Review: 'The Dark Side of Alice in Wonderland' by Angela Youngman

 I was never the biggest Alice in Wonderland fan. I can't remember reading it as a child, or watching the Disney movie, but it was inescapable. The amount of times I've said 'We're all mad down here!' at work is not even funny! (Maybe it is a little bit?) But as such I went into this book ready to be educated, and I definitely was. Thanks to Pen & Sword History and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 3/31/2021
Publisher: Pen & Sword History

Although the children's story Alice in Wonderland has been in print for over 150 years, the mysteries and rumours surrounding the story and its creator Lewis Carroll have continued to grow.

The Dark Side of Alice in Wonderland is the first time anyone has investigated the vast range of darker, more threatening aspects of this famous story and the way Alice has been transformed over the years.

This is the Alice of horror films, Halloween, murder and mystery, spectral ghosts, political satire, mental illnesses, weird feasts, Lolita, Tarot, pornography and steampunk. The Beatles based famous songs such as 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' and 'I am a Walrus' on Alice in Wonderland, while she has even attracted the attention of world famous artists including Salvador Dali. Take a look at why the Japanese version of Lolita is so different to that of novelist Vladimir Nabokov - yet both are based on Alice. This is Alice in Wonderland as you have never seen her before: a dark, sometimes menacing, and threatening character.

Was Carroll all that he seemed? The stories of his child friends, nude photographs and sketches affect the way modern audiences look at the writer. Was he just a lonely academic, closet paedophile, brilliant puzzle maker or even Jack the Ripper?

For a book that began life as a simple children’s story, it has resulted in a vast array of dark concepts, ideas and mysteries. So step inside the world of Alice in Wonderland and discover a dark side you never knew existed!

The Dark Side of Alice in Wonderland is split into the different Alices that we know today. We get to see Horror Alice, Occult Alice, Drug Alice, we even get to hear about the theory that Carroll was Jack the Ripper. There is a lot of extra information about Alice in Wonderland that you'll learn here, both biographical and, to a certain extent, speculative info. A fascinating chapter is called 'Lolita Alice', in which Youngman discusses the novel Lolita, the Lolita sub-culture in Japan as well as Carroll's odd fascination with photographing young girls in various states of undress. While Youngman does her best to contextualize this behaviour, it is still very unnerving to read and it might affect how you see Alice in Wonderland. For someone like me, who wasn't majorly attached to the novel beforehand, it was fascinating to see how far a single story can be taken, how many different ways it can be reinterpreted and understood. Sure, some of these angles I will not understand, but it's still interesting to peek behind the curtain, to steal a metaphor from another children's classic. 

Angela Youngman does a great job at showing the long and varied life that Alice in Wonderland has lived so far. A book that could have been dense and academic, or biographical and dull, is made accessible and fun. There is something a little casual about The Dark Side of Alice in Wonderland which works both for and against it. On the one hand it feels like you've met up with Youngman and over drinks she introduces you to all these fascinating offshoots and side-businesses of this novel. On the other hand some information is repeated and the book isn't as cohesive as it could be. 

I give this book...

3 Universes!

The Dark Side of Alice in Wonderland is a great book for fans of the children's classic who want to dig further into its many different afterlives.