Alice keeps getting bigger and more fantastical, as she rematerialises in a growing range of films, video games, comic strips and fashion designs
“BEGIN AT THE beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” This advice, proffered by the White King in “Alice in Wonderland”, is a handy rubric for storytellers and curators. But a new Alice-themed exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London takes a different approach.
Some of Alice’s afterlives have proved truly bizarre. In the 1970s she was deployed in an American government-backed video meant to put children off illegal drugs. More recently Alice has been enlisted as a poster girl for South African women protesting against Jacob Zuma. She has even inspired a project at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research , which explains why its scientists, on discovering the very smallest lump of nuclear glue, called it the Humpty Dumpty particle.
But amid the increasingly outré exhibits—Tim Walker’s Pirelli calendar from 2018, artwork for Alice-inspired music by Lady Gaga and Little Simz—the man who launched the myth disappears from view. Although the exhibition is not intended to be straightforwardly biographical, it underplays the darkness of Lewis Carroll’s imagination.
A serious mathematical scholar, Dodgson made pithy contributions to the study of algebra and logic. An inventor too, he loved contriving what, with a touch of vanity, he called “dodges”: a steering mechanism for tricycles, an adhesive strip for sealing envelopes, a device that made it easier for invalids to read books in bed and an early version of what would later become Scrabble.
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