Alice at the Bodleian

On Tuesday morning we decided to visit the Bodleian Library (or maybe I decided and the kids agreed to fall in with my plans).  The Bodleian Library is the main library for the University of Oxford, a massive building built in the 1600's, largely due to the influence of Sir Thomas Bodley who was a retired ambassador of the Queen.  He had much energy so needed a project to fill his time, fortunatly he had a rich wife to help put his plans into place.  The library evolved into this building which contains more than 4 million books.

There are two exhibitions currently showing - the first is to celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Dickens and the other is a temporary exhibit about Alice in Wonderland.  Alice's Day seemed to interest all of us.  This year is the 150th anniversary of the original telling of the story.  Lewis Carroll and the original Alice (Liddelll) were both associated with Christ Church so this exhibit is particulary appropriate.  Imagine our dismay when we reached the room and were directed to a single display case containing 8 or 10 different editions of Alice in Wonderland.  It was interesting because they were all illustrated by differenht people but still (as Anna said) lame.  Good thing the admission was free.

With much of the day stretching before us, we decided to take in the Dickens exhibition as well.  My expectations were not high, after the Alice disappointment, so I was pleasantly surprised to enter a room filled with display cases.  Now this was an exhibition!  I also leaned a new word - ephemera, which means transitory written and printed matter not intended to be retained or preserved.  Fortunately for us, someone at the Bodleian had made the decion to collect playbills, maps, sheet music, etc. 

I found it interesting that in the early days people felt free to take Dicken's writings and hack them up to make them into theater productions (no copyright protection at that time).  This so incensed him that he included scathing dialogue in his "Nicholas Nickleby" about it.  I was happy to see on later playbills that he had given permission so obviously it got to the point where he was consulted.  I didn't realize that Dickens was apparently quite an actor himself.

I was also fascinated by a couple of different examples of his personal writing - one was a letter to a schoolmate when he was 13 or 14, apologizing for not returning a textbook and offering a diffrerent one in exchange.  I kept thinking about my sister who is such a Dickens fan and about how she would have enjoyed this so much.