Oxford
Lewis Carroll was a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, and the story that became Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was first told on a river outing with the daughters of the college's dean. The manuscript he later wrote out and illustrated is held in the British Library, but Oxford is where the joke began.
The Bodleian is a legal-deposit library, which means its catalogues are unusually good for tracing what a nineteenth-century reader could actually have bought. For anyone checking an edition rather than a biography, that matters more than a plaque on a wall.
A library to check
- Bodleian Libraries — catalogues and digital collections, open to readers online
Books connected to Oxford
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll, 1865. Genuinely funny for children and for mathematicians, for different reasons.
- Jude the Obscure — Thomas Hardy, 1895. Hardy's most direct attack on class and education, and his last novel.
- Apologia Pro Vita Sua — John Henry Newman, 1864. Victorian autobiography at its most lucid, written under pressure and without self-pity.
- Culture and Anarchy — Matthew Arnold, 1869. The source of 'sweetness and light', and a serious argument about what education is for.
A note on accuracy
We describe literary connections and public collections, not street addresses, opening hours or ticket prices. Those change and we cannot verify them for every reader. Follow the institution's own site for current visiting information.