Alice in Space

"Beer chooses her themes well, and throughout makes interesting connections and comparisons that are supported by her wide knowledge of Victorian literature, both fictional and scientific"-- "The British Society for Literature and Science" "In sum, though this text is sometimes complex, it provides intriguing insights by a veteran scholar and is a must for anyone interested in Carroll....Recommended."-- "Choice" "The title of this wonderful work--alert and witty in its attention to details, capacious and learned in its opening up of the realms of knowledge Carroll lived among and engaged with--evokes outer space and rightly so. Alice travels underground and through a mirror and beyond any earth we know. But she inhabits other zones, too. She lives in our minds. She reads the signs of a foreign world and is herself read by others. All of this comes richly alive for us in Beer's writing. We are as close to 'adamant eager Alice' as we shall ever be."--Michael Wood, author of Literature and the Taste of Knowledge "Children's Books History Society" "This is not a book, then, that one approaches to find out the most likely real-life candidate for the Hatter. Instead, Beer points us to how Carroll draws 'obliquely' on contemporary culture, how everything he knew 'became untethered and confounded as they enter his dream worlds.' Explaining the joke notoriously strips it of its humor, but Beer up-ends that argument too: the Alice books have already anticipated the reader's desire to 'get' what's going on, and gleefully take apart that impulse."-- "Open Letters Monthly" "While Lewis Carroll's importance to the history of children's literature has long been recognized, this book convincingly establishes Carroll and the Alice books at the very heart of Victorian literature and culture. Here we learn how the Alice books engage in active conversations with the ideas of great minds like Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, Max Muller, John Stuart Mill, and Emily Bronte. Beer brilliantly reveals Carroll to be, like his famous protagonist, always curious, always enquiring."--Jan Susina, author of The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature "Children's Books History Society" "The project of resetting Carroll's fanciful dreamscapes into their historical moment has been done before. . . . Beer develops and extends such footnotes into critical prose that describes the intellectual and emotional contours of the Alice universe with enchanting, lapidary precision. She also draws on new archival material to reveal obscure but telling aspects of Carroll's doubled identity as mathematician Charles Dodgson. The result is an enjoyable and compelling description of the Alice books' slant engagements with 1860s British culture. . . . Alice in Space is no critical breakthrough, but its principal aim is more modest: to enhance readers' understanding and enjoyment of the Alice books. In this it succeeds superlatively, by revealing the historical milieu of the books' carefree conceptual play."-- "Critical Inquiry" "Offering sensitive and judicious insights into Lewis Carroll--the man, the mathematician, and the writer--Beer takes us on a vertiginous voyage through the wonderlands of his creation. She explores the scientific and ethical questions of his time and reveals how the comic--and dark--fantasy of the Alice books often conveys the subtlety of his dissenting views. Beer always writes with stylish, consummate eloquence. Alice in Space exemplifies how flights of passionate sympathy and imagination can also be acts of scrupulous inquiry and immaculate research."--Marina Warner, author of Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights "Children's Books History Society" "Just when we all thought we knew the Alice books, along comes Gillian Beer, who opens up not just new doors, but whole new corridors a

Gillian Beer is the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature Emerita at the University of Cambridge. Her books include Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction and Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. Named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1998, she has edited popular editions of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Jane Austen's Persuasion, and Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense: Collected Poems.