In the second edition of the Norton Critical Edition of the Alice books, I have again included matter that suggests the important contexts out of which Lewis Carroll's best-known, and best, books were written. Principally, the Alice books, and even the mysteriously disturbing The Hunting of the Snark, are stories told to and written for children. Carroll mocked the conventions of nineteenth-century children's writing, and his books helped to change them. But for those very reasons, much of his playfulness depends for its point and effect on a familiarity with writing for children like that which Carroll's contemporaries, adults as well as children, would have broughtto the reading and hearing of these stories. Carroll also appropriated some of the practices of popular comic entertainments of his time....
This Norton Critical Edition reprints the 1897 editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and the 1876 edition of The Hunting of the Snark.New to the Second Edition is "The Wasp in a Wig," a recently discovered episode Carroll deleted from Through the Looking-Glass, but which fits into the story in interesting ways. Each text is accompanied by ample explanatory notes.
"Backgrounds" reprints new selections from recent biographies of Carroll and from recent editions of his diaries and letters.Our understanding of and appreciation for Carroll’s life and literature are deepened by new contributions from Anne Clark, Tony Beale, E. M. Rowell, and, most revealingly, Carroll himself.
"Criticism" retains seven seminal critiques from the First Edition while adding four important recent essays by Nina Auerbach, Roger Henkle, Robert Polhemus, and Donald Rackin.
A revised and updated Selected Bibliography is also included.
Preface
Texts
Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland
Through the Looking-Glass
The Wasp in a Wig
The Hunting of the Snark
Backgrounds
EARLY LIFE
Derek Hudson, [Parents and Childhood]
Anne Clark, [School]
Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, [Oxford]
Lewis Carroll, From the Letters [1855]
From the Diaries [1855–56]
Early Poems
She’s All My Fancy Painted Him
Solitude
Upon the Lonely Moor
Derek Hudson, [Ordination
THE ALICE BOOKS
Derek Hudson, [Child Friends]
Lewis Carroll, From the Diaries [1856–63]
From Alice’s Adventures Under Ground
Alice and Caryl Hargreaves, Alice’s Recollections of Carrollian Days
Lewis Carroll, From the Diaries [1863–65]
From Alice on the Stage
LATER LIFE
Helmut Gernsheim, Lewis Carroll-Photographer
Lewis Carroll, Letters to Children
From the Diaries [1868–71]
Letter to Mrs. A.L. Mayhew
Tony Beale, C.L. Dodgson: Mathematician
Derek Hudson, [Rooms at Christ Church]
Anne Clark, [Friendships with Women]
E.M. Rowell, [To Me He Was Mr. Dodgson]
Isa Bowman, [A Visit to Christ Church]
Lewis Carroll, From the Diaries [1879–85]
Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, [An Old Bachelor]
Essays in Criticism
Gillian Avery, Fairy Tales with a Purpose
Fairy Tales for Pleasur
Peter Coveney, Escape
Nina Auerbach, Alice in Wonderland: A Curious Child
William Empson, The Child as Swain
Roger Henkle, Comedy from Inside
Robert Polhemus, The Comedy of Regression
Play, Nonsense, and Games: Comic Diversion
A.L. Taylor, [Chess and Theology in the Alice Books]
Elizabeth Sewell, The Balance of Brillig
Michael Holquist, What Is a Boojum? Nonsense and Modernism
Donald Rackin, Blessed Rage: Lewis Carroll and the Modern Quest for Order
Selected Biblioraphy