Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.
Reviewer: Colin Hynson.
On a summer afternoon in 1862, a young mathematics teacher in Oxford called Charles Dodgson went on a river trip with the three daughters of the Master of Christ Church College. While they were rowing down the river, he entertained them by weaving a fantastic tale about one of the girls having a series of strange adventures after following a rather anxious rabbit down a hole.
That girl, Alice Liddell, begged him to write the story down. Two years later he presented her with a bound volume of the story (now on display in the British Library), hand-written and with his own pen and ink drawings. A few years later it was published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with drawings by John Tenniel and under the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll.
There are three ways in which pupils can explore the manuscript version of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. The first part allows pupils to simply watch as the digitised pages are turned automatically and the text is read by actor Miriam Margolyes. The reading can be paused at any moment and even bookmarked so that pupils can return to where they had left off before. On the face of it, this part of the CD-ROM seems the least interactive and less useful from a classroom point of view. However, it could easily be used as part of a whole-class teaching exercise in which all pupils can watch and listen together using an interactive whiteboard or projector screen.
Teachers can pause the reading to discuss what the pupils have just listened to. The major section of the CD allows pupils, with the click of the mouse, to ‘turn the pages’ of the whole of the bound volume that once belonged to Alice Liddell. Lewis Carroll’s handwriting is clear but is not always easy to read on the screen. To help with this, pupils can read a typescript of the text. They can also magnify the pages and listen to Miriam Margolyes reading that page. There are many stylistic and content differences between this manuscript and the first printed volume. This makes it especially useful for the comparison of texts, an important part of the literacy strategy for Key Stage 3.
