90. The Bald Prima Donna by Eugene Ionesco

Apologies for the intermission - now for some more titles.

Ionesco said that The Bald Prima Donna, his first play, and a keystone of absurdist theatre, was inspired by a teach-yourself-English manual. He wrote in his autobiographical work on the theatre, Notes and Counter-Notes:

I bought an English-French conversational manual for beginners. I set to work. Conscientiously I copied out phrases from my manual in order to learn them by heart. Then I found out, read­ing them over attentively, that I was learning not English but some very surprising truths: that there are seven days in the week, for example, which I happened to know before; or that the floor is below us, the ceiling above us, another thing that I may well have known before but had never thought seriously about or had forgotten, and suddenly it seemed to me as stupefying as it was indisputably true.

The play drew on these banalities, spiced up with a few well-known English proverbs (‘He who sells an ox today, will have an egg tomorrow’), and was originally called English Without Pain ­— but when a director commented that this might lead people to believe it was a satire on the English, this was changed to The Bald Prima Donna.

This title actually emerged during rehearsals. In the episode called 'The Headcold', the script refers to an ‘institutrice blonde’ (blonde schoolmistress); instead, the actor, Henri-Jacques Huet, made a slip – or began improvising – and said ‘cantatrice chauve’ (bald prima donna). Ionesco was present at the rehearsal and realized this was a much better phrase, and indeed a better title. It was adopted, and for form’s sake, a brief reference to a bald prima donna was later inserted in Scene 10.

Consulted:
Lamont, Rosette C.: Ionesco's Imperatives (1993)
Esslin, Martin: The Theatre of the Absurd (1980)

Brief hiatus

I'm off on holiday for a few days but will be returning at the weekend with more titles. And by the way, Robinson's barley water + lemonade = Robinsonade. See you later,
Gary

89. The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

Der Schweizerische Robinson was published in 1812 and tells the story of a pious Swiss family, a mother, father and four young sons, marooned on an island in the East Indies following a shipwreck. It is 600 pages long. The father, who narrates the book, uses the shipwreck as a pedagogical opportunity:

‘I believe,’ said Ernest [aged 12], ‘that mangoes grow on the sea-shore in marshy soil.’
‘You are partly right, my boy,’ I said, ‘but what you say applies to the black mango, not to the grey or red species, which bear small berries and do not grow so high.’

During their stay on the island the family undertake a holocaust of its creatures. Among the species butchered are kangaroos, penguins, bears, giant land crabs, capybaras, apes, jackals, ostriches and turtles (the island contains the fauna of six continents). To keep themselves in comfort the family build a luxurious treehouse, plant and harvest corn, milk cows (rescued from the ship), boil up a whale, manufacture isinglass and cochineal, breed doves, gather honey, tap rubber and salt herrings. There is no difficulty of island life that their ingenuity and perseverance cannot resolve. By the end of the book they have created a Calvinist paradise in which nature has been subdued and largely exterminated, and where disease, sex and conflict (between humans) have been banished. In a final act of dour appropriation they christen their island ‘New Switzerland’.

The family is not, of course, called Robinson. They are never named. The title refers instead to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe of 1719 (see post 73). In an odd twist of literary fate the word ‘Robinson’ had taken on a life of its own in eighteenth-century European publishing, appearing in the titles of hundreds of adventure stories, mainly German and Dutch, but also French, Danish, Swiss, Swedish and Italian, known collectively as ‘Robinsonades’: Teutsche Robinson (1722), Americanische Robinson (1724), Nordische Robinson (1741), Hollandsche Robinson (1743), Dänische Robinson (1750), Walchersche Robinson (1752), Maldivschen Philosophen Robine (1753), Oude en Jongen Robinson (1753), Isländische Robinson (1755), Hartz-Robinson (1755), Robinson vom Berge Libonon (1755), Haagsche Robinson (1758), Robertson (sic) aux terres australes (1766), Steyerische Robinson (1791) and Böhmische Robinson (1796), among many others, all by different authors. ‘Robinson’ simply denoted an adventure tale. They didn't even have to take place on desert islands: there were Robinsonades set on mountain-tops, in jungles, among corsairs or in Turkish prisons. Many of the tales dispensed with the idea of the isolated adventurer altogether. There were even Robinsonades without ‘Robinson’ in the title.

Scholars first began to examine the Robinsonade phenomenon as early as the mid 1700s. Among the Robinsonade sub-groups identified by a French scholar were the robinsonnade gullivérienne, the robinsonnade en famille (such as the Swiss Family) and the robinsonnade de l’enfant. There were satirical Robinsonades, fantastical Robinsonades, Utopian Robinsonades and interplanetary Robinsonades. Life was a Robinsonade. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Robinsonade had mutated still further: Tarzan of the Apes, looked at in a certain way, is a Robinsonade (a robinsonnade de l’enfant?), and so is The Island of Doctor Moreau and Lord of the Flies (dystopian Robinsonades). In film and television, Lost in Space was obviously a Robinsonade (being based on the Swiss Family), and there were TV dramas such as Mountain Family Robinson and Swiss Family Robinson Lost in the Jungle.

But strangely, of the eighteenth and nineteenth century continental Robinsonades, only The Swiss Family Robinson took root when transplanted back onto English-speaking soil. Why, it is difficult to say. Perhaps the title had something to do with it. Originally, of course, it had been Der Schweizerische Robinson, and as such was indistinguishable from all the other Hollandsche Robinsons, Dänische Robinsons and Haagsche Robinsons. But the insertion of the word ‘Family’ in translation put it in a class of its own. ‘Family’ acted as a sort of pivot. Substitute anything for the ‘Swiss’ or the ‘Robinson’ and you get an infinite number of delightfully silly variations: Space Family Robinson, Beverly Hills Family Robinson, Swiss Family Treehouse, Swiss Family Orbison, Swiss Family Guy Robinson, Mouse Family Robinson, Swiss Family Mouse House, Stick Family Robinson, Swiss Bank Family Robinson, Swiss Cheese Family Robinson, and on and on (all real examples). The words ‘Swiss Family Robinson’ are close to nonsense in any case: tinkering with them reduces them to gibberish. Perhaps the reason only one Robinson made it back home was because it could be endlessly parodied.

Consulted:
Gove, Philip Babcock: The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction (Holland Press, 1961)

88. Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper, by Charles Perrault

The salient detail here is the glass slipper, and perhaps my French-speaking readers will correct me if I make any blunders!

The version of Cinderella that most readers will be familiar with first appeared as ‘Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre’, one of the stories in Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l'Oye (Mother Goose Tales) in 1697. His immediate written source was ‘La Gatta Cenerentola’ from Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone of 1634. ‘Cenerentola’ comes ultimately from cinis, ash, and tollere, to carry: thus the heroine is an ash-carrier, or ash-girl. In Perrault the sisters refer to her unkindly as ‘Cucendron’ — ash-bottom, or ash-arse: this found its way into the first English translation as ‘Cinder-breech’. Perrault has all the paraphernalia we recognize from Disney: the fairy godmother, the pumpkin coach, the glass slippers, the rat coachman, and so on.

It is the detail of the little glass slipper that brings Perrault’s title into an area of controversy. The glass slipper was his own addition (it does not appear in Basile, where the shoe is merely ‘the richest and prettiest patten you could imagine’), and he gives it star billing — ‘Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper’. Before modern industrial toughening, glass would have been an entirely impractical, not to say lethal, material for slippers, and appears in very few other Cinderella stories (which go back at least to dynastic Egypt). It has been suggested that Perrault drew on oral sources in which the slipper was made of vair, an archaic French word for an ermine-like fur, and changed it to verre, or glass, either because he liked the sound of it or out of a genuine error, and thus the tale was altered forever. One of the earliest champions of this theory was Balzac, in his Etudes Philosophiques sur Catherine de Medicis (1836), but its spread was guaranteed when it was taken up by encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Among the most recent encyclopedias to cite the theory uncritically is the fourth edition of Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of 1996, in front of me as I write. Folklorists still occasionally cite the vair/verre hypothesis as fact. But it is almost certainly false.

The reasons were pointed out by the folklorist Paul Delarue in a short essay in Le Monde in 1951. Essentially, the vair/verre hypothesis depends on the idea that glass is very uncommon as a slipper-material in other tales of the Cinderella cycle. Perrault invented it through this tiny slip or misunderstanding, the hypothesis runs. Any other Cinderella tales with glass slippers must therefore derive from Perrault. Certainly there are none published which pre-date Perrault. But Delarue pointed out that in other Cinderella tales with glass slippers, motif-analysis does not bear out the assertion that they are necessarily derivative of, and post-date, Perrault. A Scottish version of Cinderella, for example, which includes glass shoes, also includes the ‘helpful animal motif’, which, for folklorists, sets heads nodding. Animals helping the heroine in Cinderella stories — frogs (Africa), fish (China) and giant crabs (Java) — indicate antiquity, and in the Scottish tale it is a little black lamb, not a fairy, who dispenses the rich raiment that enables Cinderella to attract the prince.

Delarue deals his knock-out blow by finding this dangerous item of footwear in other antique tales. In a Gaelic story a heroine who desires to climb a glass mountain in order to find her husband must wear glass shoes. In an Irish tale it is the hero who wears glass shoes when rescuing a princess from a sea-serpent. The point here is that glass is a magical material, on a par with diamond and gold (all of which are materials for objects, including shoes, in fairy-tales). Thus in various stories we have a glass mountain, a boat of glass, a castle of glass, a tree with leaves of glass; there is even a story of a giant with a beard of glass (as well as a giant with a beard of copper and a giant with a beard of gold). Impossible things are permissible in the magical world, and a beard of glass is as impractical as shoes of glass. The fact that glass is likely to shatter, and that fur would be more sensible, is an absurd attempt to judge the fairytale world by the standards of our own mundane one.

Perhaps the debate will never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, but the fact remains that the original story with the fur has never been located, and that Perrault wrote verre, and meant verre.

Rather a shame, because the verre/vair hypothesis is useful as a story to tell at dinner-parties, and Balzac is on your side if anyone disagrees.

Consulted:
Perrault, Charles: Histories or Tales of Past Times Told by Mother Goose with Morals (Fortune Press, 1928)
Barchilon, Jacques and Flinders, Peter: Charles Perrault (Twayne, 1981)
Dundes, Alan, ed., Cinderella: A Casebook (University of Winconsin Press, 1982)

87. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

In his autobiography In Memory Yet Green, Asimov recounted how I, Robot, his short-story collection of 1950, got its title.

On June 8 I visited Fred, got my advance for The Stars, like Dust —, and handed over additional chapters. I also gave him the manuscript of the robot story collection. Martin Greenberg had rejected my notion of calling it Mind and Iron and suggested it be called I, Robot.
“Impossible, Marty,” I said. “Eando Binder wrote a short story called ‘I, Robot’ back in 1938.”
To which Marty answered, with unassailable logic, “F— Eando Binder.”
So I, Robot it was. There is no question that Marty’s title was far better than mine and probably helped sell the book.

(Eando Binder was in fact two people, the brothers, E. and O. Binder – E and O = Eando – early US sci-fi writers.)

It’s a good story, but it begs a further question — where did Eando Binder get it from? There is one other famous book with the same title formula: Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, which was a huge international hit in 1934, four years before the Binders’ I, Robot. Coincidence? You decide.

Consulted:
Asimov, Isaac: In Memory Yet Green (1979) (Back cover blurb: ‘THE AMAZING ASIMOV TACKLES HIS MOST FASCINATING SUBJECT - HIMSELF!’)

86. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

The Tale of Genji (c.1010), by the Japanese noblewoman known as Lady Murasaki Shikibu, is sometimes designated the world’s first novel; perhaps it could be called the world’s first bonkbuster, dealing as it does with the irresistibly attractive Prince Genji and his many love affairs.

The name ‘Genji’ is something of a smokescreen, though. This is not his actual surname, which is never revealed. He is the son of the emperor by a low-ranking concubine, and Genji is a rendering of the Chinese characters for ‘Minamoto’, a clan name conferred on princes of the blood who were not in direct line to the imperial throne. The fact that Genji was given this name signalled that he was no longer a member of the imperial family and could never aspire to supreme power. The title The Tale of Genji thus means, in a sense, ‘the story of an outcast’.

But that doesn’t stop him having a lot of fun.

Consulted:
Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji, trs and notes Royall Tyler (2001)

85. The Ego and the Id by Sigmund Freud

Freud had something of a genius for titles. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is startling and witty; Beyond the Pleasure Principle is intriguing and titillating. The Ego and the Id demonstrates the same mastery. With all the confidence of his forty clinical years, Freud introduced in his title a completely new term, the ‘Id’.

Although it wasn’t quite new. A couple of weeks previously, another book had appeared: The Book of the It. The author was the analyst George Groddeck. Both Freud and Groddeck used the same German term for their ‘Id’ and ‘It’ respectively: das Es. Freud was quite open about his debt: rather shockingly, he announced that The Ego and the Id was ‘under the sponsorship of Groddeck.’ It was shocking because Groddeck was regarded in some quarters as little better than a lunatic.

In the early years of psychoanalysis, practitioners were very anxious to establish their respectability as legitimate medical men. This was still an age of sexual puritanism, in which the sexual organs and sexual functions were not generally mentioned in polite conversation, and in which sexual categories as we now know them, or think we know them — homosexuality, bisexuality, transvestism, transsexualism — were still at an early and controversial stage of development. In this atmosphere, George Groddeck delivered a notorious speech to the congress of psychoanalysts at The Hague in 1920, opening his address with the words: ‘I am a wild analyst.’ This was somewhat crass. Analysts were regarded by the public as ‘wild’ already: it was exactly the image the profession wished to avoid. In his speech Groddeck went on to develop the idea that unconscious forces were the rulers of the human organism: even bodily diseases were caused by unconscious conflicts and neuroses. Groddeck moreover insisted on bringing his mistress to conferences and was the author of a risqué novel, The Seeker of Souls.

Nevertheless Freud liked Groddeck personally. He wrote to Max Eitingon that Groddeck was ‘a bit of a fantasist, but an original fellow who has the rare gift of good humour. I should not like to do without him.’ And Freud and Groddeck were in regular correspondence about their projects in 1923. Groddeck wrote to Freud, explaining his concept of the It, an idea partially derived from Nietzsche:

I am of the opinion that man is animated by the unknown. There is an It in him, something marvellous that regulates everything that he does and that happens to him. The sentence ‘I live’ is only partially correct; it expresses a little partial phenomenon of the fundamental truth: ‘Man is lived by the It.’

Groddeck sent Freud the chapters as he completed them, and Freud sent back letters of encouragement, also revealing the direction of his own thinking on the composition of the psyche. Taking Groddeck’s idea of the ‘It’, along with previous notions of the unconscious, as well as other speculations on the nature of personality, Freud was crafting the model that came to dominate psychiatry in the twentieth century. This was the tripartite model of Ego, Id and Superego, which he set out for the first time in the book The Ego and the Id.

It is important to look at the actual terms Freud used. In German the title of his book was Das Ich und das Es — ‘The I and the It’. It was only in the Standard Edition of Freud’s works in English that the latinate ‘Ego’, ‘Id’ and ‘Superego’ were used. Freud’s Id was therefore, as already mentioned, terminologically identical with Groddeck’s It in The Book of the It (in German Das Buch vom Es). But in analytical practice there were some important differences between It and Id. Groddeck saw the It as the dominant, though entirely unconscious, fount of personality: Freud’s Id was the ultimately subordinate repository of sex and death drives. For Freud, the Ego, although largely controlled by the Id, was in some senses an agency: it had limited powers of will, despite its unhappy position at the centre of pressures from the Id, the Superego, and the external world. For Groddeck, the psyche had no conscious agency at all. The unconscious It regulated everything.

Some time after the publication of both books, on the occasion of Groddeck’s sixtieth birthday, Freud sent him a letter with his best wishes, in a form which neatly encapsulated his debt. It was as if the elements of Freud’s psyche were wishing happy birthday to the single hidden force of Groddeck’s: ‘My Ego and my Id congratulate your It.’

Consulted:
Gay, Peter: Freud: A Life for our Time (Little, 2006)
Groddeck, Georg: The Book of the It (introduction by Lawrence Durrell, Vision Press, 1949)

84. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Anyone who has read The Secret Garden will feel that the walled, abandoned and secretly-visited garden is a symbol of great richness and power. TS Eliot obviously felt so: as Ann Thwaite points out in her study of Burnett, he must have been remembering it in Burnt Norton, right down to the roses, the children and the bird who guides the way:

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know. Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. [...]
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

Frances Hodgson Burnett was a keen gardener with a wide knowledge of horticulture, and she took the idea for The Secret Garden in large part from the walled Rose Garden at her home at Maytham Hall, Kent, where she wrote, sitting outside with tuffet, rug and Japanese parasol. ‘It was entered by a low, arched gateway in the wall,’ Burnett wrote of the Maytham garden, ‘closed by a wooden door...and then at every available place, roses were planted to climb up the ancient trunks and over the walls.’

Consulted:
Thwaite, Ann: Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett (1974)

83. The Escaped Cock by DH Lawrence

In early 1925, in Mexico, DH Lawrence contracted malaria. In his weakened state, tuberculosis took a hold, and for a few weeks he hovered between life and death. But in the spring of that year, on his ranch in New Mexico, he began to recover. Frieda wrote:

How he loved every minute of life at the ranch. The morning, the squirrels, every flower that came in its turn, the big trees, chopping wood, the chickens, making bread, all our hard work, and the people all assumed the radiance of new life.

This personal resurrection was reflected in his writing. The period from 1925 to his death in 1930 was the period of Lady Chatterley's Lover, and the period too of The Escaped Cock, his last major work of fiction. One might say that in this last phase of his writing he was preoccupied by cocks. During these five years he also wrote the essays 'Women are so Cocksure', 'Cocksure Women and Hensure Men' and 'Aristocracy', the latter immediately after his illness in July 1925, in which he described his white cock Moses:

And as the white cock calls in the doorway, who calls? Merely a barnyard rooster, worth a dollar-and-a-half. But listen! Under the old dawns of creation the Holy Ghost, the Mediator, shouts aloud in the twilight. And every time I hear him, a fountain of vitality gushes up in my body. It is life.

The cock is, with perfect Lawrentian seriousness, nature's phallus. And the bird is not some symbol from Frazer but the living embodiment of thrusting male energy, ready to fight and copulate at a moment's notice.

The novella The Escaped Cock was published in two parts, the first in 1928 and the second in 1929. It tells the story of Jesus’ life immediately following his resurrection. In later years it was published as The Man Who Died, chiefly for reasons of prudery, but this was not the title preferred by Lawrence.

The plot, as Lawrence described it in a letter to a friend, is as follows:

Jesus gets up and feels very sick about everything, and can't stand the old crowd any more — so cuts out — and as he heals up, he begins to find what an astonishing place the phenomenal world is, far more marvellous than any salvation or heaven — and thanks his stars he needn't have a 'mission' any more.

Jesus’ first intimation that the phenomenal world is a marvellous place comes in the form of a barnyard cock escaping from a Galilean peasant:

Advancing in a kind of half-consciousness under the drystone wall of the olive orchard, he was roused by the shrill, wild crowing of a cock just near him, a sound which made him shiver as if a snake had touched him [...] leaping out of the greenness, came the black-and-orange cock with the red comb, his tail-feathers streaming lustrous.

Jesus buys the cock from the peasant and goes on his way carrying it under his arm.

In the second part of the story we are introduced to a priestess of Isis. This woman has known both Caesar and Anthony, but has given herself to neither. She is a virgin, and waits for the man who can awaken her body. (‘Rare women wait for the re-born man,’ Lawrence comments — a good advertising slogan, if only one could think of the right product.) One morning she comes across Jesus lying asleep. ‘For the first time, she was touched on the quick at the sight of a man [...] Men had aroused all sorts of feelings in her, but never had touched her on the yearning quick of her womb, with the flame tip of life.’ The priestess and Jesus initiate one another into the life of the senses, a life which, until that moment, neither has known. Jesus sees the essential wrongness of his past ministry: he sees, suddenly, that saving souls has been, at bottom, a dry exercise:

A vivid shame went through him. — After all, he thought, — I wanted them to love with dead bodies. If I had kissed Judas with live love, perhaps he would never have kissed me with death...There dawned on him the reality of the soft warm love which is in touch, and which is full of delight.

In the throes of this revelation, Jesus echoes the Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? of the biblical Christ on the cross:

He untied the string of the linen tunic, and slipped the garment down, till he saw the white glow of her white-gold breasts. And he touched them, and he felt his life go molten. — Father! He said — Why did you hide this from me? [...] Lo! He said. — This is beyond prayer.

At the odd, evocative end of The Escaped Cock, a story that Lawrence might have continued had he lived, Jesus escapes by water, with the Romans in pursuit, presumably to re-crucify him. Now, suddenly and differently fulfilled, he carries the priestess's perfume in his flesh 'like essence of roses'. The novella ends with the words: 'Tomorrow is another day.'

The title The Escaped Cock was suggested by something Lawrence noticed in Italy in 1927. At around this time he had developed a love of the culture of ancient Etruria (an interest that was later to have a flowering in the posthumous book Etruscan Places). After visiting the Etruscan tombs with his friend Earl Brewster, examining the frescoes with a battery torch, he wrote:

The tombs seem so easy and friendly, cut out of rock underground. One does not feel oppressed, descending into them. It must be partly owing to the peculiar charm of natural proportion which is in all Etruscan things of the unspoilt, unromanticised centuries. There is a simplicity, combined with a most peculiar, free-breasted naturalness and spontaneity, in the shapes and movements of the underworld walls and spaces, that at once reassures the spirit. [...] And that is the true Etruscan quality: ease, naturalness, and an abundance of life, no need to force the mind or the soul in any direction.

After inspecting the tombs, Lawrence and Brewster were passing through the town of Volterra, and stopped for provisions. Brewster recalled what they saw:

We passed a little shop, in the window of which was a toy rooster escaping from an egg. I remarked that it suggested the title — ‘The Escaped Cock — a story of the Resurrection.’ Lawrence replied that he had been thinking about writing a story of the Resurrection.

Lawrence said in a letter to Harry Crosby that the model was of ‘a cock escaping from a man’, but he may have been confusing the model with the use he made of it in his story, in which the bird, tied by a string to a post, breaks free and runs off with the man pursuing it. But in both cases the cock was escaping. As Lawrence later wrote to Brewster about the title: ‘It’s called The Escaped Cock, from that toy in Volterra.’

It is all rather astonishing. If Lawrence and Brewster had not seen the toy, they would have had to have invented it. It brought together all of Lawrence’s thinking: his fascination with the phallic cock-bird as representative of Christ and the Holy Ghost, his own sense of escape into a new life after his illness, and the story ‘of the Resurrection’ he had been considering, very probably one in which Jesus was imagined as a free-and-easy Etruscan, at home in his body, ‘free-breasted’ and spontaneous. At the centre of it all was a cosmic pun — Jesus as phallus, as the escaped cock himself. In this last fiction, here is the solemn, impressive, puritanically-erotic Lawrence, with a double entendre that defies parody:

The deep-folded, penetrable rock of the living woman! The woman, hiding her face. Himself bending over, powerful and new like dawn. He crouched to her, and he felt the blaze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins, magnificent.
‘I am risen!’

Consulted:
Sagar, Keith: D.H. Lawrence: Life into Art (Viking, 1985)
Sagar, Keith: The Art of D.H. Lawrence (Cambridge University Press, 1966)

82. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The title of the original hand-lettered book was Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. As is well known, it had its origin in stories told by Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Dodgson) to Alice Liddell and her two sisters in the early 1860s; particularly in a set of stories told on the afternoon of 4 July 1862, when they went on a boating trip on the Isis at Oxford.

Dodgson illustrated the hand-lettered book himself, and presented it to Alice in 1864. But by this time he was barely on speaking terms with Alice and her family: relations with the Liddells had suffered a mysterious rupture. One guess is that Dodgson offered Alice his hand in marriage, and the offer was not well received by the Liddells. Alice was only 11, of course. Possibly of greater importance was that she was the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church College (where Dodgson was a Fellow). Alice’s mother was a social climber, and Dodgson was not a very good prospect.

Still, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground was the fruit of those golden days on the Isis: and it was so well liked by the friends Dodgson showed it to that he determined to have it properly published, with proper illustrations. He decided on John Tenniel as the illustrator – thus bringing to being the most famous marriage of author and illustrator in the history of literature – any other candidates?

However, he worried that the title Alice’s Adventures Under Ground might be a little too prosaic for the published version (he even joked that readers might guess it had something to do with mining). Accordingly he wrote on 10 June 1864 to a friend, Tom Taylor, for advice. He enclosed several titular possibilities in his letter, including Alice Among the Elves, Alice Among the Goblins, Alice’s Hour in Elfland, Alice’s Hour in Wonderland, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Taylor picked the latter, and Dodgson concurred. Of the possibilities, it stands out as the superior choice, but in rather a poor field. The original title – Alice’s Adventures Under Ground – is easily better, with its mythic connotations and its modern sense of a parallel social reality.

Taylor went on to be editor of Punch and a minor member of the Victorian literati. He had one other claim to fame: he was the author of a play called Our American Cousin. This was the play being performed when Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.

Consulted:
Brown, Sally: The Original Alice (1997)
Gardner, Martin: The Annotated Alice (1970)