"The quest began when the authors discovered a strange link between Lewis Carroll and their forebear, Prime Minister Gladstone. It led them to re-examine Carroll's diaries and search out his many little-known photographic portraits of the celebrities he recorded meeting - such as Faraday, Huxley, Tennyson, Ruskin. By the time they had visited all the places that Carroll frequented, they had unravelled an astonishing code whereby the Oxford mathematician laced his famous "Alice" stories with clues to his scurrilous views on "the great and the good" of Victorian England." ( )

A highly entertaining quest that endeavours to link virtually everyone of note with whom Lewis Carroll had acquaintance or dealings with characters in the Alice books. A perfectly legitimate attempt , given Carroll's fascination with puzzles of various kinds. The results therefore range from the very probable to the entirely fancilful. The Carroll family's destruction of many of his papers after his death has created an area ripe for speculation about his personality and motives and there have been countless theses written upon all aspects of his life and output. I was delightfully taken on a ride through the Victorian landscape and culture and some important areas were illuminated convincingly. Not every theory held up but with vital evidence irretrievably lost we shall ever be mired in the realms of speculation.

Enough already.

That was my immediate response to this attempt to "decode" Lewis Carroll's Alice books. Oh, there is no question that the books contain a lot of inside jokes. (Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie, anyone? Or the Dodo?) But a series of inside jokes do not make a nineteenth century version of a Da Vinci Code. And yet, this book is devoted to finding a secret meaning in everything.

Francis James Child once commented of the Robin Hood scholar J. Hunter that he "could have identified Pigrogromitus and Quinapalus, if he had given his mind to it." This is an even more extreme instance of the same thing. Even where Jones and Gladstone's identifications are possible, that does not make them true. And most of them are based on very thin reeds indeed.

Alice Liddell herself, in requesting the story that became Alice's Adventures, demanded that there be "nonsense in it." A series of subtle references is not nonsense. I am very much inclined to think that Carroll -- who cared for Alice very deeply -- got what she asked asked for. ( )