Alice in Wonderland Tea

For Christmas my best friend's children gave me a wonderful surprise:

They found the tea during a recent trip to Disney World and found the teapot and cup online. I absolutely love them. This, the 2013 Scarlett O'Hara ornament from Hallmark, a gift card to purchase books and a book by a distant cousin of mine published posthumously by his wife (I'll blog about it later) were my literary Christmas gifts this year.

What were yours?

Recent Read: The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

My alma mater, Meredith College, has many wonderful traditions, and one of my favorite of those that happens every four years was recently. Eighty-eight years ago the campus was quarantined and to keep the students entertained, the professors got together to put on the play, Alice in Wonderland. The idea since has been for the professors to perform the play again once in each college generation. I saw it my junior year, missed it in 2008 and was determined to make the 2012 performance. I was able to make it happen, sit with friends and former coworkers and bring my five year-old niece with me, who loved it.

I've always loved the Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, both by Lewis Carroll, and listened to them both on my iPod last year for the first time in a while. To celebrate I read a book I bought used from Better World Books several months ago: The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Discovering the Whimsical, Thoughtful, and Sometimes Lonely Man Who Created Alice in Wonderland by Jenny Woolf. Reading it to coincide with seeing the play seemed ideal. The book came out last year.

On my trip to London in 2010 I saw Carroll's manuscript that later became Alice in Wonderland called Alice's Adventures Underground. It was illustrated and one of my favorite things I saw in that gallery filled with wonderful manuscripts. My friend from the trip and I commented then about Carroll's questionable reputation when it came to his relationship with young girls. This idea has been rumor for years, and according to Woolf's book, it's due to the fact that we no longer consider Victorian ideals to be part of our lives. Yes, things change. So, I'm glad to have read The Mystery of Lewis Carroll so I can get a clearer picture of this interesting author and find out more about what has been skewed over the years.

For starters, Woolf maintains that we can't, as citizens of the 21st century, judge Carroll according to the rules that govern our society; we must judge him according to the rules of the time in which he lived. I realized as I read the book that I don't think I've really done much reading before on Carroll's life, so I'm glad my first read about him appears to be balanced and well-researched. Woolf's book is different from other accounts of Carroll's life out there in that she was able to explore Carroll's financial records, something that's never been analyzed before. She also considered a letter that lives at the University of Colorado-Boulder that sheds light on one of his personal relationships.

I enjoyed this book, and for a fresh take on Carroll's life, I'd recommend the book to anyone who loves Alice in Wonderland too.

Westminster Abbey

While in London, I got to visit Westminster Abbey twice - once for a tour, and one for a service. Both were wonderful. If you haven't been to Westminster, anything I told you about its magnificence still wouldn't do it justice, so just take my word for it. Of particular interest to me here was the Poets' Corner, where over 100 writers are buried and/or celebrated. I was most interested in seeing the Williams (Shakespeare, Blake and Wordsworth), Chaucer, Burns, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Austen, Byron, Dickens, Lewis Carroll, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Henry James. It was really overwhelming to see so many important literary contributors all mentioned together. Luckily, I had been able to study up on everything before my visit, thanks to a book Teresa bought for me on the Poets' Corner during her London trip three years ago. What fun!  

Rare Books and Manuscripts

Yesterday I finished my third of three books about books (you can see my thoughts on the first two here and here), titled simply, Books by Larry McMurtry. I was hoping it would be much like one of these recent reads, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee. Instead, it covered decades of McMurtry's life as book scout and seller of rare and valuable books. It was interesting enough, though he dropped only a few names I recognized and many, many I didn't. However, I really enjoyed hearing about all the rare books he's found over the years in basements, on bookshelves of both regular people and the rich and famous, and the ones he's sold himself and been paid a pretty penny for.

While I was in London, I, too, got a taste of rare books and manuscripts by visiting the British Library. This facility houses 14 million books, 920,000 magazines and journals, 58 million patents and three million sound recordings, according to their website, which you can visit here. I knew before I went that I'd see a Gutenberg Bible, several versions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and some other things. I wasn't prepared, though, for feeling overwhelmed by seeing so many world-changing works all housed in one place. It was so much that I knew I'd forget a lot of it, so I started jotting down notes while I was there. Here's a sampling of what I saw/heard:

• A recording of James Joyce reading from Finnegan's Wake
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• Jane Austen's third volume of a journal she wrote from age 12 to 17 with writings composed for her family's enjoyment

• Jane Austen's writing desk, given to her by her father. It was kind of like a lap desk that held supplies in compartments.

• Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre manuscript

• A notebook containing writings by Virginia Woolf that she used to write Mrs. Dalloway

• Original sheet music by Handel for Messiah and the Wedding March he created for A Midsummer Night's Dream (which just so happens to be my favorite Shakespeare play, and the musical selection I chose to walk out of the church to with my new husband in 2007 at our wedding)

• The beginnings of Beatles songs scribbled on napkins, paper scraps and other things that eventually became hit songs

• Notebooks from Leonardo Da Vinci

• The Magna Carta

• A letter from Charles Darwin to a friend which became the basis for Origin of Species

• A lecture draft written by Sigmund Freud

• A version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland illustrated by Salvador Dali

• Shakespeare's first folio, which was open to Henry VI Part I

And that's just a sampling of all that is there and on display. It was truly amazing to see. Of course there's no picture taking on the inside, but here is the library from the outside:

London

All writing, editing, blogging, networking, freelancing and other professional endeavors came to a halt last week as I visited London for the first time with a friend. I hope you enjoyed Lori's entries during my time off.

As I do with many of my travels, I read and watched related movies ahead of my trip that relate to London in preparation. I soaked up everything I could and read a lot while I was there, so it's no surprise to me that the list of "homework" I've given myself to do now that I'm back in the States is lengthy.

Before I went, I read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and watched Tim Burton's recent movie version (I recently blogged about that here). I listened to Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest on my iPod. I watched the Hugh Grant/Emma Thompson/Kate Winslet movie version of Sense and Sensibility. I watched Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law's version of Sherlock Holmes that came out a couple years ago. I watched Great Expectations starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke (I don't recommend it). I watched PBS' recent productions of Emma and Northanger Abbey. So, as you can see, I went feeling prepared to experience Literary London.

I picked up about 10 books while I was there, found new subjects to read about, got book recommendations from my travel buddy, and listed out additional books and movies I hadn't gotten to before the trip, but that I intend to watch and read now that I'm back.

In the coming weeks I'll be blogging about my trip as it relates to literature, and reporting on my related reading. Keep checking back for more!

Alice in Wonderland

I’ve just recently finished listening to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and followed those up by watching Tim Burton’s recent film, Alice in Wonderland.

I went to Meredith College for undergrad, and as part of a long-standing tradition, once every four years, faculty and staff members put on the Alice in Wonderland production for students. That was one of my favorite things from college. As I listened to the stories on my iPod recently, I could remember exactly which professor played which part in the 2000 production, so that made my reread even more fun.

I’ve always loved both of the stories, mostly because of the memorable lines that are complete nonsense.

Some of my favorites:

Alice in Wonderland

Alice: "Curiouser and curiouser!"
The Cat: "We're all mad here."
The Queen: "Off with her head!"
The Queen: "Sentence first -- verdict afterwards."
Alice: "You're nothing but a pack of cards!"

My very favorite, though, is from Through the Looking Glass:

Alice laughed, "There's no use trying," she said, "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

I have to confess that though I enjoyed the movie version, I didn’t much “get” it. I was about three quarters of the way through before I realized why Alice was about 20 years old. Because the whole movie was like a sequel to the real Alice in Wonderland story. Wonder why they didn’t call the movie something else?

Test Your Knowledge of Alice in Wonderland

USA Today has an Alice in Wonderland quiz online. I didn't do nearly as well as I thought I would!

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2010-01-12-alice-wonderland-quiz_N.htm?csp=books