The Hatter was mad; Kingsley’s books were mad “in a certain sense – written in an emphatic, racy style”. I far prefer his suggestion that the Mad Hatter was based on an eccentric, top-hatted Oxford furniture dealer, to the proposal, here, that he was based on Charles Kingsley.The chapter leading to this revelation is a fair example of the book’s style and method. The Hatter’s riddle about the raven and the writing desk leads them to a novel, Ravenshoe by Charles Kingsley’s brother, Henry. There is a tenuous connection: Dodgson had once photographed him. And Henry – wait for it – must have written his novel at a writing-desk! Peering at a photograph of a bust of Charles Kingsley, the authors note that it has a sightless look which reminds them of the Hatter.

Martin Gardner’s glorious book, The Annotated Alice, has been here before and with a wider range of possible sources. Dodgson, in the view of these authors, was an irredeemable snob, using his camera as an entree to circles he could never have hoped to join as a poor don.They are not the first to have spotted connections. What he was really doing was getting his own back on everybody who had failed to treat him well, from Alice’s father to the Poet Laureate. To play, you must abandon the idea that Dodgson was telling a children’s story That was the cover. He clung to the Old Testament scheme of creation at the time when TH “Bulldog” Huxley was debating the case for evolution with Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce.Elwyn Jones and Gladstone have approached the Alice books in the spirit of a literary detective game. He was outraged at the sum being spent on a new Natural History Museum He disapproved of Dean Liddell’s plans for a new Tom Tower. We know, too, that Dodgson was an Oxford mathematician and that much of Alice’s mad charm springs from his ability to put preposterous ideas together as logical equations (as when the broody pigeon, fearing serpents, is convinced that Alice must be a serpent because she also eats eggs).
Dodgson, a traditionalist, lived in Oxford at a time when the city was violently at war with itself – about religion, about reform, and about rebuilding.

We know that when Alice in Wonderland became famous, Dodgson himself wrote that there was no “why” to the book, other than the desire to please a little girl. His companion, Duckworth, entered the story as the Duck, Alice’s small cousins became the Lory and the Eaglet, while Dodgson portrayed himself as the mild, outdated Dodo. Sitting in a boathouse on a rainy afternoon in 1862, Charles Dodgson began to spin a mysterious, entrancing tale for Alice Liddell. Had they, he reflects, shipped out for Southampton instead of New York, he might have made sergeant-major in a modest British regiment, but not British defence chief. I don’t think we can argue with that, and the idea that we cannot plausibly claim that we offer a fair chance to people like Colin Powell does not fill me with pride.. This may be a campaign biography, but the campaigner comes across as a nice man, with a sense of decency and a sense of humour.It also leaves a thought for us to ponder. When his mother died, he found the British passports his parents had taken with them to New York, “two solemn-faced black immigrants from a tiny British colony” whose son was about to be knighted by the Queen of England.