Great Celebrity Reviews in History: Lewis Carroll reviews “Alice on Stage”

You ever sit over a homecooked meal that you shopped for but didn’t prepare? Maybe the fish is a little dry, but is that your fault or the cook’s? How can you fairly critique a darn thing?

Well imagine you’re an author viewing a play with characters based off your work, your book come to life onstage by someone other than you.

If you’ve found yourself in that situation, you must be Lewis Carroll. Thanks for checking out the site, sir!

The year is 1887, The Theatre is a monthly journal publishing reviews of, well, theatre.

So What Has He Got to Say?

Now, you can see at the bottom of that snippet, that Carroll admits he feels unqualified to critique the play as a play or the players as players. Bold of him to attempt to critique without criticizing, but to each their own. He soon states that, by virtue of knowing the characters he created and what he meant them to be, he is capable of sharing if he thinks the intent was realized.

What Carroll does spend a large amount of words on is writing and the origins of the Alice story. He gets distracted a bit.