Oxford, England may have
recently gone crazy for Harry Potter, but another literary figure connected
with this charming college town has a much longer pedigree. It was back in 1865
that an Oxford mathematician named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson published, under
the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, a small book called Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland. The story of a little girl named Alice who slips down a
rabbit-hole and meets a number of outlandish creatures (a caterpillar smoking a
hookah, a totally mad Hatter, the dangerous Queen of Hearts) evolved out of the
tales he told three little girls as they rowed up the River Isis from Oxford to
the village of Godstow, five miles away. The girls were the daughters of Henry
Liddell, dean of Oxford’s Christ Church College. (There were ten little
Liddells in all, of whom ten-year-old Alice was the fourth.) After the boat trip,
Alice begged Dodgson to write down the marvelous yarn he’d spun, He borrowed
her name for his heroine, and dedicated the published book to her.
Today Dodgson and Alice
Liddell are honored by Christ Church College with a special stained glass
“Alice window.” It can be found high on the wall of the formal dining hall that
was once the seat of Parliament during England’s seventeenth-century Civil War.
At the center of one panel is a portrait of the actual Alice. Surprise! Instead
of the long, straggly blonde hair of
Tenniel’s famous illustrations, she wears a neat brown bob. Other panels include
memorable images of familiar “Alice” characters. One is the White Rabbit,
clutching his pocket watch. Legend has it that this rabbit, forever anxious
about being on time for some very important date, is Dodgson’s comic portrait
of Alice’s own father, who was known to be continually checking his timepiece.
.
There’s one more Oxford place
that provides a link to Alice in Wonderland. The venerable Oxford Museum
of Natural History, founded in the Victorian era, contains the world’s
best-preserved remains of the long-extinct dodo. There’s not much to see,
merely the head and foot of a single bird. But the museum also displays a 1651
painting of a dodo by a Flemish artist, and it’s probable that Dodgson, a
frequent museum visitor, used this as the basis for his wonderland dodo. Today display cases honor
Alice as well as the dodo, showing off a taxidermied dormouse and even providing
a stuffed white rabbit with his own tiny pocket watch.
It goes without saying that
Hollywood has always loved the Alice stories. Back in 1933, Paramount Pictures
introduced an elaborate black & white version, featuring such stars as Gary
Cooper as the White Knight, Edna May Oliver as the Red Queen, Cary Grant as the
Mock Turtle, and W.C. Fields as Humpty-Dumpty. Disney’s inevitable animated version,
from 1951, of course favored the sweet over the scary side of the story,
emphasizing how it takes place (in the words of one of the film’s songs) all on
a golden afternoon. In 2010, director
Tim Burton took the opposite tack. Updating Alice into a nineteen-year-old (Mia
Wasikowska) on the brink of marriage to a dunce of a nobleman, he returns her
to a phantasmagoric 3-D Wonderland where she must join forces with an outrageous
Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) to defeat the villainous Red Queen (an eye-popping
Helena Bonham Carter)and her Jabberwocky, thus returning the White Queen (Anne
Hathaway) to her throne. I admit I’ve
only seen the trailer for this film, but that was enough to steer me away from Burton’s
hectic, exhausting take on what Lewis Carroll wrought on a golden afternoon in
Oxfordshire. 
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| Alice is in the top left panel |
