Once, apparently, was not enough.

Jones and Gladstone, before writing this book, published The Red King's Dream, or Lewis Carroll in Wonderland, which was an ambitious attempt to explain large parts of the Alice books as inside jokes about Oxford and Christ Church, where both Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell lived.

It fell flat.

It fell flat because it's just too forced. Yes, much that we see in the Alice books is genuinely based on life at Christ Church. This has been well-documented, e.g. in Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice. And it is no doubt true that there are other references in the Alice books to Liddell Life which the commentators have not found. But The Red King's Dream insists on interpretations that just don't work. They are too subtle; pre-teen children (like Alice and her sister Edith) simply wouldn't understand them. To be an inside joke, something must be both inside and a joke, and the ideas Jones and Gladstone suggest are simply too obscure.

But, having published a book that just adds to the Alice Obfuscation, Jones and Gladstone came back two years later and produced this. Which still contains too many of their ideas.

It's too bad. We need a good Alice reference (the best, Denis Crutch's The Lewis Carroll Handbook, is no longer being maintained or kept in print). There is valuable material -- a lot of valuable material -- in Jones and Gladstone. But there is also that bogus 20% or so. And no good way to know which is which without checking other sources. What this book needs is a good editor to shorten it dramatically -- and turn it into the book it ought to be. ( )