Zoe Jaques and Eugene Giddens: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. A Publishing History (Ashgate Studies in Publishing History). Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013.

The volume under review is part of the Ashgate Studies in Publishing History, a series designed as a resource for book historians and other specialists. Its focus is on the production, marketing and reception of texts, textual/editorial issues and archival resources. The context is likewise important: the interplay of the publishing history with the writer, the cultural milieu and the history of print culture (p. ii). The publishing history of Carroll’s Alice novels is regarded as an apt object of study because it is “almost as magical and mysterious as the stories themselves” (p. i). Jaques and Giddens are particularly concerned about the subsequent transformations of the texts after their initial publication. They were influenced by the orality of the original tale, the reception of which they in turn influenced. The shift from the texts’ initial to today’s context and the huge deviations from Carroll’s original intentions are the subject of the central inquiry (p. 1). The major research concept selected for tracing Alice’s textual history is D.F. McKenzie’s ‘sociology of the text’ which calls for the inclusion of verbal, visual, oral and numeric data (“Introduction: Alice through the Ages”, p. 1).