Monkey's Blog - with a little help from Alice

About Alice

OK then Alice, you can stop going on about being ignored. Here's a post all about you.

When she was a little girl, her father (a lovely Dad, as you can see) would read to her from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. She asked to hear it so often, she can still recite the first page off by heart!

She just loved all the weird logical jokes and philosophical conundrums, as when Alice in the Sheep's shop says, "I should like to look all round me..." and the Sheep replies, "You may look in front of you, and on both sides, if you like, but you can't look all round you - unless you've got eyes at the back of your head." Another part that appealed to her sense of the surreal was where Tweedledee tells her she's just "a sort of thing" in the Red King's dream, and if he woke up, she'd "go out - bang! - just like a candle!"

(Vera adds here that this must be where they got the idea for that amazing film Inception, which Mark Kermode, her favourite reviewer, said "proves really expensive movies don't have to be stupid to be successful.")

No wonder our Alice seriously studied Philosophy at university when she grew up.

Her favourite character in the Looking Glass book was the White Knight, who thought up amazingly bizarre inventions, but was terribly impractical and prone to falling off his horse.

Of course she strongly identified with her namesake. Especially so when she was a bit older and discovered that she actually looked rather like the real Alice who had her photograph taken by Charles Dodgson (the real Lewis Carroll). Her own father took the photo on the left when her family was on holiday by the sea-side.

Dodgson (1832 - 1898) took many photographs of the children of famous people in his lifetime.

There is a lovely film, Dreamchild, about Alice Liddell recalling, as an old woman, her relationship with Dodgson and the characters from the Alice books. Sometimes she interacts with the characters in Wonderland as young Alice, and sometimes as a confused old Mrs Liddell. It's rather hard to obtain if you live in the UK, though our Alice put it on her wish list and was given a copy. The gift giver said they found it on eBay.