Robert Douglas-Fairhurst: The Story of Alice

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst: The Story of Alice

Following his acclaimed life 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 Drawing on numerous unpublished sources, he examines in detail the peculiar friendship between the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the child for whom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 analyses how this relationship stirred Carroll’s imagination and influenced the creation of Wonderland. It also explains why Alice in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), took on an unstoppable cultural momentum in the Victorian era and why, a century and a half later, they continue to enthral and delight readers of all ages.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a biographer and critic who is a Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the author of Becoming Dickens (Harvard UP, 2011), which was awarded the 2011 Duff Cooper Prize, and Victorian Afterlives (OUP, 2002), and has also produced editions of Dickens’s Christmas stories, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies for Oxford World’s Classics. He writes regularly for publications including the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, TLS, Art Newspaper and New Statesman. Radio and television appearances include Start the Week and The Culture Show, and he has also acted as the historical consultant on BBC productions of Jane Eyre, Emma and Great Expectations.