ALICE: CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER

Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books were probably the first introduction for many of us to the weird and wonderful, to absurdity and contradiction, to the Other. The young Charles Dodgson’s headmaster wrote that the 12-year-old was “marvellously ingenious in replacing the ordinary inflexions of nouns and verbs… by… convenient forms of his own devising.” He thought this would soon pass; we can be grateful he was wrong. The Alice books are a joy and a delight – as is the Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser exhibition at London’s V&A museum.

It’s an exercise in surreality, though it starts conventionally enough, books, mainly by John Tenniel, but also by Carroll/Dodgson. Both were perfectionists; Carroll binned the entire first run of because they were poorly printed, and paid for a new edition.