Alice's Evidence: Examining the Cultural Afterlife of Lewis Carroll in 1932

Abstract

In the context of recent work on Charles Lutwidge Dodgson/Lewis Carroll, this paper argues that, given the scarcity of new archival information on the author and his life, the cultural ‘afterlife’ of Carroll and his books, such as Alice in Wonderland, provides a rich alternative avenue for scholarly research. It focuses on the 1932 centenary of Lewis Carroll's birth, which marks a key transition point in cultural discourses around the author and Alice. While the Alice books had, by 1932, been incorporated into a society very different from the 1860s Britain in which they were first published, they were also subject to conservative notions of authenticity and fidelity to the original. Carroll was already considered in terms of literary ‘immortality’, and his work associated with a nostalgic past, yet he also remained within living memory, while ‘the real Alice’, Mrs Hargreaves, was still alive, and feted as one of the text's cultural curators. Both Carroll and Alice were, meanwhile, subject to new contemporary discourses such as psychoanalysis, and became key to literary tourism and heritage on both a local and national level.