The Red King's dream, or, Lewis Carroll in Wonderland - Jo Elwyn Jones

'Fascinating. . . mixes extensive research with intelligent and convincing guess-work' Daily Express 'A scholarly and approachable study, with the premise that Alice can be read at two levels: as a children's entertainment, or as a cunningly wrought, satirical roman-a-clef. ' Literary Review The quest began when the authors discovered a strange link between Lewis Carroll and their forebear, Prime Minister Gladstone. It led them to re-examine Carroll's diaries and search out his many little-known photographic portraits of the celebrities he recorded meeting -such as Huxley, Faraday, Tennyson and Ruskin. By the time they had visited all the places that Carroll frequented, they had unravelled an astonishing code whereby the Oxford mathematician laced his famous 'Alice' stories with clues to his scurrilous views on 'the great and the good' of Victorian England