The Official International Wade Collectors Club

2010′s  Collectors Club membership set celebrates Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the amazingly creative tale by Lewis Carroll.  We all know the story of Alice from our childhood and movies.  Wades’ current series coincides nicely with the 2010 movie starring Johnny Depp, the seventeeth movie adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland since 1903.

Alice & Mad Hatter by C&S Collectables

Lewis Carroll was the pseudomym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.  He was born in 1832 at the parsonage in Daresbury, England, where his father was a curate.  He grew up in a large and close family.  He was exceptionally gifted in school and excelled in mathematics.  He loved literature and studied the popular authors of the time:  Coleridge, Dickens, Eliot, and Tennyson who also became his friend.  He expressed his creative side by writing poetry and short stories for his own magazine which delighted and amused his siblings. He studied at Christ Church College and later at Oxford where he earned a B.A. and M.A. with honors in Mathematics and Classics.  After graduation, he was appointed Mathematical Lecturer at Oxford, a position he held for most of his adult life.  He retired a few years before his death in 1898 so he could concentrate on his writing and publishing.

The tales of Alice started when he befriended the new dean of Christ Church, Henry Liddell, and his family.  Liddell had several children, one of whom was Alice.  Dodgson went on many outings with the family and entertained the children by drawing pictures and telling stories, including the beginnings of his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 

Even as he taught math at Oxford, he submitted  humorous stories and poems to various publications and also wrote numerous math texts. He became a deacon in Christ Church Cathedral, enjoyed photography, the theatre, had a busy social life and began to write more seriously.  Friends encouraged him to write down the Alice stories which were published in 1865.  Dodgson took his pseudonym from the Latin version of his given name:  Lewis was the Latin for Lutwidge and Carroll the Latin for Charles. 

Dodgson’s stories had an amazing mix of creativity, fantasy, word play, satire, nonsense and dry wit which is obvious today to those of us familiar with Alice, the March Hare, wise Dodo, the Mad Hatter, White Hare, Cheshire Cat, White Rabbit, King & Queen of Hearts, etc.  As Alice herself would say:  It was “curiouser and curiouser.”

There is much depth to the Alice stories and layers to uncover as one rereads the books.  As the Duchess says to Alice, “Tut, tut, child.  Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”  There is some good advice to follow as the Kings tells Alice, “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end:  then stop.”   I especially relate to Alice’s comment, “Shall I never get any older than I am now?  That’ll be a comfort, one way—never to be an old woman—but then—always to have lessons to learn.” And my favorite, “It would be nice if something made sense for a change.”

For those who would like to take a step back in time, it is possible to visit Alice’s Shop in Oxford, England.  It is opposite Christ Church on St. Aldate’s Street.  It was formerly frequented in Victorian times by Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.  She used to buy sweets there when she lived at Christ Church with her father and was befriended by Charles Dodgson.

Throughout the years, Wade has made a number of Alice figurines, including the 1999 and 2010  Club Membership sets.  Others are the Guinness promotional figures Tweedledee and Tweedledum and the Mad Hatter in 1968, and the Mabel Lucie Atwell Alice and Mad Hatter recently commissioned by C&S Collectables.

A few of the other Alice in Wonderland pieces are the small Toby mugs like the White Rabbit from Staffordshire Pottery, the King and Queen of Hearts from Beswick, the Cheshire Cat which is one of many figures sold at Disney outlets, and the ceramic souvenir from Oxford’s Alice’s Shop. 

Wade continues to make figurines that appeal to children of all ages.  I, for one, hope they continue to do so for years to come so we can all be “forever young.”

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