"To Please A Child I Love"

ALICE'S ADVENTURES UNDER GROUND by the Rev. C. L. Dodgson. 90 pages. University Microfilms Inc. $4.95.

One summer's day in 1862, the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson of Christ Church, Oxford, went punting on the Thames with three charming little girls named Alice, Lorena, and Edith Liddell. Alice as usual asked him to tell her a story, and since he was in great form that day she begged him to write the story down. "And so, to please a child I love," he later explained, "I printed in manuscript, and illustrated with my own crude designs, this little book." "This little book," entitled Alice's Adventures under Ground, was the first draft of a later and longer story entitled Alice's Adventures in Wonderland which was published by Dodgson under the pen name Lewis Carroll. Alice addicts have long known of the original transcript and now, thanks to the progress of photocopying, they can own an elegant but inexpensive facsimile.

And cheap at twice the price. Dodgson's first draft, it turns out, is something more than a literary curiosity. It is only half as long as the Alice everybody knows; the White Rabbit, the Mock Turtle, Father William and the Queen of Hearts are all there, but the Mad Hatter, the Dormouse, the Cheshire Cat and the Ugly Duchess are still swimming undiscovered in Dodgson's inkwell. The earlier Alice, however, is much more than half as interesting; though it lacks the rococo richness of the final version, it has a primitive charm and artless appeal that make it, on the whole, rather the better of the two as a bedtime story.

The Dodgson drawings, though worlds away from the expert expressiveness of the famous illustrations by Tenniel, have a charm all their own. They summon an image of dear Dodgson as he sat back, pen in hand and collar askew, to beam at this lucky squiggle or that eager splodge and imagine how Alice would soon stare at it with huge believing eyes. The later Alice is a work of literature; the earlier a work of love.

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