Vietnam National University - Lewis Carroll

I enjoyed giving the talk and it has given me a structure so I can write it up. The people I met were receptive and had good questions even though I suspected them of googling them during the talk.

One lady asked me a question about the White Queen and it led to a conversation about female mentors, time travel and why modern women aren't as supportive as the two Queens were to help Alice.

The response has been very positive and I may go to Vietnam and Singapore next year.

The Building where the Lewis Carroll Society Committee Meet.

There is an article in the London Evening Standard about the building where we hold our Committee meetings. I avoid the 'Homes and Property' section of newspapers and magazines so it was a friend who spotted it.


"Playing cards are painted on to the ceiling of the Queen of Hearts meeting room and there are White Rabbit-shaped chairs for the boss in the smaller White Queen rooms, which open up into a bright 40-seat conference suite."

A remarkable space to hold a meeting.

Lewis Carroll Reference - David Starkey 'Henry VIII - Peronalities and Politics'

I'm reading the David Starkey book at the moment and saw him speak on the weekend about Henry VIII as 'the first Brexiteer'. I got a signed copy of one of his early books and it is great. I love intelligent, gossipy and analytical writing. There is a Lewis Carroll reference early on one page 7.

"Henry could not simply say, like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, 'off with his head'. Instead, the accused had to be condemned by due process of law. Trials, of course, were rigged. But rigging took much effort and could go embarrassingly wrong."

A great view of History.

Lewis Carroll Goes to Vietnam!

Event: The Influence of Lewis Carroll on Management Thinking

24 November, Faculty of Education, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University- Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

A talk by Stephen Folan on the influences on Lewis Carroll that formed his world-view, the influence of the ‘Alice’ books on people today and how we can see examples of behaviour from these stories in modern corporate life today.

Evolving Communication - Emoji Wonderland!

 It is incredible that old stories can be restored through modern technology and techniques. Even though we know 'Alice in Wonderland' when you see a different set of pictures attached to it because it is set in a different time it will give you a new perspective. A man called Joe Hale has translated some well-known stories using emojis.

An emoji is a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication such as the smiley faces that you use in instant messaging.  Emojis are almost like modern-day hieroglyphics, An enterprising individual, Joe Hale, has created special emojis and used them to make a four-foot-tall Wonderland Emoji Poster that tells the story of ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

The tale begins with a combination of "backhand pointing down," "rabbit," and "heavy large circle," to depict Alice's journey down the rabbit hole. Alice, represented by the princess emoji, encounters a Cheshire "smiling cat face with open mouth emoji," a mad "top hat emoji," and frightening "crown emoji" of hearts. Hale painstakingly translated these images, along with dozens more, from Carroll's original text, layering over 25,000 separate symbols until "the emoji text was sufficiently dense that [he] could transliterate the emoji back into a crude version of the original."

Joe believes the idea, ‘"Alice in Wonderland translated into emoji," is powerful enough to create images in the reader's mind's eye, and anybody curious enough can develop these images into their own personal Wonderland in their head and escape to that place. People should just use my poster as a visual aid to think about Wonderland, trip out and explore their imagination. Or: be inspired to read some Lewis Carroll!’

Here is a couple of examples of his translation of the ‘Alice’ text to a set of images. The emojis below translates as:

We're all mad here

The Hatter was the first to break the silence

Other Alice quotes as emojis can be seen on twitter account @emojiwonderland

Joe says “this project has taken inspiration from the intensely visual atmosphere of the Disney Alice in Wonderland film, William Burroughs' writings on hieroglyphics and the Buddhist concept of visualisation.”

'He described the creative process. 'When I was translating I put the emojis on in layers—almost more like painting than writing—until the emoji text was sufficiently dense that I could transliterate the emoji back into a crude version of the original. I think I put about five of these layers on, then countless read-throughs, cross-checks, etc. until I was reading through the text and not changing anything. It was a dreamy, dizzying endeavour.'

I wonder if this use of emojis might be a step in the direction of a new form of cryptography. 

The poster is available online for $29.95 at http://joehale.bigcartel.com/product/wonderland-emoji-poster. I will confess that I bought a copy as an appreciation of his quixotic, creative idea.

Lewis Carroll and Violence

I'm off to a talk this evening that should be very interesting. Lewis Carroll’s worlds are full of violent encounters. There is the  Queen of Hearts terrorising Wonderland with threats of decapitation.  Then we have the combatants Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Lion and the Unicorn and the Red and White Knights. Let's not forget Alice kicking Bill the Lizard out of the chimney.

The British literary critic and academic, Gillian Beer – whose book, Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll, has recently been awarded the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism – is going to explore this topic within the context of Victorian literature and society.

The details are below for people who want to go.

The Eleventh Roger Lancelyn Green Memorial Lecture

Presented by The Lewis Carroll Society

OFF WITH HER HEAD! Lewis Carroll and Violence

Professor Dame Gillian Beer

7.00 pm Friday 13 October 2017

The Art Workers’ Guild, 6 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AT

Tickets: £10

Book online to reserve your seat: http://lewiscarrollsociety.org.uk/store

Tickets will also be available on the door.

Lewis Carroll and The Sergeant Pepper Album

Before Sergeant Pepper 

There is an obvious influence of Lewis Carroll on the album – “Sgt.Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”.  The single, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is based on a painting that Julian Lennon brought back from school one day.   John Lennon used this as inspiration to develop a psychedelic anthem that he also admitted also owed something to Lewis Carroll.

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds starts off.

‘Picture yourself in a boat on a river
with tangerine trees and marmalade skies.
Somebody calls you; you answer quite slowly,
a girl with kaleidoscope eyes’.

Lennon said in an interview with Playboy (1980):

“The images were from 'Alice in Wonderland.' It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty Dumpty. The woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep and the next minute they are rowing in a rowing boat somewhere and I was visualizing that.”

There are many reasons why the picture of Lewis Carroll is on the album of ‘Sgt Pepper’ apart from John Lennon’s love of the books.   The “Alice” books have had a constant buzz about them for 150 years and there is no sign of that stopping. Each generation rediscovers the material and reworks it into something extraordinary: plays, films, cartoons, online games and music. Sometimes the buzz becomes a roar when a fresh interpretation of the Alice stories is released. Alice as Joan of Arc in the recent film Wonderland: in a Dreamworld in the Jonathan  Miller TV Production, Alice as a Goth in video games -  even in a quiet year Alice acts like a dog whistle to creative people who find the stories a way of describing a particular situation or point in time. Artists like Salvador Dali, Peter Blake and Ralph Steadman have all illustrated the “Alice” stories to highlight ideas that interested them.

The two stories (Alice in Wonderland; Alice through the Looking Glass) are part of our collective unconscious. You either had them read to you, you have read them yourself or seen them as a film, an animation or an illustration. All of the Beatles were likely exposed to the stories, but it seems that Lennon was the one who responded to them in a creative fashion. In the same Playboy interview, Lennon said,

“Lewis Carroll. I always admit to that because I love 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Alice through the Looking Glass.' But I didn't even know he'd written anything else. I was that ignorant. I just happened to get those for birthday presents as a child and liked them. And I usually read those two about once a year, because I still like them."

The Alice stories are episodic, imaginative, non-linear and amoral. They are complicated, exciting, unpredictable and a bit dangerous. In 1865 they were ground-breaking and there are few children’s book since that has such appeal with combinations of word play, logic, songs, poetry and surreal imagery. It was an improvised story that was developed over a series of outings as entertainment for children that was developed into a final version. Carroll could not be assured of its’ success and invested his own money into it. He even recalled the first 5000 copies because they were not “up to scratch”.

The Buzz in 1967 - The Beatles vs The Establishment

At the time of the album, the Beatles were gaining control over their own music. They were taking a risk by not doing what the industry expected of them. They pushed against the establishment similarly to the main theme in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ amongst all the tomfoolery.

Another reason for a buzz about ‘Alice’ within the Beatles was that in 1967 some of the people the Beatles had worked with were also involved with a TV Play of “Alice in Wonderland” directed by Jonathan Miller. There was a lot of crossovers and many were in the vanguard of 60s counter-culture.  Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and Alan Bennett were all members of the show, ‘Beyond the Fringe’ and were driving a fresh style of satirical comedy that mocked the establishment. Again ‘Alice in Wonderland”’ has a strong anti-establishment theme where it shows a person who is thrown into a world where the old ways of doing things are no longer relevant.  In 1865 Great Britain was moving from Victorian to Industrial thinking, in 1967 The Beatles were looking at a post-war Britain where the old certainties were crumbling and new influences were being reflected in their music such as psychedelia and Eastern religion.

There were other friends of the Beatles with parts in the TV Play.  Wilfrid Brambell who was in the film ‘Hard Day’s Night’ played the White Rabbit; Leo McKern who was in the film ‘Help’ did a drag turn as the Ugly Duchess. Ravi Shankar wrote the music for the TV Play and was already a friend of George Harrison. In 1966, George Harrison had met Shankar and began to take lessons from him. This could explain the dreamy feel in the music of the TV Play that is reflected in some of the music on the Sgt Pepper album. These people socialised and gossiped, a creative hub of people that the Beatles knew.

The strongest link between Lewis Carroll and the Beatles is that of John Lennon. There can be a lot of analysis performed of lyrics to determine the Carroll influence but it is best to be cautious. Lennon was not a fan of over intellectualising things. However, Lennon referred to the influence of Carroll in the Playboy interview.

"It's from 'The Walrus and the Carpenter.' 'Alice in Wonderland’ to me, it was a beautiful poem. It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles' work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, 'I am the carpenter.' But that wouldn't have been the same, would it? (singing) 'I am the carpenter....'"

His own books of poetry, “In His Own Write” and “A Spaniard in the Works” that were written before “Sgt Pepper” had some of the whimsy of Lewis Carroll and they were both fond of wordplay, rhymes and puns. They were both interested in language and experimenting with it. Lewis Carroll created many words that we use today such as ‘chortle’ and ‘galumph’. Many of Lennon’s songs later included nonsense sentences including “Come Together” and “I Am The Walrus”.

After Sergeant Pepper

After the Sgt Pepper album, we can still see Carroll’s influence on the cover of “The Ballad of John and Yoko” where the band (plus Yoko) is surrounded by small stone statues of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ characters. The statues were a present to Paul McCartney from his brother Mike.

On “The Magical Mystery Tour” album John referred to Carroll’s “The Walrus and The Carpenter” from “Through The Looking Glass” in the nonsense song, “I Am The Walrus”.

Even as late as the 80’s Ringo Starr played the Mock Turtle in a TV version of Alice Wonderland’.

The Beatles and Lewis Carroll are both influences on many creative people. The words and illustrations from both have become part of the fabric of English culture. The images are reused and the words quoted in places where the authors did not expect them to be seen. It was good that the Beatles gave Carroll the recognition that he deserves for producing two English masterpieces that, like “Sgt Pepper”, have remained and will remain popular for a long time.

Stephen Folan

January, 2017