The Making of Lewis Carroll's Alice and the Invention of Wonderland | Peter Hunt | Bodleian Library

I have to admit that I found this book more accessible to the layman than Fashioning Alice: The Career of Lewis Carroll's Icon, 1860-1901, primarily due to the coloured illustrations.  I can physically see the colours of Alice's dresses and understand Alice's fashion evolution from this book visually better than the earlier book I read.

There may be quite a fair bit of writers trying to discipher what Carroll was trying to imply in his Alice books.  Hunt's perspective in this book is more aligned with the opinion that the first Alice book would have been more or less a written-down version of stories that Carroll spun for the three Liddell sisters with sly references to people they were familiar with.

Without any authenticated documents from Charles Lutwidge Dodgson himself describing the circumstances or reasons how he spun those stories, it cannot quite be stated for certainty if the Alice stories themselves were hidden riddles or suppressed thoughts.  And not forgetting that the Zeitgeist then and now would have been quite different.  What may have been socially acceptable then may be not be today and vice versa.  Thus different different perspectives and opinions (and of course with coloured illustrations) are crucial in aiding readers in different Zeitgeist augmenting their perspectives when reading texts from different eras.