Connection of the Day

I love the World Wide Web. It works the way my mind works. Try as I might to stay on a sequential course in my thought life, my mind is constantly darting off to chase a rabbit down a hole. Which brings me to my connection of the day. Alice in Wonderland and Liddell, of Liddell Scott Greek lexical fame. (Let me digress just a moment to mention last night's episode of Gilmore Girls. I love the dialog in this show. Lorelai's monlogue last night on her thoughts jumping around was masterful and strangely apropos to my subject.I wish I had a transcript of it, maybe I'll sit down and transpose it from the TiVo recording, Nah, maybe I can find it online.)

I was browsing through I book I just bought called The Smithsonian's Book of Books. (List Price around $25, on sale for $12 which was further marked down to around $6 because the B. Dalton bookstore in the local mall is going out of business and everything in the store is half price. I picked up a bunch of books, more later on this, maybe.) Anyway, I came across a picture in the book similar to the one above of Young Alice Liddell, who was the "muse for whom Oxford deacon Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, created Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)." I thought, "That name, Liddell, sounds familiar." It's the first part of a Greek lexicon that I own called Liddell and Scott. Actually there are several of them, I have the "Little Liddell" and the big Liddell, the pint sized version and the big, heavy tome that is the standard for classical Greek lexicons.

So I googled Alice Liddell ,and she is indeed the daughter of Liddell who was dean of Oxford and a friend of Lewis Caroll, who btw, was also a good friend of George MacDonald, another author I'm currently reading. George MacDonald's children are said to be the ones who encouraged him to publish Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Isn't life grand! At some level everything is connected, some connections are just more obvious than others.