As Tim Burton invites us to take a trip down his 3D rabbit hole this week, it's the ideal moment to stop and admire Lewis Carroll's original stories. There are two incredible artifacts online you can enjoy. The first is Carroll's original handwritten and self-illustrated manuscript. Scanned and presented by the The British Library, the 1864 novel, titled "Alice's Adventures Under Ground by Charles Dodgson", is the very first recorded version of the story by Dodgson who invented the tale for three young girls on an earlier boat trip. He officially published it the following year and assumed the name Lewis Carroll that we all know so well.
The British Library has done a fantastic job of presenting the work as a virtual book. You can use your mouse to turn the pages, zoom into the pages and rotate the book itself, use a search bar to locate specific passages, and even turn on an audio recording to have the book read aloud. Explore more books at the
British Library's Virtual Books index.
Not only is it fascinating to read the story in its original form, but it's astonishing to see both the meticulous and creative nature of Dodgson in crafting his book, the precision in formating all of the sentences and the arrangement of his illustrations.
This week the British Film Institute made available online, for the first time, the very first film made from the Lewis Carroll books. Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow's Alice In Wonderland was created in 1903 and drew its inspiration from the illustrations by John Tenniel included in the first printing of Carroll's book. Although film archivists have recently performed a restoration on the more than 100 year-old film, what we have is just eight minutes of the original twelve. At the time, that was the longest film produced in England. You can read more at the
BFI's website.
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