Carroll Lewis - The Alice Behind Wonderland

The A LICE Behind
W ONDERLAND

ALSO BY SIMON WINCHESTER

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SIMON
WINCHESTER

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Winchester, Simon.
The Alice behind wonderland / by Simon Winchester.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-19-539619-5
1. Carroll, Lewis, 18321898. Alices adventures in Wonderland.
2. Carroll, Lewis, 18321898.Photograph collections.
3. Great BritainSocial life and customs19th century
4. Hargreaves, Alice Pleasance Liddell, 18521934.
5. Fantasy fiction, EnglishHistory and criticism.
6. Childrens stories, EnglishHistory and criticism.
7. Alice (Fictitious character: Carroll). I. Title.
PR4611.A73W56 2011
823.8dc22 2010053503

Photograph of Alice Liddell courtesy of Morris L. Parrish Collection,
Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

FOR CYBELE

Chapter One
THE PHOTOGRAPH IN QUESTION

Chapter Two
THE PHOTOGRAPHER-TO-BE

Chapter Three
MATTERS ARISING

Chapter Four
THE RUDE MECHANICALS

Chapter Five
THE FIRST MAKINGS OF ART

Chapter Six
A PORTRAIT MOST PERFECT AND CHASTE

Chapter Seven
AND THEN THE GIRL BECAME A LADY

The A LICE Behind
W ONDERLAND

ON THE MAIN FLOOR OF THE FIRESTONE LIBRARY, THE COZILY magnificent and prematurely ancient (it was built in 1948) Gothic centerpiece of the Princeton University campus, there is what appears to be the private library of an English gentlemans country house, carefully set back and hidden away to keep it from the general bustle of readers.

Beyond its collection of leather-bound books, this room-within-a-room is notable for its deep and corduroy-ribbed reading chairs, stained glass, richly polished paneling, lamps, and portraits. Perhaps most impressive of all to those of romantic disposition is its baronial fireplacein which, however, no fire is ever permitted to be lit because of its being sited within a great and very flammable academic library.

The room is more than just a faithful reproduction of the libraryit is the library, reconstructed panel by panel, carpet by carpet, book by bookthe library of a mansion, Dormy House, built some thirty miles away in the tiny New Jersey hamlet of Pine Valley, a swanky Philadelphia suburb, really. The house was owned by a wealthy financier, Morris Longstreth Parrish, a Princeton alumnus whose passions were many, though few so great as that for collecting Victorian books.

Parrish & Company was a prominent Philadelphia stockbroking firm, a member of the exchange from the end of the nineteenth century, and owned by a colonial-era family long prominent in Main Line society. Well traveled and well rounded, Morris Parrish never graduated from Princeton. His wealth and other interests much distracted him from his studies. But as a young man he developed a keen interest in books. He read everything he could, furiously, though he much preferred the Victorian and Edwardian classics to later twentieth-century novels, which he generally disdained, though he prized them as objects later. Nonetheless, reading was all. He abhorred dust jackets, slip cases, penciled prices marked inside the coverand unread books. A collector who has unopened books is to me an enigma, he once wrote. He cannot, of course, read them; and no-one can deny that if a book cannot be read, it loses its purpose of existence.

He started collecting in the early 1890s, his initial aim the perfection of his parents collection of Charles Dickens novels, which his father had bought edition by edition as they were published. Morris made an early and ill-advised decision to rebind some of these volumes for his father in glossy red leather, learning betimes that the smartest collectors strived not to prettify their books, but to maintain them in a state as close as possible to their original condition. From then on, a steely determination settled on Parrish, and with little care for expense he set about ensuring that every book he acquired was in near-original condition. Dealers soon recognized what he wanted (and what he could afford): the term in Parrish condition is still employed in the antiquarian book trade to denote books of such quality as to represent the apotheosis of the collectors art.

It was during the Great War that Parrishs collecting zeal and acumen came to be widely recognizedand before long, dealers around the world were helping him complete full-spectrum runs of all the authors he admired. From the Bronts to Robert Louis Stevenson, from Sir James Barrie to Charlotte Yonge, he collected everythingevery book, every edition, every pamphlet, playbill, poster, binding, variant and foreign-language version ever madeso he could rightly claim to have the worlds best and most comprehensive collection of English Victorian fiction.

By the time he died in 1944, Parrishs formal Victorian library amounted to approximately sixty-five hundred volumes, representing the careers-in-full of the authors he most favoredThackeray, Carlyle, Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, and Froude among themand most comprehensively, almost the entire oeuvre of the Christ Church, Oxford, mathematics lecturer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, now more familiarly known as Lewis Carroll. (The first manuscript of