Description
Simon Winchester turns his unrivaled talents to revealing the significance of the intriguing photograph whose subject inspired Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Interesting, original and not unidirectional.
As usual with Winchester, well-founded, witty and perceptive.
Mr. Winchester's elegantly written study provides a balanced, sympathetic portrait of a complex and gifted man.
What Winchester offers that is new, largely, is a detailed explanation the nascent field of amateur Victorian photography. He meticulously tracks Dodgson's 1856 purchase of his first mahogany-and-brass folding camera. He carefully works through the history of the development of the camera, and explains the difference between the daguerreotype, the calotype, and the wet-plate collodion that Dodgson relied on.
In this very slim volume
Winchester provides a new perspective on the shy bachelor who wrote one of the world's most famous children's stories, while questioning the most recent scholarship that neglects the role of photography in Dodgson's life. An important addition to the burgeoning collection of Dodgson scholarship, this book will appeal to scholars and general readers and is recommended to all.
With remarkable clarity and eloquence, Winchester uses this photograph as the focal point for an examination of the man behind Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Simon Winchester is the author of Atlantic, The Professor and the Madman, The Map that Changed the World, and A Crack in the Edge of the World, all of which have been New York Times bestsellers. In recognition of his accomplished body of work, Winchester was made Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2006. He lives in Manhattan and western Massachusetts.