Impact case study database

Giddens and Jaques’ research on the history and especially adaptation history of Alice (a) led directly to Wonderland Week, 15-19 September 2015, an event organised by Jaques, with Maria Nikokajeva and Siddharth Pandey, hosted by Homerton College, Cambridge, and co-organised with the Lewis Carroll Society (S1).

Focusing on ‘transformations’, Wonderland Week incorporated a variety of events, targeted at beneficiaries ranging from members of the Lewis Carroll Society, to actors, artists, musicians, teachers, and local families. The programme across the week included a two-day conference, Fitzwilliam Museum Exhibition, Cambridge Arts Picturehouse screening, theatrical show at Anglia Ruskin’s Mumford Theatre, musical performance at Homerton College, and a Homerton garden tea party for local families, all detailed below. Local enterprises such as the Arts Picturehouse benefitted from selling out a showing of Alice films, while the Milton Brewery generated community interest in its beers by providing two barrels of a specially brewed Wonderland Ale that was sold at Homerton as part of the tea party (building upon Giddens and Jaques’ work on Alice beers, publication c above). Local venues such as the Fitzwilliam Museum and Mumford Theatre saw additional visits from the general public to Cambridge University and Anglia Ruskin sites.

A review of the various international celebrations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was published in the Children's Book History Society Newsletter for December 2015, commented that Wonderland Week offered ‘[b]y far the most significant scholarly event in the UK’ (S2); it also had the largest number of associated impact activities. These include:

- Multidisciplinary conference: Alice through the Ages

This three-day conference explored such diverse topics as Alice’s influence on hotel design and the history of fashion – following from the Alice monograph’s wide concern with the ‘sociology of the text’. The conference attracted speakers and delegates with a variety of interests, including substantive participation from non-academic members of the Lewis Carroll Society, co-sponsors of the event. Macmillan, Carroll’s original publishers, sponsored the conference banquet. The Norfolk Children’s Bookshop was a local enterprise supplying the conference with an extensive Alice bookshop. 250 participants.

- Curated exhibition – Fitzwilliam Museum

The exhibition on ‘Fantastical Victorians’ at the museum sought to highlight the late-nineteenth century’s fascination with bold whimsy – pointing to a culture surrounded by objects inspiring the imagination and giving rise to Alice and the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Held in the Graham Robertson Room of the museum, the guided exhibition permitted unusually close consultation of materials, booked in small groups. It included rarely seen materials such as sketches by Edward Lear and an autograph letter from Carroll, and was designed in close collaboration with Jaques, based upon the findings of the Alice monograph. 48 participants.

- Curated exhibition – Homerton College Library

Alice’s importance in material culture was addressed by a public exhibition of translated and re-illustrated editions at Homerton College library. Homerton College has ambitions to host one of the leading research collections in the field, including the acquisition of rare books and manuscripts, and this exhibition helped to highlight that aim to students and visitors to the College. It also enhanced the curatorial team’s experience of handling artefacts and issues arising from Museum lending. The Librarian notes: ‘Working with the Lewis Carroll Society to arrange the loan of many items and ensure their care whilst in our hands was a new experience for the whole Library team and a helpful development point for future exhibition’ (S3). The exhibition was based upon the Alice monograph’s discussion of significant post-Macmillan editions and translations.

- Arts Picturehouse Lecture and Screening

The Cambridge Arts Picturehouse offered a public lecture on ‘ Alice in Cinema’, coupled with a double-bill screening of the earliest Alice film (Hepworth, 1903) and the (then) most recent (Burton, 2010), both of which are extensively analysed in the Alice monograph. This was a rare opportunity to study these two films side-by-side and was open to the public to enhance knowledge of Alice adaptation and cinema history. The viewing sold out Screen 2, occasioning employment for staff and resultant refreshment sales. 148 seats.

- Dramatic Interpretation at the Mumford Theatre, Anglia Ruskin

The Mumford Theatre hosted Kevin Moore’s one-man-show on Lewis Carroll, ‘Crocodiles in Cream’. The production was aimed at local families as well as participants in Wonderland Week. Employment of 1 performer and associated ticket sales for the theatre.

- The Music of Alice

London-based Cellophony offered a public performance of their specially-produced musical version of Alice in Wonderland, narrated by Geoff Ward, Principal of Homerton College. Employment of 4 musicians. 107 tickets - sold out. Impact on attending musician evidenced by (S4).

- Exhibition and Practice – Alice in Art

We hosted an installation of William Stok’s 24-metre drawing ‘Alice in Wonderland’, accompanied by a public lecture from the artist. This was followed later in the week by a round table discussion with children’s illustrators John Vernon Lord and Marcia Williams, in which they discussed the challenges and affordances of John Tenniel’s seminal work on Alice from the perspective of contemporary practice . This second event was influential to Cambridge’s large community of children’s illustrators, with many of Anglia Ruskin’s MA in Children’s Book Illustration students in attendance. Artistic impact evidenced by (S4).

- Alice in the Classroom

The Children’s Literature Special Interest Group of the English Association sponsored a ‘Wonderland in the Classroom’ workshop for teachers and trainees, held in the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Training co-delivered to primary teachers included ‘Alice in the Classroom’, a half-day workshop for 45 primary teachers and teacher trainees. Giddens’ session discussed how the history of Alice on film, as outlined in his and Jaques’ monograph, can be used to shape learning outcomes in literacy and intercultural communication, as evidenced in (S5).

- Wonderland tea-party

The finale of the event was a tea party, in which local adults and children celebrated all-things- Alice in the buildings and grounds of Homerton College. The event included Alice-related objects exemplifying the importance of this text for the history of childhood and children’s books. 246 tickets were sold to the public, and members of the college also attended. The College especially benefitted from members of the public coming to its grounds for the first time, enhancing its reputation in the local community. Macmillan Publishers provided bunting and stickers and activity sheets for children. Cambridge Waterstone’s sponsored a book stall to sell a variety of Alice editions.

- Event Engagement

The event was widely noticed on television and in newspapers generating significant reach across the city community (S6). A Cambridge University podcast on ‘Alice through the Ages’ received over 700 Facebook shares. The teachers’ day allowed 45 local educators to take research findings on Alice directly to their classrooms; The UK Literacy Association Representative for the Eastern Region, noted that: ‘The workshop opened my eyes to the ways in which literary classics can be taught creatively beyond the framework of the English curriculum and of their potential, in doing so, to stimulate wider holistic learning opportunities for primary-aged children. I left the workshop feeling inspired to look at classic texts through a fresh lens when planning - to read, discuss and appreciate them with my class in new ways, diving deeper into visual literacy and the use of film in particular’ (S5). Anna Kérchy calls Wonderland Week one of the ‘landmark projects in Carrollian studies’ (S2).

Beyond Wonderland Week, the book has underpinned a number of physical and online collections and exhibitions bringing knowledge to the general public of the material aspects of the work and its subsequent history. It shaped curatorial practice towards Harvard University’s ‘Alice 150: Alice in America’ exhibition (S7) – both Giddens and Jaques have been Houghton Library Fellows (d, h) – and the University of Michigan’s ‘Curiouser and Curiouser’ exhibition (S7). The Brighton Toy and Model Museum’s Alice collection holds a Through the Looking-Glass biscuit tin, which is examined for the first time extensively in this monograph, and the museum relies upon these findings to explain the rare object’s significance (S7). The monograph is also significantly influencing the ongoing ‘Curating Illustrations of Wonderland’ project at the University of South Florida, including in methodological interventions on digital curatorship (S7).

Beyond the archive, the monograph is cited in the US government’s account of Alice copyright (S8), as it offers the most detailed investigation of Carroll’s rejection of the first edition, subsequently released in the US, why that rejection and publication occurred, and what American publishers did to promote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland subsequently. The book has also enhanced public understanding by being drawn on by many different online sources of information about the Alice books ranging from fandom sites to scholarly webpages on Salvador Dali’s response to the Alice stories. (S9).

As part of the 150th anniversary, Jaques (having left for a position at Cambridge University) and Giddens (still employed by Anglia Ruskin) also contributed to a freely available critical edition, in association with the Public Domain Review, on Medium.com, which employed practising artists to produce new illustrations and animations (b). This freely available scholarly edition has been accessed over 11,000 times, disseminating our scholarship on the history of Alice to a diverse general public. In October 2019, Giddens gave a talk on ‘Alice and Girlhood’ to the Stephen Perse Senior School, Cambridge, which was attended by all forms (approx. 400 pupils), and bolstered students’ knowledge of gender history through Alice.

Physical events arising from the publication of the Alice publishing history therefore directly reached over 1,000 members of the general public, including artists, musicians, pupils, and teachers. With digital materials, such as the Harvard and Michigan virtual exhibitions and the Medium edition, that reach is much greater, putting the rich history of Alice to a diverse range of beneficiaries.