“Alice In Wonderland”: 150th Anniversary
Amanda Craig writes: ‘This year, “Alice in Wonderland” is 150 years old, marked by a slew of shiny new editions, and a splendid book by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, “The Story of Alice,” exploring how a shy unmarried Oxford don came to write the first true classic of children’s literature. Of all the spells laid on me by books, Alice’s is both the most frightening and perhaps the most influential…Nowadays, we are so used to the idea of a magical land that its originality is hard to recall, but before “Alice,” children had little but adult novels (“Robinson Crusoe,” “Gulliver’s Travels,”), the Bible and fairy tales to entertain them.’
