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Glad Company
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18764 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1991 |
1,869 Words |
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Anne Carson Daly
Anne Carson Daly, former professor of English at the
University of Notre Dame, is currently writing a book entitled
Alice and the Existential Questions. |
MORE ANNOTATED ALICE
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
Lewis Carroll, notes by Martin Gardner; illustrated by Peter Newell
New York: Random House
363 pp., $35.00
Alice in Wonderland is, as the French would say, a phenomene. According to Stan Marx, the founder of the Lewis Caroll Society of North America, next to the Bible, it is the most translated and quoted book in the English language. In fact, the adventures of this diminutive Victorian heroine have been recorded in at least 120 languages--including Morse code! Since Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford mathematician writing under the pen name Lewis Carroll, first published Alice in 1865, generations of children and adults have delighted in the exploits of the flustered White Rabbit, the ubiquitously grinning Cheshire Cat, and the decapitation-happy Queen of Hearts. Many of the characters and settings, the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, the Queen of Hearts' transient croquet game, Humpty Dumpty's precarious philosophizing, the antics of Tweedledum and Tweeedledee, and the absurd trial to determine who stole the tarts ("Sentence first--verdict afterwards") have passed into popular culture where they have taken on a life of their own.
In the century since Carroll's death from pneumonia in 1897, Alice in Wonderland has attained the status of a world classic. She and her adventures have been immortalized in ballets, plays, movies, and parodies of every sort. In academic circles, Carroll studies are booming--a development that some irreverent academics have christened the "Alice industry." This interest has not, however, been confined to scholars. No matter how much Carrolliana appears, the public always seems to clamor for more.
Back by popular demand
When Martin Gardner published The Annotated Alice thirty years ago in 1960, it seemed that little could be added to explicate Alice or to enhance enjoyment of her adventures; but growing scholarly and public fascination with Carroll has made a sequel not only desirable but also necessary. In the introduction to More Annotated Alice, Gardner gives ample evidence of ever-increasing interest in Dodson, citing the formation of England's Lewis Carroll Society, the debut of its journal, Jabberwocky (1969); the founding of the Lewis Carroll
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