ALICE IN SUNDERLAND 15
one “total falsehood,” which he challenges the audience to spot. He presents a history
of the Empire on its 100th anniversary before moving onto his ostensible focus: “What
has Alice [in Wonderland] to do with Sunderland?”
To answer this question, Talbot’s Pilgrim takes the reader on a virtual guided tour
of Sunderland and environs past and present, from Talbot’s own house in St. Bede’s
Terrace, through the city, to the village of Whitburn on Sunderland’s northern bor-
der, and up the river Wear to Durham, home of the great Norman cathedral and the
tomb of the Venerable Bede. Each stop on this literary pilgrimage provides an array of
associations that reveal Carroll and the real Alice’s Sunderland connections through
seemingly extemporaneous tangents on local, regional, and national history. Describing
Carroll as a longtime visitor to the area, Talbot identifi es local residences of Carroll’s
family and acquaintances, including his Whitburn cousins. He also explores the known
or possible Sunderland origins of some of Carroll’s characters, settings, and writings
through a number of creation stories, some of which are more compelling than others.
To get at the whole truth about Carroll, the pen name of Charles Dodgson, Talbot uses
recent scholarship to refute the conventional image of him as a shy Oxford don who
preferred the company of children to that of adults, a stereotype created by Carroll’s
nephew and fi rst biographer, Stuart Collingwood of Sunderland. He even goes on to
challenge Carroll’s own account of improvising the fi rst Alice story during an 1862
Oxford rowing trip, making room for Sunderland’s place in Carroll’s books.
Despite its sui generis character among comics, Talbot’s Alice relies extensively upon
other sources for its content and structure, as refl ected by its two-page bibliography. In
particular, Talbot credits local historian Michael Bute, author of A Town Like Alice’s ,
for unearthing Carroll’s and the Liddell family’s links to the area. As Talbot traces the
growth and development of Sunderland from an early Romano-British settlement into
a coal-mining district and the world’s largest shipbuilding port in the 1850s, before
its recent decline and recovery, his allusive and associative approach to history recalls
the psychogeographical works of Iain Sinclair, whose writings explore the power of
place through local tales. In terms of comic books, Alice in Sunderland also recalls Alan
Moore’s account of Northampton in Voice of the Fire. Carroll’s own Alice books pro-
vide the principal literary model for Talbot with their episodic narratives and dream
frames.
Talbot’s primary visual infl uences come from comics, as seen most prominently in
his imitations of various predecessors in short tales. Talbot uses a diff erent artistic
style for each of these stories, depending on its subject matter. Th us, the tale of sailor
Jack Crawford, the hero of Camperdown, is told as a Boys ’ Own adventure comic;
the ghost story of “Th e Cauld Lad of Hylton” appears as a 1950s horror comic from
EC Comics ; the Norman Conquest receives a Marvel Comics treatment. A cartoon
polemic supporting asylum seekers, sketched on pages of lined notebook paper to
refl ect the subject’s journalistic character, serves as the book’s culmination and, in
Talbot’s words, “is to some extent the heart and soul and raison d’etre of the piece”
(qtd. in Flanagan).
