The real point of Gillian Beer’s lecture on the relationship between Charles Darwin and Lewis Carroll’s Alice came from an audience question.

Did Victorian contemporaries understand anything of the limitless academic theorising which the celebrated children’s books have attracted since their publication in the 1860s? The Freudians analysed Alice in sexual terms, Breton’s Surrealists saw a dreamscape, Empson’s ambiguities understood wombs and reproduction.

Dr Beer feels Darwin is heavily implicated and an ingenious and scholarly disposition of her thesis made for an entertaining evening.

She described how the human passion for classification as illustrated by her title Animal, Vegetable And Mineral was subject to stress in the mid-19th century as Darwin’s theories of evolution required constant revision of criteria.

Alice, herself a curious child who asks questions, is constantly required to define herself by a changing cast of characters including the famous etymologist Humpty Dumpty, caterpillars, pigs and legs of lamb.

It was all great fun, richly decorated with quotes and humour, even if some ideas stretched a point. We’re reminded that Carroll was a writer of immense imagination and not a pedantic bachelor in Tom Quad - but what would he make of the retrospective analysis industry?

Four stars