Who the Hell is Alice? And why her?

I do keep coming back to Alice, don’t I? In the last 7 days I’ve purchased two new Royal Talens sketching journals, the first 9x13 and the second 21x13 and in both of them my first test sketches have been copies of Alice in Wonderland illustrations. What is it about the book?

I’m sure that I’ve explained how I first came into contact with the books before, but in case I haven’t or you missed it, here goes. My parents never had their own house so they, my two brothers and I all lived in my grandmother’s house. My grandfather died a few years before I was born. My parents didn’t keep a lot of books, but I remember that in the living room on a shelf above the bureau there were some red hardbacked copies of famous novels. There weren’t a huge number of them. I can remember there being David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Little Women and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (and Alice through the Looking Glass). There was also the copy of Great Expectations that my Mum had won in school, which belonged to a different set.

The photographs shows the set I'm talking about, although these aren't my grandfather's actual books, which are with my brother in Hillingdon now. Sadly I couldn't find a photo which showed Alice in Wonderland or any of the others that I remember. 

These books, the look of them with the gold lettering on their faded red cloth spines, fascinated me from a very early age. My grandfather had bought them. They were published by the Daily Express in 1933. My grandfather would have been 26 years old when they were published, so he could have bought them new. It was two years before he married my grandmother. It’s also possible he bought them second hand later – I just don’t know. I know that they were published in 1933 because I've just googled them, and pictures from sets being sold on ebay have just filled me with nostalgia. My Nan always reckoned that they’d had more of them at one time, but how many they’d had and what happened to the others I don’t recall asking. Too late to ask now.

So, as I said, I was fascinated by them. Time would eventually come when I would read all of them, except Little Women, which I’ve never read yet. Not a conscious choice not to, I just haven’t. I enjoyed all of them except Jane Eyre. But when I was first becoming interested in things around me, the only one I could even try to read was Alice. It helped that Alice had illustrations. At that tender age I didn’t really get much of the story, and some of Tenniel’s pictures frightened me. But then, kids do like to be frightened to an extent. Then, only a couple of years later, there was a kids’ TV series on – it may have been at lunchtimes – when an actor, who may well have been Aubrey Morris read out the stories in a series of short episodes while Tenniel’s illustrations were shown periodically. I was hooked on the stories. This was also when I developed a preference for Looking Glass over Wonderland.

So maybe this is it, that Alice has maintained my fascination because it at least helped to ignite a spark in me of two things which I would come to love very much – drawing and literature. Perhaps – it works as an explanation to me at any rate.