150 Years of Wonderland!

by Cuppa Tea
6th March 2015

One hundred and fifty years of Alice's adventures in Wonderland, and she's still going strong having never been out of print, and still more film adaptions on the way. This iconic and bizarre story has inspired countless people and pursuits. Tell me, has Wonderland ever inspired you? and how?

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And that doesn't include the scholarly studies [non-fiction]=

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Jimmy
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Jimmy Hollis i Dickson
08/03/2015

On that point of being famous without ever having actually done anything outstanding, the very fact that wikipedia has a 2,635-word entry on her is rather amazing. I found the following particularly interesting:

Alice Liddell in other works

Several later writers have written fictional accounts of Liddell:

• Liddell is the main character of Melanie Benjamin's novel Alice I Have Been, a fictional account of Alice's life from childhood through old age, focusing on her relationship with Lewis Carroll and the impact that Alice's Adventures Under Ground had on her.[17]

• She is one of the main characters of the Riverworld series of books by Philip José Farmer.

• She plays a small but critical role in Lewis Padgett's short story "Mimsy Were The Borogoves".

• Canadian poet Stephanie Bolster wrote a collection of poems, White Stone, based on her.

• Katie Roiphe has written a fictional (claimed to be based on fact) account of the relationship between Alice and Carroll, titled Still She Haunts Me.

• The 1985 movie Dreamchild deals with her trip to America for the Columbia University presentation described above; through a series of flashbacks, it promotes the popular assumption that Dodgson was romantically attracted to Alice.

• Frank Beddor wrote The Looking Glass Wars, which reimagines the Alice in Wonderland story and includes real-life characters such as the Liddells and Prince Leopold.

• Liddell and Dodgson are used as protagonists in Bryan Talbot's 2007 graphic novel Alice in Sunderland to relay the history and myths of the area.[18]

• The 2008 opera by Alan John and Andrew Upton Through the Looking Glass covers both the fictional Alice and Liddell.

• The Nintendo DS game "A Witch's Tale" makes reference to Alice creating the different kingdoms the main character named Liddell travels through with her voodoo cat doll named Dyna.

• Peter and Alice, John Logan's play in 2013, features the encounter of Alice Liddell Hargreaves and Peter Llewelyn Davies, the boy who inspired the legendary Peter Pan character.

• In the 2007 film The Last Mimzy the children find a picture of Alice Liddell with a stuffed rabbit resembling the eponymous Mimzy, alluding to her having received one.

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Jimmy Hollis i Dickson
08/03/2015

Alice Liddell outlived Carroll / Dodgson by nearly 37 years. (She died at 82.) I have often wondered what it must have been like for her, growing older, never achieving anything of real note in her own life, yet internationally known [ask any cultured - British - person: "What was the surname of the real-life Alice?", and chances are good that you'll get the right answer] as the inspiration for perhaps the most famous character of all time in children's literature, having surely read his poems of how she still haunted him. Did she ever try to get in touch before he died? According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Liddell :

"After her husband's death in 1926, the cost of maintaining their home, Cuffnells, was such that she deemed it necessary to sell her copy of Alice's Adventures Under Ground (Lewis Carroll's earlier title for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)."

Do I need to write that, personally, I would have sold the house to keep the book?

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Jimmy
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Jimmy Hollis i Dickson
08/03/2015