Audiobook · read by volunteers
Alice Pleasance Liddell
Lewis Carroll (1832–1898)
Read by Clarica, Christina Maria Haller, C Pannier, Ezwa, Fredrik Vladimir Coulter, JemmaBlythe, Jc Guan, Jon Scott Jones, Kristin Hughes (1974-2021), Karen Savage · 23 chapters · 29 min
About the book
A boat beneath a sunny sky, a golden afternoon that never quite fades, and a poem whose first letters spell out the name of a real girl. Lewis Carroll’s poem to Alice Pleasance Liddell, the child who inspired his famous story, is a short, wistful piece about the passing of childhood and the memory of a golden afternoon. This collection offers twenty-three different readings by LibriVox volunteers, recorded for the weekly poetry project in June 2007. Each is brief, and each voice finds its own mood in the poem, from tender to playful to quietly sad. Listening to several in turn is a surprisingly rich experience: the same words, the same rhythm, but a different light every time. A small gift for lovers of Carroll, of poetry in performance, or of anyone who has ever missed a summer that cannot return.
Introduction
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who was born in 1832 and died in 1898. He was a mathematician and lecturer at Oxford, a photographer, and the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, two of the most celebrated works of children’s literature in English.
Alice Pleasance Liddell is dated 1872 and is a poem in the form of an acrostic, a verse in which the first letters of the lines spell out a name. It is usually printed at the end of Through the Looking-Glass, where it recalls the summer afternoon on which the story of Alice was first told to the real Alice and her sisters, and where it looks back on childhood from the vantage point of adult life. Its tone is gentle and elegiac, with a tenderness that is characteristic of Carroll’s serious verse.
This recording belongs to the weekly poetry project of LibriVox, which invites volunteers to record the same short poem so that listeners can compare versions. The project for the week of June 17th, 2007, brought together twenty-three recordings, so the collection has twenty-three short tracks and lasts about half an hour. Each track is labelled with the name or LibriVox handle of its reader.
It is an agreeable way to spend a few minutes, and a good way to notice how much a reader’s pace, pauses and tone can change the effect of a poem. It will appeal to anyone who knows the Alice books and wonders about the person behind them.
Public domain
Lewis Carroll died in 1898: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text