Book review: “Alice’s Oxford – People and Places that Inspired Wonderland”

I am grateful to the publisher, Bodleian Library Publishing, for sending me a review copy so I can give you my honest opinion about this book by Peter Hunt!

According to the press release, the author of this book “combines historical insight with a guided tour of the city, revealing both well-known and lesser-known connections to the Alice books. From the hatters and marmalade makers on the High Street to the dodo displayed at the Museum of Natural History, Oxford’s streets, colleges, and landmark are woven into the fabric of Wonderland. […] The result is a unique blend of travel guide, history, and local culture – perfect for both Alice enthusiasts and those curious about Oxford’s rich literary heritage.”
The author tells us that “[m]any books about the ‘Alice’ books begin with the texts and extrapolate from them possible references to places and people in the real world; this book begins with the places, and traces their association with Dodgson, Carroll and both the Alices – real and fictional.”

So this is not a book that tries to explain the ‘Alice’ books. Instead, it looks at places, buildings, and people from the Oxford of Dodgson’s time, discusses how Dodgson and Alice were familiar or involved with them, and how they may have been an inspiration for Dodgson’s tales to amuse Alice with things she would recognise.

The book is quite small (including the text, which makes it somewhat hard to read), contains 120 sturdy pages bound in a hardback cover, is illustrated with several Tenniel illustrations that have partly been colored, and also contains a couple of old Oxford maps. Many fragments from the ‘Alice’ books are used to supplement the text when relations to the books are discussed (and also sometimes when there isn’t an obvious relation to it).

The first 14 pages are in a section called ‘About this book’, which is a bit misleading, as they are not just an introduction to Hunt’s book, but also tell the reader something about Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson, Alice Liddell, John Tenniel, and the original ‘Alice’ books.
After this introduction, sections about ‘The city’, ‘Christ Church’ and ‘The River’ follow. These sections are divided into chapters that tell us about the relationship between a specific place or building in Oxford (like the Oxford Botanic Garden, Tom Quad, and Folly Bridge) and Charles Dodgson, Alice, or the original tales.

In the ‘About’ section, Hunt informs us that Dodgson most certainly satirised his fellow academics in his tales, but (somewhat surprisingly) cautions us to relate actual places to fictional events: if the real Alice saw things in real life that also appear in the books, it does not automatically mean Dodgson had this in mind when writing the story. It is easy to suggest connections, but it is very hard to find proof to sustain them. According to Hunt, his book is “leaning towards the facts, but not neglecting things that might be true – especially if it would be whimsical if they were.”

This sounds promising, but in practice, it makes the book a bit of a mishmash of facts and speculations, and it is hard to distinguish between them. In several cases, Hunt expresses his personal doubts about the connections he describes, but in other cases, unsubstantiated conclusions are drawn and rather doubtful theories seem to be presented as facts, without any reference to their sources, making it unclear if Hunt is repeating someone else’s ideas or presenting his own. (Only 22 sources are mentioned in the notes in the back, while many more connections and theories are described. In my review of Hunt’s earlier book, “The Making of Lewis Carroll’s Alice – and the Invention of Wonderland“, I uttered similar criticism.)

An example of a doubtful connection is the claim that the garden Alice sees through the door in the hallway, is ‘Lily House’ in the Oxford Botanic Garden, as it can be seen in the background of the illustration of the Queen of Hearts pointing at Alice. However, many huge greenhouses of this sort were built in Victorian times and this specific glass dome does not resemble the Water Lily House on any old picture I can find of it. Similarly, Hunt writes that “there is more than a passing resemblance” between the tower in the background of Tenniel’s illustration of the Lion and the Unicorn and the tower of St. Mary’s Church, and that the puppy in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland resembles Charles Darwin. Again, I don’t see it.
He also tells us that a line in a satirical poem about Dean and Mrs. Liddell (“She is the Broad, I am the High”) refers to Oxford’s High Street and Broad Street, while there is no evidence for this – it may as well refer to High Church and Broad Church, or something other ‘broad’ versus ‘high’.
And I feel that the suggestion that Dodgson was blackmailed to pay Mrs. Prickett’s husband to keep quiet about Dodgson’s former relationship with his wife, a suggestion that is solely based on an untraced payment in his bank account and relies on the assumption of a misspelling of a name, really goes too far. I would not call this ‘a thing that might be true’ and therefore would be ‘whimsical’ to include!

The book however does a good job when it comes to listing more fact-based and generally accepted links between the ‘Alice’ books and Oxford, as well as providing interesting anecdotes about Dodgson, Alice and dean Liddell, not necessarily directly related to the tales. The reader learns among others about the existence of a real treacle well, the shop that inspired the Old Sheep’s shop, and the river that Dodgson and the Liddell sisters made boat trips on.

As the book is divided into chapters connected to physical Oxford locations, but also deals with people and events, not everything seems to fit the assigned chapter. For example, the blackmail suggestion is placed under ‘The Old Bank’ that is part of High Street, but is really about a connection between Dodgson and Miss/Mrs. Prickett. And because several non-Oxford facts and speculations, like an explanation of the link between a poem in Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there and Tennyson’s Maud, are included as well, this makes the book feel a bit less focused and structured than it appears to be at first glance.

All in all, I would say it is an interesting, easy to read book about the connections between Oxford places (and people) and Dodgson’s ‘Alice’ books for people who are not yet very knowledgeable about the background of those stories. But it needs to be read with a bit of scepticism (as “I say what I mean” is obviously not the same as “I mean what I say”).
And I would not describe the book as a ‘guided tour’. I had expected the book to include more drawings and old photographs of the Oxford buildings and places it discusses, instead of so many Tenniel illustrations. This would have helped make the book feel to be as much about Oxford as about the ‘Alice’ books and the people behind it, but now it leans towards the latter. The inclusion of such images could also have better supported several claims about connections, for example those between buildings and book illustrations.

You can currently pre-order the book, for example from Amazon.com for $20 / or from Amazon.co.uk for £12.99.