Reading the initial chapters of Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Story of Alice, one may rightly shudder at the quaint, mawkish-sweet encasement of the former Alice Liddell. An apparent ‘inspiration’ for Lewis Carroll’s celebrated protagonist, Douglas-Fairhurst presents the ageless ‘Dream-Child’ as a person of particular tragedy. “Crumpled and confused” by persistent associations with Wonderland, this genuine Alice emerges as a prisoner – a figure fettered to a fictional fame. Her literary correlate, resisting the assertion that she is “a sort of thing” in The Red King’s dream, touches on a similar anxiety. A probable cipher for authorial agency, this slumbering monarch addresses the dread of imagined existence, exploring the fear of a lost control. Concerned with the invasion of reality by fiction, I shared some of these impressions with Douglas-Fairhurst himself.

“Another reason for her looking ‘crumpled and confused’ may simply have been that she was fairly old (she celebrated her 80^th birthday in New York)” he replies “but it’s certainly true that in her later years she was a reluctant celebrity. It’s not hard to understand why. Although she’d experienced much since the famous river trip in 1862, including the loss of two of her three sons in the muddy trenches of WWI, all anyone wanted to ask her about was an event that had happened when she was ten years old. So although she sometimes shyly signed herself ‘Alice in Wonderland’, she might have had mixed feelings about a fictional creation that in some ways had overshadowed her real life. In some ways she was doomed to fame.”

On the weight of this reputation, he continues: “If you’re asking whether someone might regret creating – or being turned into – a different version of themselves, made out of paper and ink rather than flesh and blood, then I think the answer is probably yes. Carroll sometimes returned letters addressed to ‘Lewis Carroll’ with ‘NOT KNOWN’ written across the envelope, and told one correspondent that ‘My constant aim is to remain personally unknown to the world’. It’s as if he wanted to keep his literary avatar safely hidden away from the mess and fuss of the real world. That’s one of the reasons I had doubts about whether or not I should subject him to another biography, as it would undoubtedly have made him squirm with embarrassment and annoyance”.

Biographies of Carroll can certainly prove contentious. He has appeared as a daydreaming mathematician, Victorian Humbert Humbert and even Jack the Ripper. One of these guises remains something of an ‘elephant’, haunting perceptions of the writer to the present day. With Wonderland’s 150^th anniversary occurring this year, BBC Two’s The Secret World of Lewis Carroll (dir; Clare Beavan) was broadcast in late January. Earlier this month, Edward Wakeling’s acidic reservations about the documentary became the subject of a Times article by David Sanderson. Sanderson writes: “The BBC spiced up a documentary on Lewis Carroll and ‘lied’ by including a nude photograph he had purportedly taken of a young girl, it was claimed yesterday by an expert on the author”. As the programme’s historical consultant, it was inevitable that Douglas-Fairhurst would have some opinion on the matter.

“I know that a number of people were annoyed by the decision to include the photograph, as there’s no definite proof that it shows Lorina Liddell or that it was taken by Carroll. But (and admittedly I was the programme’s historical consultant), it’s interesting that someone had already attributed it to him. And that probably says more about us as it does about him – it shows how far he has become a lightning conductor for all our fears about childhood and sexuality, and it is worth asking ourselves why. Of course, there are fans of Carroll’s who see such questions as irrelevant muckraking. Perhaps that’s because when we talk about the Alice books we are also talking about ourselves, as these are some of the books we remember most fondly from childhood, and that makes it hard for some readers to hear anything potentially awkward about Carroll without it being experienced as a personal assault.”

Yet, is there not something inherently “awkward” about Carroll’s writings? His ‘Easter Greeting to Every Child who Loves Alice’ (1876) speaks of an inclination for “mixing together things grave and gay”, aspects of joy being balanced by the acknowledgement that “Echoes fade and memories die”. His association of children with seasonal brevity is wedded to a discourse on death.

“The saddest part of the Alice books is probably the underlying reason Carroll had for writing them. This seems to have been something more or other than simply the desire to entertain small children. Ultimately I think he wrote stories for children for the same reason that he took photographs of them: it was a way of creating little bubbles of fantasy in which they could be protected from growing up. In one of his letters, Carroll wrote that ‘There are few things so evanescent as a child’s love’, but turning them into stories or fixing them into images meant that he would never suffer the otherwise inevitable betrayal of them growing up and leaving him.

This is one of the interesting differences between photographs and stories. When Carroll took a photograph of Alice Liddell, it was like pinning a butterfly to a board – she would never change unless the image faded over time.  Put her in a story, on the other hand, and he could keep her the same age while also bringing her to life in speech and movement. She could be ‘still’ like Tenniel’s illustrations, but also ‘still’ in the same way that a river is still – always on the move, still going.”

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Evidently, Carroll proves a complicated character to interpret. Douglas-Fairhurst’s reference to letters raises a question about this interpretation itself: about the borders between biography and invention – Is it folly to judge Dodgson’s mind through the prism of his fictional work?

“That’s a good question. I think there’s always a danger in treating fictional works as disguised confessions, but I also think that the Alice books – perhaps because they are supposed to be a journey through Alice’s unconscious mind – allowed Carroll to explore parts of himself that he would never have felt able to without the alibi of fiction.”

Combined with Carroll’s own desire for privacy, The Story of Alice necessarily treads on the threshold of risk. With the fragile nature of the subject matter, the personal inspirations are worthy of note.

“I thought long and hard about whether to talk explicitly about the person it’s dedicated to – Conor Robinson, a dazzlingly talented English student at Magdalen who died after an accidental fall in Michaelmas 2013. There were a couple of paragraphs I put in and took out several times. In the end I decided to include them, because The Story of Alice would have been very different without what was a very sad time in many people’s lives. It’s probably why so much of the book is about how we grow up and what happens if we can’t. It was only after I finished it that I realised that in some ways the whole book was an act of mourning.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a story I knew long before I knew how to read, and the more I talked to other people about this the more I realised that this wasn’t just a personal quirk. Over the past 150 years the story has become a modern myth – one that is forever being reinvented, and one that slips out of our grasp whenever we try to pin it down. I suppose I wanted to find out why “

The reference to a “modern myth” is interesting. Indeed, it is true that Alice is often first known or experienced through adaptation and retelling. My preferred film version, directed by Jonathan Miller in 1966, sheds away the cloth of fantasy to render every character human. In contrast, Douglas Fairhurst sees the ‘cartoonish’ as intrinsically vital.

“I love the Miller for its druggy haze and the Svankmajer for its sheer weirdness, but my favourite adaptations, though, are probably the 56 very early films made by Walt Disney in the 1920s, when he started by dropping a real Alice into Cartoonland, but soon realised that the jokes were better when human beings weren’t getting in the way. And overall I suppose my feeling is that it’s cartoons that come closest to the mad inventiveness of Carroll’s Wonderland, a place where nothing is but thinking makes it so.

There are endless cultural sequels and echoes and offshoots, which you can see in everything from John Lennon’s lyrics for some the greatest hits of The Beatles (‘I am the Walrus’ or ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’) to fashion items like the ‘Alice band’, but the most significant work is probably Disney’s 1951 cartoon. It’s not as sugary-sweet as some people think – I think Dali had a hand in it somewhere – but it probably fixed an image of Alice in the popular mind just as much as John Tenniel’s original illustrations. Along with Tim Burton’s recent film, it’s one of the main reasons that far more people know the story of Alice than have ever read the books.”

Alice is something of a protean beast – larger now than Carroll’s work itself. So far, the year’s anniversary has been a varied affair, crafting a Wonderland in perpetual shift.

“I agree it’s been hugely diverse already – sometimes cosy, sometimes surprising – in a way that’s perfectly in tune with Carroll’s own writing and personality. And there’s still a lot more to come, including the new Damon Albarn musical wonder.land in Manchester and then at the National Theatre. I sat in on a rehearsal today and interviewed the creative team for a piece in the programme, and I think it could be very exciting. Wonderful, even”.

When questioned on what he was “working on” currently, Douglas-Fairhurst offered this reply: “My abs.”

Carroll, a known athlete and strongman, would certainly approve.

The campaign for a reading week in 5th week points to a much deeper problem with the working climate at Oxford. Of course we’ve all heard it before: the well-touted big fish/small pond, little minnow/big ocean dogma that encompasses us all. Most of us had their egos hyper-inflated to get us this far, whether you were primed for Oxbridge application in a class of 12 or whether your acceptance made local headlines.

As a second year I have reached a certain degree of cynicism about my position as an undergrad at this university. As such I am already the smallest and peskiest of my tutors’ duties – they are here to do research, sometimes lecture, look after grads, and then teach us. More often than not we insult them and their time by handing in work that we dashed off forty minutes before the deadline for no particular reason (but also, mate, because I was so hungover). We are young, intellectually immature, and our degrees are sweeping taster courses at the end of which – infancy of all infancies – we sit exams.

And yet – most of us are here for eight weeks a term, three terms a year, for three/four years. In three years I am expected to come to grips with 1500 years of English literature. How could I possibly? Then again, with its compulsory Old English paper, it is the most rigorous English course in the world. When I leave this place at 21, myself and my peers will have the most wide-ranging knowledge of English literature out of anyone else our age.

Oxford is a dichotomous place: the demands made of you are nigh impossible to fulfill, and yet we must recognize quite how much we do achieve in the little time we have. The powers that be can try as they might to take Oxbridge of its pedestal, but the fact  remains that its graduates will always have a premium on the job market because of what the climate here trains them to do: I will leave this place with a fairly superficial knowledge of the afore-mentioned 1500 years, but more important is the ability that Oxford has given me, of producing under pressure; the ability, we might say, of bullshit. All those essays you dashed off hungover and forced your poor tutor to wade through, your poor tutor who has waded through generation after generation of people talking about Milton’s satanic sympathies; every single one of those essays will have prepared you for the ‘real world’, where you will be asked to come up with something, anything, as quickly as possible.

My time at Oxford has gone in peaks and troughs. My fresher year was a blur of alcohol-induced magnanimity and skimming through Prelims because I felt justified in not caring – I’d busted my gut to get myself here and I was determined to enjoy it. Second year came and the change in pace was remarkable: my workload, although still heavier than at any of my friends’ universities, was far more humane. Gone were the days of biweekly 3,000 word essays plus commentary and presentation – a baptism of fire, the cruelty of which I am only starting to register. The rhythm was now one of a single essay, and of working myself into a crescendo of stress over the course of a five day period to get it in on time with my integrity intact. I fell into a rhythm of giving myself three days for reading and two for writing. Consequently I submitted work that had promise but was lacking in depth – my tutors accused me of making sweeping generalizations and of not knowing having contextualized.

My fifth term at Oxford hit, and with it a much worse case of the blues. I have heard the testimonies of relapses into eating disorders, struggles with depression, bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies, and alcoholism. In my case it was a much simpler case of feeling that I wasn’t erudite enough, that I didn’t spend enough time working to justify how little I did outside of my degree, and that I didn’t socialize enough. Days would dribble away and I would hate myself for it. Essay after essay that I had tried so very hard at were handed back with not even a cursory ‘well done’.

I think it telling that Oxford, historically, is founded for the privileged, male population coming out of boarding school, where the dominant mentality is one of all hardship being ‘character-building’. Even the name of the problem – the ‘blues’ – trivializes it. Here lies the issue: mental health at Oxford is treated too lightly. It is expected that everyone get ‘the blues’ regardless of whether they have been medically diagnosed with a mental condition. It is something you are expected to ‘get through’.

But it’s not just a 5th week issue. It builds over the course of term where there is no try, there is only do, and what you do is never good enough. A reading week in fifth week would not  be enough to help those who struggle with serious conditions to consolidate for the next half of term, nor would it shake the feeling of inadequacy that most of us feel. As superegos, we were conditioned with praise. It is the language we respond to and flourish under. It would do us all some good if we started to get some.

Jan Nedvídek wrote here in defence of Conservative proposals to repeal the Human Rights Act, explaining how, before getting “all angry and agitated”, we should take time to pause and appreciate the facts. However, his piece fails to situate the potential revocation in the wider context of Conservative plans regarding civil liberties: when considered in this manner, concern is a justifiable (and necessary) response. 

Jan claims that the government is not proposing to “scrap” any human rights, and that the policy has “nothing to do with rights and liberties”, and that it is simply about “changing our relation with the European Court of Human Rights”. False; false; partially true.

Firstly, it is true that scrapping the Human Rights Act would not see a deletion of the concept of any of our fundamental rights; however, it creates the space for them to be modified, reduced, and made contingent upon the State’s will to provide them. Essentially, this removes the core pillars of human rights, namely their universality and indivisibility. A British Bill of Rights would give the state stronger interpretative provisions of what rights are, and the ability to change the threshold of classification as to what constitutes ‘serious’ matters. The Conservative manifesto promises that this will allow UK courts to strike out ‘trivial’ cases, yet procedures already exist to determine whether a case constitutes a rights violation. If a case meets the existing criteria – that is to say, it is classed as a contravention of human rights – I am unsure of quite how it could be labeled ‘trivial’.

Secondly, the Bill of Rights would incorporate the rights included in the European Convention, but “clarify” them to “ensure that they are applied in accordance with the original intentions for the Convention and the mainstream understanding of these rights”. What gives the Tories the just mandate to arbitrate the ECHR’s intentions? Furthermore, since when was appeal to the “mainstream understanding” a legitimate, sound and fair basis for the judgment of what rights are? Political philosophers have written for centuries about the dangers of the tyranny of the majority. While Jan will undoubtedly recoil at my use of such polemic language, surely you can understand my concern at the thought of vesting rights in subjective interpretation.

Thirdly, the proposed change in relationship is to “break the formal link’” between Strasbourg and domestic courts. Currently, Section 2 of the Human Rights Act requires that courts “take into account” judgments of the ECHR: the Tory claim that the ECHR can “force the UK to change the law” is only true insofar as Parliament must respond to judgments and align domestic legislation with international legal provisions. When, in the context of universal human rights, is harmonizing domestic penal codes with international legal standards a bad thing? The manifesto’s promise to “break the formal link” removes Parliament’s obligation to consider European Court judgments, the implication of this being that the UK has a mechanism to avoid international accountability for its human rights violations.

Finally, Jan states that “to claim that there is correlation between one’s membership of the ECHR and the extent to which civil liberties are protected is quite frankly factually incorrect”; quite the opposite, in fact. There may not be correlation between the enjoyment or realization of civil liberties and State membership of the ECHR, but it provides a mechanism by which individuals can hold their governments to account, facilitating appeals to an international body which can then mandate changes within the country. And, as an aside, Strasbourg is not a “foreign court”, it is an international one, with legal provisions and territorial jurisdiction that we signed up to. The European Court is our regional authority on human rights: to distance ourselves from that is to undermine the concept of universal human rights

The crucial weakness of Jan’s argument – and indeed my counter-argument – is that we do not have the draft for the new British Bill of Rights, and so cannot comment on what is in it. Notable is that Cameron reneged on his promise to publish it prior to the election, a move undoubtedly linked to the virulent criticism that the policy has faced from civil society and party members alike. However, in the absence of the Bill itself, we can briefly (this list is by no means exhaustive) situate it in a wider context:

• The current ‘Prevent’ strategy, revealed in 2014, has faced criticism for stigmatizing minorities, while Liberty Director Shami Chakrabarti noted that it ‘transform[s] us all into suspects – leaving the public no safer and everyone a little less free’;
• Home Secretary Theresa May indicated that she was ready to revive plans for the Snooper’s Charter, which faced international condemnation;
• David Cameron’s stance against encryption and privacy online caused international uproar, noting his willingness to endorse mass surveillance;
• Reports of Justice Secretary Michael Gove and Theresa May’s willingness to remove the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights have emerged, in which they refer to withdrawing as the ‘only solution’;
• The Bill of Rights would limit the territorial scope of rights protections, making them the preserve of the British and ensuring that ‘British Armed forces overseas are not subject to persistent human rights claims that undermine their ability to do their job’ (if that doesn’t set off alarm bells, I’m unsure what will).

Nobody is claiming that human rights “didn’t exist” before 1998, nor that this policy entirely “eradicates” our civil liberties. But I’m angry, I’m agitated, and crucially, I’m concerned about what the future may hold for human rights in Britain. What’s more? I think you should be too.