The Alice Companion: A Guide To Lewis Carroll's Alice Books

The Alice Companion is for anyone with an interest in Lewis Carroll and his Alice stories - be they armchair readers, librarians or students of the nineteenth century and its children's literature. It is a commentary on the people and places that make up Carroll's and Alice Liddell's world in mid-nineteenth century Oxford. The Alice Companion is also a source-book to the extensive existing literature concerned with this period in Carroll's life in all its critical, linguistic, biographical and bibliographical aspects. Indexed with its own extensive bibliography, the Companion is designed to provide access to Alice in all her disguises - in film, on the stage, as seen by different illustrators and translators, and as interpreted in different countries.

""The Alice Companion" presents copious evidence, from firm facts to the slightest of suppositions, which might serve as skeleton keys for the reader eager to pick those cryptic works, revealing what is to be Found There."
a"Roy Porter"

One of the most elusive and enigmatic writers of the Victorian era, Lewis Carroll has also proven one of the most durable writers of his age, consistently popular with children and adults alike. "The Alice Companion" opens a window into the mind of Carroll and his muse, Alice Liddell, as they created the mystical, turbulent, and clever world described in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone provide valuable insights into the life and works of Carroll, adding a crucial, new dimension to our knowledge of Alice's celebrated phantasmagoric wonderland. Unraveling secretive jokes in the Alice stories and their derivations from nineteenth-century Oxford life or uncovering the real life models for such figures as the Dormouse, the Ugly Duchess, and the White Rabbit, the book also provides access to Alice in all her disguises: in film, on the stage, as seen by various illustrators, and as interpreted in different countries. Filled with critical, linguistic, biographical, and bibliographical information, "The Alice Companion" will prove an indispensable reference on this renowned surrealist writer.