Lewis Carroll and Alice on Stage: The Savile Clarke Letters

In August 1886, Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) received a letter asking permission to dramatize Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. This book presents and annotates 103 letters from Carroll to the playwright Henry Savile Clarke (of which six are to Savile Clarke’s daughters). Carroll tells Savile Clarke in detail exactly what he would like to see in the stage performance. Savile Clarke wrote the script for the first full dramatization of the Alice books, which was staged at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre in London in 1886-87, and revived at the Globe Theatre, also in London, in 1888-89. This is the largest body of focused Carroll correspondence to which we have access. It is deeply revealing of Carroll’s personality and his relationship to his most brilliant writings, the two Alice books. The book includes a posthumous essay, ＂Lewis Carroll in the Wings,＂ by the eminent Carroll biographer Morton N. Cohen. The book also includes supplementary materials on British theatre in the late Victorian period and the child-acting controversy.

Clare Imholtz has published her research on Lewis Carroll in Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America, The Book Collector, the Knight Letter, the Carrollian, and elsewhere. She has co-authored a bibliography of Carroll’s Sylvie & Bruno books; edited Elizabeth Sewell’s Lewis Carroll: Voices from France; and prepared an index to Jabberwocky, a journal of the Lewis Carroll Society (UK). From 2006 to 2014, she was secretary of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America and an editor of the Society’s journal, the Knight Letter.