Page 111 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 111/206
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll): Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Alice in Wonderland) 1865 + John Tenniel: Alice in the Rabbit’s House + Dodgson: Alice Liddell as a beggar girl (1858)
Dodgson was an accomplished amateur photographer and a professional mathematician and logician before he wrote his signature Alice in Wonderland, which embodies many aspects of these interests in a form of a ‘literary nonsense’ aimed at children. The book was developed from the verbal stories he told the Liddell sisters (Alice and Lorina) over several long summer afternoon boating trips near Oxford, where Dodgson held a lectureship in mathematics. It was reading Martin Gardner’s wonderful The Annotated Alice (1960) that introduced me to the range and depth of the infiltration of mathematical and logical thinking in Alice. And I had always admired the equally signature style of John Tenniel’s illustrations - those pen and ink drawings that became the wood-engravings printed in the first Alice edition. Here was a wonderful blend of a realistic drawing style fuzed with fantasy and surrealism - pictures that not only illustrated the text, but amplified it. Later I discovered more about Dodgson, how he had visited my home village of Freshwater, Isle of Wight several times, seeking the friendship of Alfred Tennyson and the society of fellow photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and other members of the loose-knit Freshwater Circle lampooned by Virginia Woolf.
Of course this is the most successful children’s story of all time, but it was part of a tradition of children’s literature that had become commercially important in the 19th century, with increased literacy, and a growing realisation of the importance of early-years education (informed especially by the work of Frederick Froebel (Kindergarten Education 1826). Other famous works for children at this time included The Princess and the Goblin by George Macdonald (1858), and Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1878); Beatrix Potter: The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) and Kate Greenaway: Pictures & Rhymes for Children (1879).