Alice Through the Working Class

Witty, acerbic at times, and magisterially researched Alice through the Working Class introduces its readers to a new cast of characters and encounters including Mary Wollstonecraft, Lenin, Trotsky, Fidel Castro, Tsar Nicholas II and such historic figures as Prince Kropotkin and Emma Goldberg.

Through a mischievous application of the law of the approximate homophone "Looking Glass" changes into "Working Class" and Alice is plunged into a new (for her) historical dimension. Witty, acerbic at times, and magisterially researched Alice through the Working Class introduces its readers to a new cast of characters and encounters including Mary Wollstonecraft, Lenin, Trotsky, Fidel Castro, Tsar Nicholas II and such historic figures as Prince Kropotkin and Emma Goldberg. Throughout McCaffery is faithful to Carroll's own style, syntax, and vocabulary; the three can be sensed palimpsestically as can the original illustrations by John Tenniel in Clelia Scala's forty-two delightful and at times mordantly witty visual collages. Now, nine years later Alice through the Working Class and the second of McCaffery's "Carroll Caprices," joins its sister text Alice in Plunderland (Book*hug Press 2015). Might we expect then an Alice through the Cooking Class and an Alice in Sunderland?

"From a man who once gave us a translation into the dialect of South Yorkshire of The Communist Manifesto (by Charlie Marx and Fred Engels, two North of England chaps) no icon of our culture is safe. So, having sent poor Alice down into Plunderland, the underworld of Toronto junkies, McCaffery, with his customary linguistic wit, now takes her through the working-class, into the industrial revolution, where Mary Wollstonecraft is the Red Queen, and the Soviet workers' paradise, where Lenin is the Lion and the Unicorn is Trotsky. And, horribile dictu, it works. Don't miss the Bolshevik Jabberwocky."--Jean-Jacques Lecercle, author of Philosophy through the Looking Glass.

Fiction.