The Red King's Dream: Lewis Carroll in Wonderland - Tapa dura

Through tireless searches in archives and some very astute deductions these two ex-BBC television production executives have exposed a new dimension to Lewis Carroll's ALICE IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS - first that the characters are closely based on real people, and second that he wrote the books as satire, to tell his comtemporaries at Oxford what he thought about declining moral and academic standards in the 1860s. Carroll (the Rev. Charles Dodgson) -besides being a collector of little girls, a brilliant mathematician, a superb photographer and an impoverished don at Christ Church College - was acquainted with the great and the good of his day, (Tennyson, Darwin, Ruskin, Jowett among them), and poked fun at them in their thinly disguished roles in the absurd adventures he created for Alice Liddell.

Jo Elwyn Jones, the daughter of Lord Elwyn Jones (Lord Chancellor in the Callaghan government), read biology at Newnham College, Cambridge, and became historian of science at Harvard, where she began her Carroll research. She was a scriptwriter for Bronowski's BBC 'Ascent of Man' television series. J. Francis Gladstone, great-grandson of Prime Minister Gladstone, attended Christ Church, Oxford, as did his grandfather when Carroll taught there. He was a producer on the BBC 'Horizon' television series and has made a number of independent documentary films.