Not Alice's Sister's Book

I have been away and I have been poorly (they overlapped) and now I am rushed off my feet, which has led to the blog not being updated for a wee while. And I'm doing it now while I generously give myself a lunch break.

There was another reason that I didn't update and that was that I didn't have any photos to share. I have read over and over again that a successful blog needs pictures and lots of them, and although I am not sure that I agree 100%, who am I to go against the joint wisdom of the blogosphere?

 

And we must recall the cautionary words near the beginning of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when Alice tries to read her sister's book but gives up 'because it had no pictures or conversations in it'.

 

'And really' thought Alice, 'what is the good of a book without pictures or conversations in it?'

 

For many years (remembering that I read Alice first when I was seven) I tried to work out what sort of book could possibly exist which didn't have either pictures or conversations. Of course when I later studied the period in which Alice was written I realised that there were quite a few, some of which Carroll was himself mocking in this text.

 

I wonder if perhaps Alice's sister was 'entertaining' herself by reading one of the works of the redoubtable Sarah Stickney Ellis, a woman who wrote an amazingly successful series of books addressed to the women of England in their capacities as simply Women, then more particularly as Daughters, Wives and Mothers. (As an aside I note  there's none of this nonsense about Britain).

 

To give you a brief taste, because more than a brief taste is more  than even mildly feminist flesh and blood can stand, Mrs Ellis cautions mothers that girls are 'more liable than boys to receive impressions from surrounding things, more easily diverted from a straightforward course, less fortified by moral courage, and consequently more tempted to have recourse to artifice if not to falsehood in order to escape what they dread....' but then without missing a beat two pages later she is pointing out that girls are of inestimable use in the family for giving a moral lead to brothers when they come home from school in the holiday having gained 'mere academic knowledge'.

 

How did she not see the contradiction? Who knows. The Victorian era is full of this sort of baffling double speak - it's one of the things that makes it so fascinating, and yet so frustrating, to study.

 

Anyway, I now have pictures on my camera and as soon as I have them on my computer I'll be putting up posts more in keeping with the  'plenty of pictures' guideline.