Hi, I’m Angelina and I’m still here in lovely Oxford in the U.K. enjoying the atmosphere.
Oxford is one of the most well-known centres of learning
and a lot of famous people have studied here: Kings, queens, politicians, scientists,
and the list of authors and novelists alone is incredible.
This is the Blackwell’s of Oxford and it’s a classic, famous bookstore.
It’s about 140 years old.
As I told you, many authors are actually from Oxford.
I’m going to go in and get some books.
I got some really good books by authors from Oxford, so let’ go take a look at them.
I have to show you what I got. I got some great books and,
if you like to read, you may have heard of some of them.
I got this one, which is The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.
He also wrote The Lord of the Rings. He used to live here in Oxford.
He studied here and also worked as an English professor,
and spent most of his life here.
C.S. Lewis, who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, was actually friends with J.R.R. Tolkien,
and also lived and studied here in Oxford.
T.S. Eliot was American and he moved here to Oxford on a scholarship.
He actually ended up staying and became a British citizen.
William Golding is most famous for Lord of the Flies.
He studied here in Oxford as well.
He studied Biology, but then changed to Literature, and we all know how that ended.
Graham Greene is considered one of the greatest authors in the English Language.
He’s written many books.
I bought Brighton Rock, and he also studied here in Oxford.
Oscar Wilde studied at Magdalen College, which we saw a couple of weeks ago.
He wrote plays and poetry, as well as this novel I got,
which is The Picture of Dorian Grey.
Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited.
He also studied here in Oxford, but he actually left before completing his degree.
Dorothy Sayers was a crime mystery writer. She went to college here in Oxford
and was actually one of the first women to get a degree at Oxford University.
Before then, women were not allowed to get degrees.
I got one of her crime novels, The Nine Tailors.
Monica Ali was born in Bangladesh, but she and her family moved to Britain
and she studied here at Oxford.
Her book, Brick Lane, is a really famous book.
It’s about Bangladeshi immigrants in Britain and it became a huge success worldwide.
Most importantly, here’s an author and a book that I really love:
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
This is a book I loved when I was a child. I read it and still like it to this day.
We’re going to learn more about what inspires a story.
At the end of this video, you will have a chance to win all these books, so keep watching.
Lewis Carroll wrote the beautiful fairy tale of Alice in 1865.
That’s when he published the first book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Then came the sequel, Through the Looking Glass.
When I was a kid, I absolutely loved the book.
I also loved the Disney movie, which you might have seen.
It’s one of the most famous Alice movies.
Another famous one is the Hollywood blockbuster movie
featuring actors like Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter.
They also made a second movie, which is Alice Through the Looking Glass,
which features the actor Sacha Baron Cohen. There are actually 40 different films.
Today, we’re going to walk in the footsteps of Alice in Wonderland
because - believe it or not – she was actually a real person.
Her name was Alice Lidell
and she was a little girl who lived right here at the Christ Church College.
I thought that today, we could just go in, walk around and explore a little bit.
Right now, we’re at Christ Church College. This is where Alice Lidell, the real Alice,
lived with her family because her dad was the dean of the college.
The dean is like the principal of the school. They lived over on that side in the deanery.
She lived here from when she was three years old until she got married.
This is the cathedral garden.
On the other side, there’s another garden, which is where the real Alice lived with her family
and where Lewis Carroll got his inspiration for Alice in Wonderland.
There’s a chestnut tree there where the Cheshire cat lived.
This is the college library where Lewis Carroll worked as a librarian.
This is also where he met the Lidell family for the first time,
Alice, her mom and dad, and her siblings.
Alice and her family were really close with Lewis Carol.
He would always play games with the children and tell them lots of stories.
He would also take them on boat rides on the Thames River.
One time, when Alice was 10 years old,
Lewis Carol took her and her two sisters on a boat ride.
There, he told the fantastic story about Alice in Wonderland and the kids loved it.
Alice begged him to write down the story, which he did.
He wrote it down and gave her a handwritten copy, with his handwritten illustrations as well.
Everybody who read it just loved it, including the publishers.
They loved it so much that they published the book with illustrations by John Tenniel,
and the book became a huge success all over the world. Today, it’s a classic.
There are so many places here in Oxford, and people of the time,
that inspired Lewis Carol to write the story Alice in Wonderland.
One of them, of course, is Alice, who was inspired by Alice Lindell.
And there was also her two sisters,
who were on the boat ride that day when he wrote the story.
One of them is featured as the Lory, which is a small parrot,
and the other is featured as the Eaglet, an eagle.
The author himself also has a character in the book,
which is the Dodo because his real name was Charles Dodgson.
Sometimes he would stutter and pronounce his name
like Do-Do-Do-Dodgson, so there is the Dodo.
I’ve come to Alice’s Shop, which is an old shop that I really wanted to show you.
It’s been around for so many years.
Even Alice Lidell, as a child, used to come in here to buy candy
because she lived right opposite of it at the Christ Church College.
It has been around for so many years.
It was even featured in the Through the Looking Glass sequel about Alice.
It was called the Old Sheep Shop,
where Alice went in and a lot of strange things happened to her.
I want to go in and get something special. You’ll see.
I’ve transformed into Alice.
I think this tour of Alice in Wonderland has peaked and I’m going to end it dressed like this.
Today’s competition is actually 10 times bigger than normal,
which means that there are 10 prizes for you to win.
You can win the books by the Oxford authors that I bought.
The question for you to answer is, who is your favourite Oxford author and why?
Please comment below for a chance to win your book by your favourite author.
This is going to be my last episode here in Oxford,
but On the Go with EF is going to be back in two weeks,
so don’t forget to watch. See you then. Bye!
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