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Secret Life of Books
Every book has two stories: the one it tells, and the one it hides.
The Secret Life of Books is a fascinating, addictive, often shocking, occasionally hilarious weekly podcast starring Sophie Gee, an English professor at Princeton University, and Jonty Claypole, formerly director of arts at the BBC.
Every week these virtuoso critics and close friends take an iconic book and reveal the hidden story behind the story: who made it, their clandestine motives, the undeclared stakes, the scandalous backstory and above all the secret, mysterious meanings of books we thought we knew.
-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org
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Secret Life of Books
Alice in Wonderland: rabbit-holes, mad mathematics and the elephant in the room
Alice in Wonderland is one of the most widely translated and quoted books in the world, and yet it is - quite literally - nonsense. How was it ushered into the world and why did it travel quite so far?
Lewis Carroll, or Charles Dodgson to his mum and dad, was born in the north of England in 1832. Somehow, the unique circumstances of his life - a wild imagination, hatred of Victorian morality, appalling board school, love of mathematics and photography, debilitating stutter and a not entirely reassuring interest in children - came together in a children’s story of breathtaking originality.
Join Sophie and Jonty as they get to grips with this unlikely phenomenon, reveal how Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, the speech pathologist James Hunt, Alice Lidell and an extinct bird all played their part in bringing Alice into being, and ask whether his affection for young girls was part of the spirit of the age or something more disturbing.
Recommended reads: Morton N Cohen, Lewis Carroll: A Biography (Knopf, 1995); Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Story of Alice (Harvard University Press 2015); Jenny Woolf, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll (Haus Books, 2010)and Jonty Claypole, Words Fail Us Chapter 9 ( Wellcome, 2021); Gillian Beer, Alice in Space: The Sideways World of Lewis Carroll (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
