Alice in Dingleland - The Panto

Given plenty of money and a reliable seat cushion, I am relatively certain that a keen fan could see 365 different community theater productions of "Alice in Wonderland" this year. Amongst the ever-popular homages to the Disney film, it is always nice to hear of a production that takes a more local angle. "Alice In Dingleland" promises just that.


Dingle is a neighborhood of the English city of Liverpool. Liverpudlians, also known as Scousers, have a strong regional identity and an even stronger accent (think early Beatles).

Following on the success of their first pantomime "Cinderella and her American Fella," the Dingle Community Theatre, have created a "scousalized pantomime" version of Alice in Wonderland:

"Alice In Dingleland" follows the journey of ‘posh’ Alice as she is transformed into a true Scouser after following the white rabbit into the Williamson Tunnels.

Using local settings as our inspirations… Dickinson’s Dingle beauty spot, the Tunnels and Princes Park, we have encountered many characters such as the Scouse Mouse, Dave the Knave “I’m innocent, it’s a stitch up”, the militant gardeners, “you’re a name not a number”. The White Rabbit of course, and the double act that is the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, “Mad, Mad I’m fuming!”

"Alice In Dingleland" will be at the Unity Theatre, 1 Hope Place, Liverpool, L1 9BG, United Kingdom on the 16 and 17 February, 2010.

"Down the Rabbit Hole": Juried art exhibition in Bakersfield, California

Central Californian Carrollians and other art lovers should direct their GPS towards Bakersfield, California, for a juried exhibit of art inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice books. The Arts Council of Kern invite members and guests ($5) to the opening tonight (Friday, January 29th, 5:30 to 7:30pm) at the Younger Gallery, 1440 Truxtun Ave., Suite 105, in charming downtown Bakersfield. LCSNA member Tatiana Ianovskaia has had two of her paintings, "Court" (30"x 40", oil,canvas, $1850, ) and "Antipathies" ( 30"x24", acrylic, canvas , $1000 - pictured below and on her website here) chosen by the judge to be included. Also on display is Outside in Wonderland: "Artworks created by the members of the Outside In Visual Arts Workshop, a workshop for artists with developmental disabilities."

Chronological List of the Meetings of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America

Messrs. August A. Imholtz, Jr., and Mark Burstein, bigwigs of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, have prepared a useful digital book of the Chronological List of the Meetings of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, with details about Who Spoke About What and What Else Happened, from the inaugural meeting in Princeton, New Jersey, January 1974, thru the forthcoming April 2010 meeting at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia (that's right! where the Marianne Moore / Lewis Carroll installation by Sue Johnson is, blogged about here.)

The pdf of the Chronological List of the Meetings of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America is available here.

"Mad Hatter Card Party", painting by Leonard Filgate

This is a new painting (acrylic on canvas) by California-based artist Leonard Filgate, one of the creators of Rip Squeak. On his fineartamerica.com page, there are several ways to purchase the piece (and there's also a higher-quality image).

-A Giclée Print on either photo paper or canvas (upwards from $32)

-A 5"-by-7" customizable greeting card from $5.75

For a limited edition signed print ($500 plus shipping), or to purchase the original painting (36"-by-24", for $7,500) contact the artist thru his website filgateart.com.

Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin

I've seen some Alice-themed display tables at various bookstores recently (for instance, in the U.C. San Diego bookstore), and this new book Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin (mentioned in our post below about the USA Today article) is being prominently hawked. Whilst Disney revs up for 3-D Tim Burton spectacular, appealing to the ADD demographic, this new historical novel is marketed squarely at the book-club crowd. Narrated by Alice Hargreaves née Liddell in her octogenarian dotage, she remembers her life using a stylized semicolonoholic phony-Victorian voice:

So yes, I do get tired; tired of pretending to be Alice in Wonderland still, always. Although, it has been no easier being Alice Pleasance Hargreaves. Truly, I wonder; I have always wondered-----

Which is the real Alice, and which pretend?

Oh dear! I'm sounding like one of Mr. Dodgson's nonsense poems now. He was so clever at that sort of thing; much cleverer than I, who never had the patience, not then, not now.

Kudos for using the correct personal pronoun after the conjunction "than", but the result is sounding more British than the British. Apparently the book continues on long past her and her sisters' relationship with the strange, wonderful and affectionate Mr. Dodgson: thru Alice's relationship with Queen Victoria's hemophiliac son Prince Leopold, and into the lives of her own sons (one of whom is named Caryl.) The cover price is $25, available where all handsome new hardcover books are sold.

William Morris Society Calls for Papers

William Morris was a contemporary of Charles Dodgson, and a colleague in his fascination with medieval aesthetics in literature, art and design.

The William Morris Society has recently issued two calls for papers, which Carrollians may find of interest:

Useful & Beautiful: The Transatlantic Arts of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites
Conference at the Univesity of Delaware, Winterthur Museum and Delaware Art Museum
7–9 October 2010

"This conference will focus on the multitude of transatlantic exchanges that involved Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic movements of the late nineteenth century. We will invite papers that explore relationships and influences—whether personal, intellectual, political, or aesthetic—that connect William Morris, his friends, associates, and followers in Britain and Europe with their contemporaries and successors in the Americas..."

Call for Papers (PDF)
Proposals due 15 March 2010

"Morris and the Arts" and "Pre-Raphaleite Use of History"
William Morris Society sessions at the 2011 Modern Language Annual Convention, Los Angeles
5–9 January 2011

On the "Pre-Raphaleite Use of History": "This proposed collaborative session will examine aspects of Victorian historicism, especially neo-medievalism in painting, book design, poetry, romance narrative, translation and other genres. Papers might consider ways in which the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates and successors reshaped the works of Dante, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Froissart, the Icelandic sagas, Malory and other Arthurian sources for a middle-class Victorian audience..."

Call for Papers (website)
Proposals due 20 March 2010

Submission requirements for both events can be found on the William Morris Society website.

Alice Eats Wonderland: A Cookbook

Alice Eats Wonderland, "An Irreverent Annotated Cookbook Adventure," is available now. Authored by by LCSNA members August A. Imholtz, Jr. and Alison Tannenbaum - aka Baumholtz (we like portmanteau names) - the cookbook follows the twelve chapter format of AAIW, but this time Alice gets a bit more to eat than cake and biscuits.

Menu items include Stuffed Dormouse, Jugged Hare and Iguana Tamales, but fear not for your favorite animal characters! (or at least, fear less!), the publisher, Applewood Books, reassures us: "Although many of the characters seem, alas, to be transformed into edible dishes during the adventure, the story has a surprisingly happy ending."

We hear that Alice Eats Wonderland combines excerpts from the original text, scholarly notes and original illustrations with recipes to challenge, intrigue, and possibly upset, the most adventurous gastronome. Has anyone had a chance to sample the book? Has anyone jugged a hare? Please post your reviews and experiences in the comments below!

Alice Eats Wonderland is available at $14.95 per copy, plus shipping, from Applewood Books, 1 River Road, Carlisle, MA, 01741. Phone: 781-271-0055; e-mail: applewood@awb.com

Lewis Carroll Society Meeting with Jasper Fforde

Author Jasper Fforde, best known for his novel The Eyre Affair, and other adventures of the courageous literary detective Thursday Next, will be speaking to the Lewis Carroll Society in London on January 29th. Here is the full announcement:

The Lewis Carroll Society is delighted to announce that best-selling contemporary author Jasper Fforde has agreed to give us a talk on the influence that Lewis Carroll has had on his work.

Jasper’s best known series of highly literate comic novels is set in a parallel world where people can move into and out of books and thus change the events in them. The main function of the heroine of this series is to prevent nefarious alterations being made to classic plots by the villains of the piece, and in this she is aided or obstructed by a variety of fictional characters including several from Carroll’s works (such as the renamed Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat, for example!). These novels abound with jokes and puns and wordplay and literary pastiches – remind you of any celebrated nineteenth century Oxford don at all?

This is expected to be a popular meeting so it is essential that anyone attending books in advance. Please send an email to Shirley Jacobs to confirm availability of places, etc.

Doors open 19:00, talk starts at 19:30.

Visit the Lewis Carroll Society Events webpage for booking information.

2011 Calender with Iassen Ghiuselev's new Looking-Glass Illustrations

Iassen Ghiuselev's beautiful illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland were published by Simply Read Books in 2003 & will be re-issued in March 2010. (For obvious reasons, are we expecting a lot of timely reissues?) Ghiuselev creates a large Escher-esque poster from which smaller bits are extracted for the individual pages of the book. His Through the Looking-Glass, pictured above, is not yet released, but a 2011 Calender (list price $13.95) is now available for pre-order by Simply Read. (There was a similar such thing with his AAIW in 2007, now hard to find.)

Alice books plugged in Today's USA Today

A handful of new Alice books, in particular, and the revival of Alice in general, was written about by Craig Wilson in today's USA Today. They even made an online quiz (pop-culture heavy), How well do you know 'Alice in Wonderland'? - although I disagreed with a couple of the answers. Here's the books they plug, ending with a quote by Mark Richards:

•Alice I Have Been: A Novel by Melanie Benjamin (Delacorte, $25), out today. "I saw a photo of Alice Liddell (the model for the Alice character) taken by Charles Dodgson, and it made me realize that this was a lot more than just a children's story," says Benjamin, who built her novel around Alice's life after her childhood fame. "She was unflappable, not a typical Victorian. And she survived it all, just like Alice survived it all in the books. She was never beaten down."

•The Mystery of Lewis Carroll by Jenny Woolf (St. Martin's Press, $27.99), out Feb. 2. Woolf sheds more light on the mysterious Dodgson in this new biography, examining everything from his relationship with Alice and her older sister to his controversial photographing of nude young girls. "The more closely Lewis Carroll is studied, the more he seems to slide quietly away," Woolf writes.

•A new single-volume paperback edition of Carroll's two classic Alice stories ($8.95). Oxford World's Classics has reissued Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872) with a new introduction by Peter Hunt, an expert in children's literature. Oxford Children's Classics released a new hardcover of Alice's Adventure in Wonderland in April ($9.95).

•The Disney movie Alice in Wonderland, combining live action and animation. Alice is now 19, fleeing a proposed marriage and, yes, she follows a white rabbit into a hole, entering Wonderland once again. Depp is the Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter plays the Queen of Hearts, and Mia Wasikowska is Alice. Release date: March 5.

Why is it Alice's time again?

"The timeless appeal of the Alice books lies not only in their wonderfully imaginative qualities but, perhaps more important, in the way they touch our emotions," says Mark Richards, chairman of the Lewis Carroll Society in London.

That answer seemed to be to a slightly different question. Thank you, Jenny Woolf, for sending us this article.