In Alice’s Footsteps – Mad Hatters and Paper Houses

Children’s Books and Real Places have often been entwined and confused and none more so – and none more deliberately – than Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and the English City of Oxford.  Peter Hunt’s new book, Alice’s Oxford, explores some of the extraordinary entanglements between fiction and fact, as he explains.

Google ‘Alice’ and ‘Oxford’ and you’ll be inundated with details of Oxford’s annual ‘Alice’s Day’, ‘Alice’-themed walking tours, bicycle tours, and boat trips, exhibitions and events, all linking a real place with a world-famous group of fictional characters. Hundreds of thousands of people seem not to find it odd to retrace the steps of creatures that never existed on solid paving stones that did, and do, and wherever you turn in modern-day Oxford, there seem to be traces not only of Lewis Carroll’s creations, but of a whole society that he knew. For a few short years the small and intimately interconnected world of Oxford was shared between the eccentric writer and mathematician, Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, and his muse, the daughter of the head of his College, Alice Liddell, aka Alice in Wonderland, and somehow, they seem to still be around.

Carroll may have been a fantasist, but the fabulous creatures and places in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass were solidly based on fact, and any day in Oxford you can see tourists admiring Humpty Dumpty’s wall, or visiting the Dodo in the Natural History Museum, or watching the rowers at Folly Bridge where Dodgson hired boats to row Alice and her sisters on the river.

This slightly surreal sight would probably have amused him as much as it would have embarrassed Alice, but once you have adjusted to the eccentricity of literary tourism, Oxford and Alice may be the most fruitful place to indulge it. This is partly because Carroll was a consummate intellectual games-player, and could scarcely look at a place or a person without blending it into his off-kilter world.

For example, in Alice’s Adventures, one of the most famous characters that Alice encounters is a Hatter, thought to be mad. If you walk along Oxford High Street today, you will pass the sites of the houses and shops of no fewer than three possible candidates for the original Hatter.  At 48–9 could be found Theophilus Carter, who looked remarkably like John Tenniel’s picture of the Hatter (the more remarkable because Tenniel almost certainly never visited Oxford or saw him) and who was rumoured to be the inventor of the Alarm Clock Bed, exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851, which ejected its occupants into a bath of cold water. (Just to help things along, Mrs Carter’s name was Mary Ann – coincidentally (?) the name of the White Rabbit’s maid.) And then at 83-4. there was a hatter who later became famous for selling his wife’s marmalade, Frank Cooper (yes, that Frank Cooper).

At number 22 was the most famous hatter of all, one Thomas Randall (grandson of the John Randall who rebuilt Magdalen Bridge from 1772), who ran the ‘London Hat Warehouse’ and by 1861 had moved to Grandpont House, literally built on (or over) the river. His daughter Eliza (later Lady Stainer) was a friend of Mary Prickett, Alice’s governess, and the Liddell girls often visited. Alice Liddell remembered in her old age that it had been a special pleasure to be allowed to take Rover, a retriever ‘belonging to a well-known Oxford tailor called Randall’… out for a walk. And Randall gave tea parties for poor local children. A hatter living near Folly Bridge would have been the kind of joke that Dodgson appreciated, the kind of joke on which the ‘Alice’ books were built.

But it is not just the endless intricate whimsey of the books that leads people to stare. Dodgson’s contemporaries, the occupants of the Oxford buildings that stand today, were remarkable, extraordinary, people. Perhaps one of the most enduring mental images conjured up by the ‘Alice’ books is of a small girl in a boat on a sunny river, but there cannot have been many – or any – other girls who were routinely taken on boat trips by two young men both of whom eventually had memorials in London’s Westminster Abbey. One was Lewis Carroll – the other was Robinson Duckworth, who went to officiate at the funeral of Charles Darwin, and was one of Queen Victoria’s and King Edward VII’s chaplains. Nor can any girl have gone on to be married in the same church, wearing a brooch given to them by the son of the reigning monarch – in this case, Queen Victoria’s youngest son, Prince Leopold – with whom, as a teenager, she had had a brief dalliance (and blacked his eye with an oar) – but, she noted, ‘I was never ordered to be beheaded.’

Alice’s father, Dean Henry Liddell, was (arguably) the most powerful academic in the world at the time, and head of (arguably) the most famous Oxford college – Christ Church – and as she grew up, Alice had the very best of tutors, including John Ruskin, the most powerful art critic of the century, as her drawing master for a while. Today, Christ Church is (arguably) almost as famous for ‘Alice’ as for its historical reputation (although being used as locations for the first two Harry Potter films has confused things further). There you can see memorial windows to Alice and her sister, and doorways and fire-irons that she would have known, and the quadrangles and gardens where she grew up.

And so the spirit of Alice and Carroll can be imagined to live in the Broad Walk (where Alice and her sisters planted trees to celebrate the Prince of Wales’s wedding), or Merton Field and its lawn where croquet was played; and the Oxford Botanic Garden, which may have been a model for the Red Queen’s and whose Keeper in the 1850s was the amiable and eccentric Professor Charles Daubeny probably the  model for the White Rabbit: ‘a little, droll, spectacled, old-fashioned figure, in gilt-buttoned blue tailcoat, velvet waistcoat, satin scarf, kid gloves too long in the fingers, a foot of bright bandanna handkerchief invariably hanging out behind.’

There are convoluted links to Carroll and Alice everywhere you look in both the books, and in Oxford, and some very curious sidelights on history. In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice takes a brief train ride and encounters a man dressed in white paper (!), who advises: ‘Never mind what they all say, my dear, but take a return-ticket every time the train stops.’ Where on earth can this apparent nonsense come from? It seems that originally, when the new railway branch line from Didcot to Oxford was being built, the main Abingdon to Oxford Road was going to cross it on a new bridge, close to Hinksey Paper Mill. The owner of the mill, one John Towle (who became mayor of Oxford in 1856), objected, possibly out of political cussedness (he was a non-conformist) or because he hoped for compensation. And so, being a paper miller, he built a paper house (of brown paper, with a fireplace) on part of the proposed embankment which delayed the opening of the line. Towle’s house was much extended and survived until 1996, as a listed building, until a tree fell on it.  So perhaps nothing is as nonsensical as it may seem.

Up river to the eel traps at Godstow, or down river to the Deserted Village at Nuneham, in rainstorms or on railways, from the treacle well at Binsey to the Sheep’s shop in St. Aldate’s, the associations keep coming, and even if they can be tenuous, they are always fascinating.  They are both a part of the mythology of Oxford and the currency of almost universal literary childhood.

Peter Hunt’s, Alice’s Oxford. People and Places that Inspired Wonderland is published by Bodleian Library Publishing, £12.99, https://bodleianshop.co.uk/

Peter Hunt is Adjunct Professor of Children’s Literature at Dublin City University