Alice I Have Been
Alice I Have Been is based loosely on the life of Alice Liddell, the young girl who inspired Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) to write Alice in Wonderland. The book is broken down into three time periods. Melanie Benjamin took a few facts that were known about Alice and Mr. Dodgson and filled in the blanks with fiction.
PART ONE
The Facts: The Liddell family and Charles Dodgson were neighbors at Oxford. Mr. Dodgson was a teacher there and a friend of the family. He took a picture of Alice dressed as a beggar girl when she was seven.
The Story: Alice is an untamed young lady who is always getting dirty and can’t understand why she is constantly reprimanded for doing or saying something wrong. The only person she feels truly understands her is Mr. Charles Dodgson. He spends a great deal of time with Alice and her sisters, Ina and Edith. One day he takes her out alone to a garden near her house and takes the infamous picture of “The Little Beggar Girl”. Alice is nervous being around Dodgson alone, but she is strangely excited as well. On another afternoon when Alice is ten, Dodgson and his friend take the three sisters out on a boating trip. It is here that he first tells them the story of Alice’s Adventures Underground. Later Alice begs him to write it down so that this special attention he has given her will last forever, and she will live on forever as a little girl (if only in a book). Alice begins to feel that she is in love with Mr. Dodgson even though he is twenty years her senior.
PART TWO
The Facts: The Liddell family and Charles Dodgson ended their close relationship for reasons unknown when Alice was eleven years old. Later as a young woman Alice and the Liddell family became acquainted with Prince Leopold, son of Queen Victoria, when he attended Oxford.
The Story: As a young woman in her twenties, Alice knows that something happened to make her family cut off their association with Mr. Dodgson, but she cannot remember what it was. She says it is because she was so young at the time, but truly she is repressing the memory because it is too painful. Alice and Prince Leopold become friends and quickly fall in love. Alice hopes that Queen Victoria will consent to a marriage, but she knows it will not happen easily, for Alice is not royalty. Mr. John Ruskin, an Oxford teacher and friend of the family, threatens to expose the scandalous relationship with Dodgson and ruin any chance Alice has of marrying Prince Leopold.
PART THREE
The Facts: Alice married Reginald Hargreaves and bore three sons. When she was a much older woman she sold her handwritten copy of Alice’s Adventures Underground in order to save her family’s home. There was a renewed interest in her and the relationship with Dodgson/Carroll at the time.
The Story: Alice has many regrets as an older woman. Being immortalized as a little girl is not the grand idea she once thought it was. She is a not a warm wife or mother, and she shares almost nothing about her time with Mr. Dodgson with her family. She is finally able to admit to herself, however, what happened one summer afternoon to cause her family to cease associating with her beloved Charles Dodgson.
The first part of this story made me immensely uncomfortable. Even though Benjamin tried to write Charles Dodgson in a semi-sympathetic light, I couldn’t help but feel as if she was vilifying one of my favorite children’s authors. Depending on your interpretation of the novel, he is depicted as either a pedophile or a man so lost in the world that he can only find true companionship with a little girl. However, there is no evidence to prove that the relationship between Alice Liddell and Charles Dodgson was inappropriate. It is all merely rumor and speculation.
The end of the story was tremendously depressing, and that’s not really Benjamin’s fault. Alice Liddell’s later life was filled with several heartbreaking events. The only thing that saved me from really disliking this book was little Alice’s spunky personality as a child and her romance with Prince Leopold as a young woman. Leo, as Alice calls him, was wonderfully written, so in love, so full of dreams, so idealistic. No wonder Alice loves him. I had already read a short online biography of Alice Liddell before beginning the book, so I knew that she and Leo would not end up together, but I couldn’t help myself; I rooted for them anyway.
A childhood friend and fellow bookworm recommended this book to me. She warned me that it was definitely going to make me uncomfortable, but she said that I would be happy I read it. There were parts of it that were just lovely, precocious and sweet just like many of the children’s authors I love so well: Carroll, Barrie, Hodgson Burnett, and Alcott. But I don’t think I will be recommending this book to anyone. It’s just not the kind of story I’d ever fall in love with. A story doesn’t have to have a tidy, happy ending for me to love it, but it has to have hope. I didn’t feel much hope when I finished Benjamin’s novel, and perhaps that is the main reason I will not count it among my favorites. My friend Kelley was right though. I am glad that I read it. I feel as if I have been on a journey. I didn’t arrive where I had hoped to, and some awful things happened along the way. But I’m glad that I went. If I hadn’t read Alice I Have Been I would have saved myself some discomfort and sadness, but I would have missed out on all the delightful things too.
