The Adventures of Alice: The Stories Behind the Stories

by Mavis Batey

A companion to the Alice stories - how they came to be written down, the events and personalities which influenced Carroll, his relationship with Alice Liddell (the original Alice), the Oxford background, Carroll's dealings with Tenniel (the illustrator) and with Macmillan, who published the books.

80 pages, Paperback

First published August 23, 1991

About the author

Mavis Lilian Batey, MBE (née Lever; 5 May 1921 – 12 November 2013), was a British code-breaker during World War II. She was one of the leading female codebreakers at Bletchley Park.

She later became a historian of gardening, who campaigned to save historic parks and gardens, and an author. Batey was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal in 1985, and made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1987, in both cases for her work on the conservation of gardens.

source: Amazon

Reviews

[Scribe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Curious little book. Only 100 pages or so, I read it easily in a couple of evenings. On one hand a fairly dry account of Lewis Carroll's environment and the entries of his diary when he met up with Alice Liddell - it becomes clear that the strange tales in the Alice stories mirror the fairly strange lives of a very well-connected family in Victorian Oxford.
On the other hand it highlights Lewis Carroll's fanciful mind, and his love of spinning wonder from everyday life, and sharing it. On this level, it's a fascinating book and almost made 4 stars.

Favourite things learnt were that Alice's birthday was 4th May, and that Carroll taught symbolic logic to women and girls as he thought it "would train them to think independently and analytically to safeguard them from false statements made by politicians and what we now call the media."

Lovely book to read if you're a big fan of the stories.