I have long been fascinated by the Alice in Wonderland books and am currently a member of the Lewis Carroll society.

I suppose it was about 20 years ago when a conversation with my father brought up the subject of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poetry. I was a fan of Edward Lear and had just discovered the nonsense poem-story ‘The Hunting of the Snark’. I still recall the disbelief when Dad told me that Alice was a real person and that a Lewis Carroll Society existed.

I wanted to find out more, but it was a decade later, after my father had passed away, that I joined the Society and began to attend its monthly lectures at London University College. At first I felt a bit of an outsider as my main interest was in Alice, rather than Lewis Carroll himself. It was easy to acknowledge his genius and creativity, but much was known and had been written about him, whereas to me, Alice remained an enigma.

Lewis Carroll had a dual personality. There was the Reverend Charles Dodgson, the old-fashioned (even by Victorian standards) bachelor mathematics don, who lived his life by college rules and was brought up in a large female-dominated family in sleepy Cheshire. Then there was his creative outlet, his alter-ego, Lewis Carroll. In his mind, Alice was a fantasy child who couldn`t grow up or get any older. Alice Liddell, on the other hand, was the precocious daughter of the Dean of Oxford, who lived a few yards away across the immaculately kept Christchurch quadrangle. The Liddell family were high society and were always at the helm of Oxford social life. Alice would grow up to marry a wealthy Hampshire landowner and settle in Lyndhurst on the edge of the New Forest, and sadly lose two of her sons in the trenches in France, during World War I.

Whereas Dodgson (LC) kept a daily diary throughout his life, Alice’s diaries, and her thoughts towards Dodgson, remain an elusive mystery.

With my music, I have tried to evoke images of Carrollian days of yesteryear - halcyon days of gentle rowing trips upriver, hot sunny days and picnics on the riverbank. I have also included my interpretation of some aspects of the more sinister side of Lewis Carroll’s strange and disturbing characters, many of whom were drawn from eccentric people within his social circle.

~ Mike Bradbury ~