The Making of the Alice Books: Lewis Carroll’s Uses of Earlier Children’s Literature by Ronald Reichertz

REVIEWS with heredity (175, 185). Moreover, the articulator Mr Venus in Our Mutual Friend, like Dennis the Hangman in Barnaby Rudge, is an artist of death, a creative cannibal. W ithin Dickens and Heredity's broader narrative of Dick­ ens’s shifting views on inheritance, Morgentaler isolates the­ matic concerns in encapsulated discussions that lead to a cer­ tain amount of perhaps unavoidable repetition, although the section in chapter five on race is one of the best in the book. Morgentaler examines Dickens’s inability to escape Victorian racial and ideological strictures and argues that while Fagin in Oliver Twist lacks a clear heredity in order to deny him the sympathy genealogy provokes, Riah in Our Mutual Friend embodies a homogenized “inherited orientalism” (153), rehears­ ing— while seeming to demolish— tired stereotypes. This sec­ tion illustrates the readily accessible presentation of ideas in Dickens and Heredity, which so lucidly traces the evolution of Dickens’s conception of heredity from a force offering the poten­ tial for secularized resurrection or redemption to one promising nothing other than pre-Modernist disillusionment, death, and disintegration. OLIVER LOVESEY / Okanagan University College Ronald Reichertz. The Making of the Alice Books: Lewis Car­ roll’s Uses of Earlier Children's Literature. Montreal and King­ ston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. 256. $29.95. This interesting study, written by a former member of the En­ glish Departm ent at McGill University, was first published in 1997. In it the author argues that the strikingly original position that Lewis Carroll occupies in the history of English literature is due to his formal and informal use of earlier children’s litera­ ture. In his appendices, which extend from pages 79 to 233, he employs the useful device of presenting facsimile excerpts from selected books for children from the mid-seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. Thus, for instance, Charles Lamb’s The King and Queen of Hearts (London, 1805) is given as an obvi­ ous influence on the trial scene in Alice’s Adventures in Won­ derland, and, indeed, the W hite Rabbit directly quotes Lamb’s first verse at the beginning of the trial. 747 ESC 28, 2002 Reader reception theory has come to be a much studied aspect of the history of the book in recent years, but it does present some formidable difficulties when evidence has to be presented to prove that an author (or anyone else) actually read and was influenced by a particular book. Carroll obviously knew at least one verse of Lamb’s poem — but did he gain that knowledge by reading it? One might imagine that by Carroll’s time, the verse had become a common chant for children. Some of his other examples are even more problematical as one cannot definitively demonstrate that Carroll actually owned a copy of a particular work, and there is not much evidence that he was a great borrower of books, either from libraries or his colleagues. We do know that Lewis Carroll was a bibliophile. Shortly after his death on 14 January 1898, E. J. Brooks, an Oxford auc­ tioneer, issued a Catalogue of the Furniture, Personal Effects, and the Interesting and Valuable Library of Books, the Property of the Late Rev. C. L. Dodgson. It was hastily compiled, due to Christ Church College’s strong wish to let Carroll’s rooms as quickly as possible, and is quite frustrating to use because of the practice of auctioning books together without giving all the titles in each lot. The catalogue is very rare, but has been edited and published in facsimile twice by Jeffrey Stern, in 1981 and again in an expanded form in 1997. Stern has also included the relevant parts of three booksellers’ catalogue and a later auction, all containing books that belonged to Carroll. Stern’s first work, Lewis Carroll’s Library, is listed by Reichertz under Works Cited, but there is little evidence that he made much use of it. Limited as the Brooks Catalogue certainly is, it is still capa­ ble of being analysed in interesting ways. Of the perhaps three thousand volumes in Carroll’s library, 2,231 can be identified, and of this number only two hundred...

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