The Annotated Alice in Nurseryland
Lewis Carroll’s newly discovered suppressed precursor to The Nursery “Alice”
By Byron W. Sewell
First edition, 2016. Illustrations by the author. Portlaoise: Evertype. ISBN 978-1-78201-152-1 (paperback), price: €11.95, £9.95, $14.95.Click on the book cover on the right to order this book from Amazon.co.uk!
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| One afternoon Alice was on a picnic with her sister, who was reading her a very boring story. Alice wasn’t happy so she decided to go to sleep. She had a very curious dream. | ||
| Would you like to hear what it was that she dreamed about? I’ll tell you in a minute. Do you ever have bad dreams? You do? Me, too! That’s why I try to stay awake as long as I possibly can. If I try very hard I can stay awake for sixty hours straight. You’re probably wondering how I can manage to do this. Well, I’ll tell you my secret. I do it by standing up at my desk. Have you ever noticed that it’s hard to sleep standing up? Of course this sometimes makes me very grumpy, especially around grown-ups. Some of them think that I’m neurotic. If they had dreams like mine they would want to stay awake, too! Well, this is what happened in Alice’s dream. | ||
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Need a good laugh? This obscure work by Carrollian author and illustrator Byron W. Sewell is an outrageous comic parody of one of Lewis Carroll’s stranger and lesser-known works, The Nursery “Alice”. It purports to be the recently discovered (in Dead Deer, Alberta, Canada) precursor of the actual work that was written by Carroll to be read by children “nought to five years old”. It seems likely that this is the first (and perhaps will be the final) time that anyone has done this. While Sewell is at it, he claims that Carroll was the inventor of the iconic “happy face”, which explains Sewell’s quirky illustrations of Carroll’s famous Wonderland characters. It also demonstrates just how ridiculous and untenable some recent theories about Carroll’s life and friendships are. A very funny book indeed. |
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