Alice in the Archive … A Gathering from the Niche

If you had asked my opinion of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll when I was a little kid, it probably would have been much the same as Alice’s in the frame above from MAD magazine. Something about John Tenniel’s classic illustrations remains a little disturbing, though I have grown fond of them.*

The impression probably wasn’t helped by the 1933 Paramount Pictures black-and-white production. It boasted a host of star power, but most were unrecognizable behind their grotesque masks, prosthetics, and plain-de-ole puppetry.

The cast included W. C. Fields, Edna Mae Oliver, Edward Everett Horton, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, and Sterling Holloway as the Frog Footman. Billy Barty was one of the cards.  I remember watching it on a holiday visit to Nanny’s old house.

I never saw the Walt Disney version as a whole until years later, but of course it always had a presence in snippets on The Wonderful World of Disney and in various comics and other products. It was represented on our old kids' records by a rather slow (by our standards) rendition of the opening theme. It probably would have been better represented (to children) by The Unbirthday Song.

A more complete engagement with Alice came when we went to see the 1972 British produced musical version at the Palace Theater. We came away from that with a souvenir pamphlet and a new family rhyme: ‘Brer loves Pam, Brer loves Pam, Kenny loves Alice in Wonderland.’ At this distance, I can’t see anything wrong with Fiona Fullerton as Alice; perhaps it was something about her eyebrows. It too had a host of famous actors (who we didn’t know at the time and who were also covered up under their make-up) like Michael Crawford, Michael Hordern, Peter Sellers, Roy Kinnear, Spike Milligan, Dudley Moore, Ralph Richardson, Peter Bull, and Flora Robson.

Even in middle school I already considered the book ‘too childish’ to read, but in high school, a sudden ambition to be a ‘fantasy expert’ pretty much demanded I should at last give it a go. Fortunately, they had a nice big edition illustrated by Libico Maraja whose style I found to be classically engaging.

By the time I was in college I had an old secondhand copy Illustrated Junior Library edition (I remember because it was one of the 20 books I would take if I was going into space - there was no Kindle yet) which included both Alice in Wonderland and Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. In time I also got Lewis Carroll’s own abridgement of Alice for the Very Young,

the first edition of the Annotated Alice (1960, by Martin Gardner),

and The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll,

with a forward by Alexander Wolcott.

But I gave The Annotated Alice (along with an Annotated The Hunting of the Snark) to my brother Kenny when I got The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (1999). According to Wikipedia, there is an even fancier one out now: “In 2015, The Annotated Alice: 150th Anniversary Deluxe Edition was published, combining the previous works of Gardner and expanded by Mark Burstein, president emeritus of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. It includes features such as more than 100 new or updated annotations, over 100 new illustrations by Salvador Dalí, Beatrix Potter, Ralph Steadman, and 42 other artists and illustrators (in addition to original art by Sir John Tenniel), and a filmography of every Alice-related film by Carroll scholar David Schaefer.”

Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, Illustrated by Greg Hildebrandt. A simply enormous (but not thick) Unicorn Publishing House edition, otherwise uniform to other volumes illustrated by Greg that they’ve published. Nice faux-leather binding. All the usual charms of a Hildebrandt book, with its color and solidity, but reproduced perhaps a little too large for its own good.

And speaking of films, for a time, I had Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) on DVD, but I gave it away. To adapt Tolkien’s words on another matter: “Tolerably good fun; especially for those who have not read the book.” I’ve never seen the sequel Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016), but I do have two action figures.

I also have Dreamchild. Dreamchild (1985), purports to tell the story of the widowed Alice Hargreaves, the erstwhile little girl on whom was based Alice in Wonderland; she is traveling to the United States on an invitation to celebrate the one hundredth birthday of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) at Columbia University. She is accompanied by the (fictional) orphan girl Lucy, who is wooed by a down-on-his-luck journalist in an effort to gain access to and exploit the elderly Alice. As Mrs. Hargreaves travels down the rabbit-hole of 1930's America, she has dreams about encountering the characters from the stories and has childhood recollections about her friendship with the eccentric Oxford don. Although having conflicting memories of affection and ridicule, eventually she comes to a clearer understanding and reconciliation with her past and the loving friendship of the lonely Lewis Carroll.

Coral Brown plays Alice Hargreaves, Amelia Shankley the young Alice, and Ian Holm is Lewis Carroll. Jim Henson's Creature Shop provides the Mad Hatter, March Hare, and other characters from the book. Peter Gallagher and Nicola Cowper play the journalist and the orphan companion in the tacked-on "romantic" subplot. The main interest of the movie is, however, neither that nor the hallucinatory episodes of fantasy creatures, but the memories of Alice as a little girl, and her complicated (and controversial) relationship with the man who immortalized and idealized an aspect of her character in a classic work of children's literature.

*I remember we had an old LP of children's stories that included an adaptation of Alice. Once upon a time I found a picture of the album cover, but I can't for the life of me locate it. If I do, I'll put it below.

Found it, and in a better resolution! And a Marvel comic book adaptation (by Doug Moench):