Spanning some twenty-five years of work, an intriguing study of the photography of Charles Lutwidge Dogson ("Lewis Carroll") presents a rich array of more than 450 images that capture diverse facets of Victorian society, his relationship with the children he photographed, portraits of famous personalities of the time, narrative tableaux, and bizarre studies of anatomical skeletons. (Fine Arts)
Renowned for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was also one of the most important amateur photographers of the Victorian era and the period's finest photographer of children. From 1856 to 1880, Carroll took around three thousand pictures, the majority of which were portraits of family, friends, and colleagues. He also sought out and photographed celebrities of the day, including Alfred Tennyson, Samuel Wilberforce, Michael Faraday, William Holman Hunt, Henry Taylor, George MacDonald, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Ellen Terry, John Everett Millais, Charlotte Yonge, and Prince Leopold. Carroll's remaining output includes images of landscapes and architecture, works of art, and skeletons; assisted self-portraits; and other miscellaneous pictures. Today, his photographs are highly prized and fetch enormous prices at auction. This catalogue raisonné presents images of the nearly one thousand surviving photographs of Lewis Carroll—including many from private collections that have never been published—and provides information on their subjects/sitters, their locations, and the dates when they were taken, as well as extracts from Carroll's private diaries that mention his relevant photographic activity and background information concerning known prints. Edward Wakeling, an internationally recognized Carrollian scholar, has also reconstructed Carroll's lost register of his complete photographic opus. In addition to the catalogue, Wakeling discusses Carroll's activity as a photographer, his contacts with other Victorian art photographers, and his nude studies, and he provides a full listing of the contents of Carroll's various photographic albums. This is the most comprehensive study of Carroll's photography ever produced, and it will be a standard work for anyone studying Victorian photography and for Lewis Carroll's photographs in particular.
Though he’s known now primarily as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in his lifetime Lewis Carroll was interested at least as much in photography as in writing. This book offers a close look at Carroll’s engagement with the medium, both as a creator and a collector of photographs. Lindsay Smith takes readers to the glass studio above Carroll’s college rooms at Oxford, where he created many of his striking portraits, and she also follows him into the field—on excursions to the theater in London, to the seaside at Eastbourne, and even to Russia. Smith also details Carroll’s enthusiastic work as a collector, in which role he arranged portrait sittings for photographers whose work he admired. Beautifully illustrated with a generous selection of Carroll’s work and that of other photographers of the period, this book gives fans of Carroll’s writing a new way to understand his creative genius.
Pictures and conversations : photographic meaning -- Liddell girls : Alice and her sisters -- Pretty boys and little men : becoming a boy -- Theatrical transformations : fancy dress -- In fairyland : partial dress and the nude.
With fantastic characters and enchanting language, Lewis Carroll created magical wonderlands children have always loved to visit. These 26 selections from his classic works have never lost their fascination. "Softly realistic, period-style watercolors effectively highlight the mood of each selection....vocabulary or context notes on just about every page, and the book opens with a brief but illuminating biography."--School Library Journal. "The illustrations are well-matched to Carroll's texts. Colorful watercolors provide plenty of action and excitement on every page."--Lorgnette.
Bestselling author, pioneering photographer, mathematical don and writer of nonsense verse, Lewis Carroll remains a source of continuing fascination. Though many have sought to understand this complex man he remains for many an enigma. Now leading international authority, Edward Wakeling, offers his unique appraisal of the man born Charles Dodgson but whom the world knows best as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. This new biography of Carroll presents a fresh appraisal based upon his social circle. Contrary to the claims of many previous authors, Carroll's circle was not child centred: his correspondence was enormous, numbering almost 100,000 items at the time of his death, and included royalty and many of the leading artists, illustrators, publishers, academics, musicians and composers of the Victorian era. Edward Wakeling draws upon his personal database of nearly 6,000 letters, mostly never before published, to fill the gaps left by earlier biographies and resolve some of the key myths that surround Lewis Carroll, such as his friendships with children and his drug-taking. Meticulously researched and based upon a lifetime's study of the man and his work, this important new work will be essential reading for scholars and admirers of one of the key authors of the Victorian age.
"Few books of the past 200 years have captured the imagination of illustrators like Carroll's tale of Wonderland. This original compilation features the interpretations of dozens of artists, including Arthur Rackham, Charles Robinson, and original illustrator John Tenniel. Editor Jeff Menges discusses the artists and their work, and noted collector Mark Burstein shares a bibliophile's perspective"--
A new biography of Lewis Carroll, just in time for the release of Tim Burton's all-star Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll was brilliant, secretive and self contradictory. He reveled in double meanings and puzzles, in his fiction and his life. Jenny Woolf's The Mystery of Lewis Carroll shines a new light on the creator of Alice In Wonderland and brings to life this fascinating, but sometimes exasperating human being whom some have tried to hide. Using rarely-seen and recently discovered sources, such as Carroll's accounts ledger and unpublished correspondence with the "real" Alice's family, Woolf sets Lewis Carroll firmly in the context of the English Victorian age and answers many intriguing questions about the man who wrote the Alice books, such as: • Was it Alice or her older sister that caused him to break with the Liddell family? • How true is the gossip about pedophilia and certain adult women that followed him? • How true is the "romantic secret" which many think ruined Carroll's personal life? • Who caused Carroll major financial trouble and why did Carroll successfully conceal that person's identity and actions? Woolf answers these and other questions to bring readers yet another look at one of the most elusive English writers the world has known.
On a summer's day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church College in Oxford, Charles Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera, recently purchased in London. Simon Winchester deftly uses the resulting image--as unsettling as it is famous, and the subject of bottomless speculation--as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of English literature. Dodgson's love of photography framed his view of the world, and was partly responsible for transforming a shy and half-deaf mathematician into one of the world's best-loved observers of childhood. Little wonder that there is more to "Alice Liddell as the Beggar Maid" than meets the eye. Using Dodgson's published writings, private diaries, and of course his photographic portraits, Winchester gently exposes the development of Lewis Carroll and the making of his Alice. Acclaim for Simon Winchester "An exceptionally engaging guide at home everywhere, ready for anything, full of gusto and seemingly omnivorous curiosity." --Pico Iyer, The New York Times Book Review "A master at telling a complex story compellingly and lucidly." --USA Today "Extraordinarily graceful." --Time "Winchester is an exquisite writer and a deft anecdoteur." --Christopher Buckley "A lyrical writer and an indefatigable researcher." --Newsweek
