The Making of the Alice Books: Lewis Carroll's Uses of Earlier Children's Literature

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

The title of this book is something of a misnomer. One expects a
detailed, historical account of how “Lewis Carroll” came to write
the Alice books, how they developed (with special reference to the
changes between the original Alice’s Adventures under Ground and the
now standard Alice in Wonderland). Instead, we are offered a scholarly
study of earlier children’s books that can be regarded as analogues
and, in some cases, as specific influences (if only revealed through
parody). Moreover, the text is brief—only a third of the whole. Most
of the remaining pages—in many respects, the most significant part of
the book—are devoted to illustrative documents: transcriptions or,
more interestingly, facsimile reproductions from books or kinds of books
that Carroll had in mind when producing his masterpieces.

There is much of interest here, most notably Reichertz’s account of
the early pedagogical battle between informative and imaginary books for
children, and also his account of various late–19th-century imitations
of the Alice books. His volume is, however, oddly structured (an
interesting account of childhood parodies by the Dodgson family is
postponed until the middle of the third chapter), there is an inordinate
amount of repetition, and Reichertz spends far too long establishing his
work in relation to previous commentators. He can also be crashingly
obvious (“The lullaby is an imaginative song that helps to prepare a
child for sleep”). Above all, he often fails to avoid that
occupational hazard of the writer on comedy: the solemn explaining of a
joke that falls with a dull, humorless thud. This book will be useful to
teachers of children’s literature, but one wishes that it had been
written with more sparkle and verve.

It is disturbing to find that neither a professor of English nor a
university press noticed the misspelling of Butler’s Hudibras and
(even more oddly in a book on Victorian literature) of Thackeray.