Trip to Oxford – August 11-12, 2001

Protesting makes us hungry, so here we are having some sandwiches at the "Alice in Wonderland" Tea Shoppe. In case you didn't know, Lewis Carroll taught at Oxford for many years and wrote the famous stories while he was there.

Snookums has a particular tea ritual, where he turns the teapot around three times before pouring it. It's cute. Anyway, so Lewis Carroll (or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, his real name) lived at Christ Church in Oxford and got to be friends with the three little daughters of Dean Liddell, including one named Alice. (You can see a picture Carroll took of her here.) In fact, Carroll was friends with lots of little girls. There's nothing to suggest that he was interested in them sexually, though, which is the interesting part. He just thought they were beautiful and liked to entertain and photograph them.

Alice used to buy sweets at this little shop across from Christ Church. When the stories that Carroll wrote for her were being published, Tenniel (who did the memorable illustrations) used it as the model for the sheep's shop in "Through the Looking Glass." (You can read more about this here.) Inside it's crammed with Alice memorabilia. I bought an annotated copy of both books, which is where I got a lot of this information.

Here's the brochure from the shop. I always pick this crap up when I visit places, so I might as well scan it in for you people here. Kind of a virtual scrapbook, if you will.

I also bought this photograph, which I like a lot. It seems really sweet at first, until you notice the cat leering at her from the tree. Then it gets all crazy and dream-like. I need to frame it.

Here's Amy and Ian walking on the grounds of Christ Church, where both Carroll and the Liddells lived. We didn't see any students (they were all on holiday), but we did see a large group of Japanese tourists and a couple making out in the bushes. So that was interesting.

This is the front of Christ Church. Rather imposing, isn't it? We opted to head for the river rather than hanging around any longer...