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Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone. The Red King's Dream, or Lewis Carroll in Wonderland. London: Pimlico, 1996.
_____. The Alice Companion: A Guide to Lewis Carroll's Alice Books. London: Macmillan, 1998.
Stephanie Lovett Stoffel. Lewis Carroll and Alice: New Horizons. London: Thames & Hudson, 1997.
Am I a deep philosopher or a great genius? I think neither. What talents I have I desire to devote to His Service and may he purify me and take away my pride and selfishness. Oh that I might hear, "Well done, good and faithful servant."
-Lewis Carroll's private journal, 7 January 1856
One day, while teaching Alice in Wonderland out of the Griffith and Frey anthology, I felt like I was spinning and spinning through that rabbit hole so often identified as the vagina dentata. No, I wasn't caught, but then my being female must have had something to do with it. I just felt that I had come out on the other side of the world. I found myself telling my students that Alice's version of "I am old Father William" was a subversion of the classic British educational system, that Alice was going through not just an adolescent questioning but a questioning of the politics of the Victorian educational system, that her journey along the river, all on a summer's day, was a period of questioning of her lessons, of being on time, of wearing white gloves, of enduring prim and proper tea parties and endless croquet games, and a questioning of where she belonged in this hierarchy of Englishness and Englishism and whether she belonged there at all. But we know that little prim but coquettish Miss Alice Liddell knew she wanted to be not only English, but from reading Carroll's diaries, that her mother harbored a secret desire to see her married to Leopold, the fourth son of Queen Victoria, that paragon of empire herself. So who was revolting against being colonized? Miss Alice, or the creator of the fictional Alice, Lewis Carroll?
Here is where the wonderful new book by Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone, The Red King's Dream, comes in. It gives us an indepth insight into Lewis Carroll's politics. I happened on the book by chance. In pursuit...