Philadelphia is celebrating 150 years of Alice in Wonderland with public programming and multiple exhibitions beginning in 2015 through 2016. There are lectures, museum displays, a “Wonderland” ball, tea parties, hands-on tours at the Rosenbach Museum and Library of Philadelphia, talks of medical oddities of Alice, costume parties, publication of 150th anniversary edition of The Complete Works from Princeton University Press, and more. Carroll's original manuscript on loan from the British Library is traveling to Philadelphia and New York in pop-up displays. This focus on Lewis Carroll's work provides an intriguing opportunity to examine Woolf's signed review, written on the occasion of the Nonesuch Press issue of The Complete Works in 1939, and appearing in the Christmas Books Supplement of the NS & N [New Statesman & Nation] on December 9. Woolf's response to Carroll's legacy, in the midst of what she calls “non-war” and “written in barren horror,” homes in on the construction of childhood, the relationship of the child to the adult, and the illusory nature of the author. Her diary entries document what she calls the many distractions surrounding her and point to the irony of composition between Woolf's world and the fantasy world Carroll creates. In this paper I will approach these topics and consider the ways in which Woolf reflects on, engages with, and represents the connections and disconnections with the literary heritage of Alice and her enduring appeal.

The literary heritage Carroll represents with his enormously successful Alice stories Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass endures because of the imaginative construction of an ur-reality, a topsy-turvy world that both children and adults enter. If we consider literary heritage as those valued works of literature evolved by right of inheritance, then the idea of Lewis Carroll's place in that stream needs consideration. Certainly, the popularity of Rev. Charles Dodgson's Alice texts proliferates through the hundred and fifty or so years since their publication in 1865 and 1871 although Carroll's reputation has fluctuated (J. Woolf 84), while his other works have slipped into obscurity since the publication of The Complete Works in 1939. After his death in 1898 Carroll appears in the 1901 Volume II Supplement of the Dictionary of National Biography edited by Sidney Lee, where the immediate popularity of the first Alice and its subsequent, warmly-welcomed companion of 1871 are noted.