Fans pick 100 books like Lewis Carroll

A teasingly insightful glimpse of the Victorian Oxford of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, the two protagonists – and yet they aren’t! Yes, there is an Oxford University don with a penchant for photography, and yes his favourite subject is a ten-year-old local girl, and yes the text is scattered with subtle Wonderland and Looking-Glass references, but this is otherwise a quite different, very cleverly contrived, story. Structured as the inner thoughts of the main characters, After Such Kindness engagingly explores the dilemmas posed by the unusual friendship between a mature clergyman bachelor – Arnold convincingly captures Carroll’s playful sense of humour – and an inquisitive and trusting young girl, while sustaining a lurking sense of foreboding through to a thought-provoking finale.

This fictional interpretation of the creation of Alice’s Adventures is seen from the viewpoint of a constant, yet largely unremarked, fixture during these critical years: the Liddell family governess, Mary Prickett. The Oxford context of the time is convincingly depicted, and some of the burning issues of the day – Darwinism and Nonconformism, for instance – are interwoven with the more immediate tensions within the Liddell household, interpreted by an author who has more right than anyone to comment because Tait is the great-granddaughter of the real Alice herself. To sustain the pace she condenses the real events of 1857 to 1863 into a single fictionalised year, drawing on many well-known facts and suppositions – including Carroll’s rumoured amorous interest in Miss Prickett – and some lesser known details from her own family’s archives.

Although this guide to the many English towns and cities associated with Charles Dodgson, the author of Alice, is now more than 20 years old, it remains the most accessible and comprehensive Carrollian guide for the literary tourist. Lovett, a former President of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, provides admirably clear directions accompanied by over 200 illustrations and photographs, many coming from his own extensive collection. To quote from the cover text, Lovett takes the reader ‘from the tiny Cheshire village of Dodgson’s birth to the Surrey hillside that provides his final resting place … on a journey through Victorian Britain like no other’. True enough, and in between come locations in, most importantly, Yorkshire, Rugby, Oxford, London, the Isle of Wight, and Eastbourne.

Actually, it is ten books, covering 1855 to 1897 (with a reconstruction of the missing journals of April 1858 to May 1862 – their disappearance being the cause of countless conspiracy theories!). These diaries are the principal source of practically every piece of Lewis Carroll/Alice analysis that has ever been published, and provide a uniquely revealing chronology of the genesis of one of the world’s classic works of literature. These volumes mean that the enigmatic genius of Lewis Carroll is not the sole preserve of academics or historians; through them, he becomes accessible to us all. Transcribed and fully indexed by Edward Wakeling, a renowned world expert, whose extraordinarily detailed and insightful bibliographical and contextual notes provide an unparalleled insight into Victorian Oxford (London, Surrey, Yorkshire, Sussex, and more).

Some of these volumes are hard to get, but there are some remaining copies at the Lewis Carroll Society if interested. 

The Civil War was the first conflict in history to leave a detailed photographic record, and no one did it better than Mathew Brady. More than ten thousand war images are attributed to his studio and he did iconic portraits of Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, Walt Whitman, Horace Greeley, and other celebrities.

Today, artificial intelligence, iPhones, and streaming video are remaking our world. But back in the 1850s, photography was the latest technology. It soon became so affordable that soldiers on both sides of the struggle sent a visually accurate memento to loved ones back home before they marched into battle. 

As a kid, I wanted to be Lauren Bacall when I grew up. I watched To Have and Have Not almost weekly, emulating her sultry moves as “Slim” and wishing that I too could one day undermine the Nazis in a little black dress.  

I don’t regret my choice of teenage role model, but I do wish I had known about Lee Miller back then, who would have offered a real-life example of a femme fatale fighting for good with her talents. However, rather than grit and charm, Miller used her camera to expose the true cost of fascism. 

Carolyn Burke's biography takes us on an extraordinary journey through Miller’s life—from her days as a model to her work as a war correspondent. Miller had an uncanny ability to connect with the subjects of her photographs, creating a bridge between their world and ours.

During World War II, Miller’s work… show more.

This book is key to learning how to make the most of the camera-and-lens combination that is the photographer’s toolset and “paintbrush.”

Bryan Petersen explains the key concepts of photographic exposure in a way that is simple and unforgettable. This book also opens the portals to an experimental and open-ended approach to taking the most advantage of the creative potential that can be achieved when one works with exposure.

I’ve always loved the portraits the photographer Félix Nadar made of nineteenth-century Parisian celebrities such as Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire.

I went to this book—Nadar’s memoir—to learn more about the making of those pictures. There is a little bit of that, but what really gripped me was the weird and wonderful shaggy dog stories Nadar tells about his adventures in ‘aerostatic photography’—taking pictures from balloons.

Spoiler alert: there is a lot of crashing.

Print the Legend, the product of profound scholarly immersion in archival sources, manages to both offer a wealth of totally new information on the ways photographs have represented the West and give a superior account of themes and figures already extensively studied. Paradoxically, much of its excitement is due not so much to the way Sandweiss reads the photographs themselves – though we can all learn from her in this respect – but the way she reads the written texts (what she rightly terms “the legend”) that contextualized them. I am personally much indebted to Sandweiss’ treatment of the photographers who worked for the various government surveys and, most of all, to her nuanced readings of how Native Americans were seen over time.   

A century after German scholars developed art history as a highly conservative meta-theory well suited to the study of the broader categories of “civilization” and “culture,” the Viennese psychoanalytic movement developed a highly radical meta-theory that posited civilization and culture as fictions meant to curb individual desires. 

Art historian Mary Bergstein illuminates photography's rich role in Freud’s thinking. Bergstein deftly reminds us that Freud’s interdisciplinary approach to the history of art and the new science of psychoanalysis was specifically meaningful to his time and place. During the brief period when Vienna would be recognized as the capital of European modernism, psychoanalysis developed as a meta-theory—a radical one—with the cult of individual desires and fears at its heart.