Hunt, Peter – The Bell Bookshop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk Henley-on-Thames Sat, 26 Jul 2025 11:11:48 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/cropped-Bell-Background-Blue-32x32.png Hunt, Peter – The Bell Bookshop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk 32 32 Alice’s Oxford https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/alices-oxford/ Thu, 24 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/?post_type=product&p=47849 This book is both a guide and a history, exploring the curious and entertaining glories of Oxford through two of the most famous fantasies in world literature.

]]> Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are two of the most famous fantasies in world literature, and yet their roots are firmly in nineteenth century and the university city of Oxford, England. Oxford’s, streets, colleges and buildings, the River Thames, and the villages on its banks, are imbued with literally hundreds of intricate connections to the books. Their author, Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, spent most of his life as an academic at Christ Church, one of the largest and oldest of the Oxford colleges. His muse, Alice Liddell, who is the thinly-disguised Alice of the books, was the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, and lshe lived there as she was growing up. The ‘Alice’ books began as stories told to Alice and her sisters, and Dodgson incorporated local people, places, and events that they would recognise. But as the books grew, he included a much wider range of satire and caricature, until Oxford itself became an eccentric Wonderland. This book, a guide and a history, explores the city, the colleges, and the river that Alice and Lewis Carroll knew and shared, in all their eccentric and entertaining glory.

]]> Making Of The Wind In The Willows https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/making-of-the-wind-in-the-willows/ Fri, 16 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/making-of-the-wind-in-the-willows/ The Wind in the Willows has its origins in the bedtime stories that Kenneth Grahame told to his son Alastair and then continued in letters (now held in the Bodleian Library) while he was on holiday. But the book developed into something much more sophisticated than this, as Peter Hunt shows. He identifies the colleagues and friends on whom Grahame is thought to have based the characters of Mole, Rat, Badger and Toad, and explores the literary genres of boating, caravanning and motoring books on which the author drew. He also recounts the extraordinary correspondence surrounding the book’s first publication and the influence of two determined women – Elspeth Grahame and publisher’s agent Constance Smedley – who helped turn the book into the classic for children we know and love today, when it was almost entirely intended for adults.

Generously illustrated with original drawings, fan letters (including one from President Roosevelt) and archival material, this book explores the mysteries surrounding one of the most successful works of children’s literature ever published.

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