addressed as ‘beamish nephew’; during the time of writing it, Carroll was nursing his own nephew and godson Charlie Wilcox, the son of his Whitburn cousins, reinforcing the word’s connection with the north east.

Even much later in his life, the tales and words of the north east continued to inspire Carroll; the heroine of his later books Sylvie and Bruno is named Orme, which comes from the same root of ‘worm’ or ‘wyrm’ as nearby Ormesby, and the northern dialect he heard around him at Whitburn and Southwick resurfaces as the accent of the aptly named Outlanders.

It was also in the north east that Carroll made his first connections with the family who would have perhaps the greatest impact on his life.

The Liddells had originated in the north east; along with families such as the Lambtons and the Bowes, theirs was one of the great historic names of the region. Alice Liddell’s father had been born at Easington, where his father was Rector, and his uncle was the first Baron Ravensworth of Ravensworth Castle near Gateshead. While visiting another branch of the Liddell family, the Williamsons at Whitburn Hall, Carroll met Alice’s cousin Frederika Liddell, whom he described as ‘one of the nicest children I have ever seen’. Frederika was probably his first child-friend, and along with her siblings Carroll spent hours entertaining them with stories, referring to them as ‘my favourite little Liddells’. This was 1855, the summer before he met Alice and her sisters and adopted his famous pen name – and in fact many elements of the fantasy world he wove for them are familiar from this time, from the chaotic games of croquet played with the family at Whitburn Hall to the startling white rabbits Sir Hedworth Williamson bred to fill his grounds as his eyesight waned.

Almost all of Carroll’s working life was spent in landlocked Oxford, and when visiting Sunderland he took every opportunity to walk along