Artwork by Kristjana S. Williams.
"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"
So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid) whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her...."
“Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” was published in 1865. It was inspired when, three years earlier on 4 July, Lewis Carroll and his friend, the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, rowed up the River Isis in Oxford in a boat. With them were also the three young daughters of Henry Liddell (dean of Christ Church, Oxford): Lorina, Alice, and Edith.
The journey began at Folly Bridge just south of the city centre and ended five miles (8 km) away in the Oxfordshire village of Godstow. During the trip, Carroll told the three Liddell daughters a story that featured a bored little girl named Alice who goes looking for an adventure. They instantly loved it, and Alice asked Carroll to write it down for her.
He began writing the manuscript of the story the next day, although that earliest version is lost to history. The girls and Carroll took another boat trip a month later when he elaborated the plot to the story of Alice, and in November, he began working on the manuscript in earnest.
Ever since “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” was published, it has never been out of print. It has been translated into - at least - 97 languages, and also it has been adapted to all sorts of platforms - the stage, the screen, radio, art, ballet, theme parks, board games and video games.
In many parts of the world, there are Lewis Carroll societies dedicated to his works, and in 1982, a memorial stone to Carroll was unveiled in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, London.
These days the Victoria & Albert Museum in London brings Carroll’s “Wonderland” to life, celebrating 157 years of adaptions and reinventions of the book. The exhibition is called “Curiouser and Curiouser”, and is a creative journey through the sceneries and happenings of the book. And P.S.... in the V&A webshop, several lovely items related to the Wonderland world are on sale.
Here’s to you, a Handful of History - 5 exciting things on history I thought were worth sharing. Enjoy!
Who am I? This question philosophers, politicians, psychologists, poets, artists, scientists, theologians and more have been trying to answer throughout history. However, when looking for an answer, you can easily end up more confused than clear because… Which you is ‘who’ exactly? The person you are today? Five years ago? Who you’ll be in 10 years? And when is ‘am’? This week? Today? This hour? This second? And which aspect of you is ‘I’? Are you your physical body? Your thoughts and feelings? Your actions? To demonstrate the complexity - and deliver at least some answers - the Greek historian Plutarch used the story of a ship. Here's an entertaining cartoon version of Plutarch's story.
The Trader. “Potatoes are money for us. Euro, dollar, Georgian lari…everything is potato.” This short Netflix documentary offers a - for many of us - rare insight to Georgia. We travel through the country alongside 'The Trader', a man who sells second-hand clothing and household items out of his minibus in the Georgian rural outskirts. When the locals find something they fancy, a pair of boots, a toy for the children, they often pay with potatoes, which is the most common currency in the region.
Dashiell Oatman-Stanford calls himself "a Soviet watch nerd". His friends call him The Catalog. The website he is running brings together highlights from his impressive archive of around 3,000 pieces. "I am not a collector of watches as much as I am a collector of history and culture - fragments of a life that once was. And indeed, these timepieces have an incredible tale to tell”, Oatman-Stanford says.
Throat singing in Kangirsuk. Two throat singers from the remote Inuit village of Kangirsuk in northern Québec face off in a friendly traditional katajjaq (throat singing) duel. As they sing, the camera takes us through sweeping imagery of the duo’s Arctic home. You can watch it here in this beautiful - and quite hypnotising - 3 minutes long video. Inuit throat singing is a form of musical performance uniquely found among the Inuit. Traditionally it’s performed as an entertaining contest between two women who sing duets in a close face-to-face formation with no instrumental accompaniment. The first who runs out of breath or cannot maintain the pace of the other singer (…or the first to start laughing) is out of the game. The duel generally lasts between one and three minutes, and the winner is the singer who beats the largest number of people.
I like buying books and keeping them too, placing every one of them right up there on my bookshelves. Does that make me a collector or a hoarder? I’ve never really thought about it until I listened in on this charming little radio show by cultural historian Diarmuid Hester. “Vivian Maier left over 150,000 negatives when she died in 2009. Her boxes and boxes of unprinted street photographs were stacked alongside shoulder-high piles of newspapers in her Chicago home. The artist Francis Bacon's studio has been painstakingly recreated in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, complete with paint-spattered furniture and over 7,000 items. Diarmuid Hester considers what the difference might be between hoarding and collecting and between the stuff assembled by these artists and his own father's shelves of matchday programmes.”
Thanks for reading! This newsletter is free - to show your support please share it on your favourite social media 🙏 See links below.
Majken xx
Blogger Historical Non-Fiction
First time you read this? You can subscribe here.
A trip around central Copenhagen, 1906 - in colour - showing the women selling fish at “Gammel Strand”, the Old Stock Exchange (“Børsen”), trams and horse-drawn carriages driving through the streets and men, women and children wearing a typical early-1900s’ outfit.
Comments