The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland

· Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Shaun Grindell
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15 hr 51 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook

Following his acclaimed biography of Dickens, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst illuminates the tangled history of two lives and two books. Drawing on numerous unpublished sources, he examines in detail the peculiar friendship between the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the child for whom he invented the Alice stories, and analyzes how this relationship stirred Carroll's imagination and influenced the creation of Wonderland.



The Story of Alice reveals Carroll as both an innovator and a stodgy traditionalist, entrenched in habits and routines. He had a keen double interest in keeping things moving and keeping them just as they are. (In Looking-Glass Land, Alice must run faster and faster just to stay in one place.) Tracing the development of the Alice books from their inception in 1862 to Liddell's death in 1934, Douglas-Fairhurst also provides a keyhole through which to observe a larger, shifting cultural landscape: the birth of photography, changing definitions of childhood, murky questions about sex and sexuality, and the relationship between Carroll's books and other works of Victorian literature.
Following his acclaimed biography of Dickens, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst illuminates the tangled history of two lives and two books. Drawing on numerous unpublished sources, he examines in detail the peculiar friendship between the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Lidd...

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About the author

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a professor of English literature at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Magdalen College. His biography Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist won the Duff Cooper Prize.

Born and raised in Southampton, England, Shaun Grindell is an accomplished actor who trained at the Calland School of Speech and Drama and the Lee Strasberg Actors Institute in London. An AudioFile Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator, Shaun has narrated many titles in different genres.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a professor of English literature at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Magdalen College. His biography Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist won the Duff Cooper Prize. Born and raised in Southampton, England, Shaun Grindell is an accomplished actor who t...

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