Books like After Such Kindness — picked by fans

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. 

Mention the name ‘Lewis Carroll’ and most people will immediately think of the two Alice books. Very few would equate the name to Charles Dodgson, the photographer. This, however, is the aspect of the multi-talented Oxford don which Gernsheim, a professional photographer himself, appraised in his 1949 first edition for the very first time, concluding that Dodgson was ‘the most outstanding photographer of children in the nineteenth century. Many of the black and white plates substantiate this claim, but equally, Dodgson’s mastery of this new invention enabled him to meet and photograph (sometimes uniquely) numerous famous writers and artists, as well as many Oxford contemporaries. As an aside, Edward Wakeling’s 2015 Catalogue Raisonné is a comprehensive listing of every one of Dodgson’s hundreds of known photographs.

Yes, another series recommendation. Imagine one of those currently popular plots where a small group of people wake up in a place with no memory and don’t know where they are or why they are there. This series is like that only everybody who has ever lived is there with you, and you retain all your memories from your first life. Also, the entire planet seems to be one long river.

Things get weird pretty fast. The Riverworld series focuses on human interaction, starting from a science fiction premise. There are aliens and such, but no interstellar space battles. The series is very engaging and the idea of putting together famous figures from the entire history of humanity was, for me, extremely compelling.

This book quickly became my favorite novel by Woolf, perhaps because it depicts a large Victorian family over time.

When her mother dies, Eleanor keeps the home fires burning for her siblings, Morris in the law courts, Edward at Oxford, Delia, Milly, and the younger Martin and Rose. We watch them grow and, fifty years later, deduce what has become of their lives when they talk to each other at a party.

Woolf’s narrative sweeps across England, across London, giving us vignettes of her characters from which the reader must make up the whole. My copy of this book is tattered from re-reading. I loved following along with Woolf’s attempt to gather everything she knew into her story of the Pargiter family.

This was the first book about architecture I read and it remains one of my favourites. Clark wrote it in 1928, long before ‘Civilisation’ made him a television star and it has the freshness of a young man trying out ideas and working to understand something he doesn’t like. He was writing about Gothic architecture at a time when it was completely out of fashion. Clark’s subtitle ‘an essay in the history of taste’ is tongue in cheek because Gothic for his generation meant bad taste. Tracing its roots back into the eighteenth century Clark shows how it developed to embody the ideals of the Victorian age. 

What do the writers you are drawn to reveal about you? Why at certain points in our lives do we become “attached” to certain authors? The process of attachment is mysterious. As we age (and change) some things remain constant. Our attachment to a particular author may have begun in our youth, but evolved as we have. To reconnect with a favorite author can put us in touch with our younger self in unexpected ways. Mead shows how much Middlemarch has “spoken” to her throughout her life. This book is perhaps more in harmony with my own than any on the list. I have come to love books that underscore how what we read can be inseparable from the person we become.

I love this book because nothing more perfectly proves the historian’s adage that the past is a foreign country; they did things differently there. Houghton understands the importance of mid-nineteenth century Great Britain’s cultural, economic, and social ascendancy in determining and understanding American attitudes from work to play, attitudes to class, race, taste in literature, and so on.

The ambition of wealth and power, which in the eighteenth century had destabilized the natural God-given order of things, was now seen as respectable and to be pursued. Weakness and poverty were now a source of shame and weakness. Above all, Houghton shows the importance of hero-worship to the generation coming of age in mid-nineteenth century, a cult of loyalty to a leader could exorcise the antisocial forces of class or individual ambition.

A hero could also act as a constraint on democracy in which the doctrines of liberty and democracy could… show more.

I found this delightful, well-written account of great interest and reference. It covers the widespread passion for all aspects of natural history during the Victorian era, how the collectors of ferns, seashells, birds’ eggs, and skins, butterflies, beetles, orchids, and all manner of curiosities from the natural world, pursued their hobbies. This general acceptance by society led to the formation of clubs, articles, and even specialist journals and popular lectures by amateurs and scientists.

Beautifully illustrated, this book, even though constrained in its timeframe, provides a wonderful introduction to the topic. Since I cover many of the people and motives included here, I much enjoyed another writer’s perspective on them.