Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass
by Lewis Carroll
(aka Charles Dodgson)
Photo by Владимир Васильев from Pexels
It’s no use pretending: Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and Through the looking glass are stories embedded in their time, place, and social class. In mid-nineteenth century Oxford, I’m sure Lewis Carroll and his academic colleagues went to afternoon teas. No doubt some of the tea-goers were mad as hatters, and some of the tea parties were endless. Presenting hookah smoking as a humorous and acceptable affectation of the worldly wise may have provoked giggles in 1865. Today we know smoking is downright dangerous, even for a caterpillar. We rightly forbid smoking characters wfrom appearing in contemporary children’s fiction, printed or filmed.
I was seventeen when I first read the Alice stories, 107 years after Wonderland was first published. In search of an antidote to boredom, I browsed my cousin’s haphazardly organised bookshelves, running my hand over dozens of spines. I can’t be sure at a distance of fifty years why I slid from its itinerant slot in her randomly serried ranks a volume containing Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and Through the looking glass. Perhaps any distraction would suffice from first year university study on the law of torts. Perhaps the volume’s brevity was its own outstanding recommendation. Memory’s story is that I smiled over the illustrations and it was those etched images that convinced me Alice’s adventures would be a good way to while the afternoon’s wintry tedium. Another recollection, also possibly awry, is of finishing the book before the day shuffled into evening shadows. Familiarity may have played a part: like most children of the 1950s and 1960s, I’d seen the Disney film.
Whatever the prompt to read the stories, they served a restorative purpose: that slow, gray Sunday afternoon of despond was captured by the advance of Carroll’s enchanting characters, his dextrous imagination, and his boundless whimsy. I have been enchanted ever since. Snippets from Alice’s adventures have taken up permanent residence in my mind, entering trains of thought unbid like pop-in friends. As I navigated passages through my vulnerabilities, the plenitude of absurdities in workplaces, personal errors great and small, I found I had company in Alice and the Cheshire Cat, the Mock Turtle and the White Knight, Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
For several years around the time I turned 30 I often reached for Carroll’s stories. I can’t say why exactly. Perhaps they corresponded with my time and place. Perhaps they were an antidote to consistently draining aspects of my world of work. Perhaps Alice and company began popping in more often during that time and I felt impelled to reconnect through the book. What is not perhapsing is that I have read the stories at least a dozen times since – once every two or three years I’d wager – along with many snippets read or recounted to many children.
Photo by Fraser, C J (1900), from State Library of Victoria
There is also no perhapsing in saying that at that time, at the beginning of my fourth decade, I realised, almost as an ache, how much I would have valued listening to or reading Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and Through the looking glass during my childhood and early adolescence. That awareness has led me to loan and lose many copies of the Alice stories. I have bought a cartload of copies to distribute to a throng of first-born children, deliberately infiltrating home libraries with grumpy Duchesses and Sheep who run retail outlets. I keenly hope for children to enjoy the freedom of imagining, and to imagine in safety – the freedom and safety that pervade the Alice stories line upon line upon line. It was that measure of freedom and safety I could not access as a child or adolescent, crumpled as my imagination was by the fierce anticipation of every school day’s further depletion of hope. I want to engender imagination that brings wings rather than nightsweats. Hope is the thing with feathers only when storms pass overnight and days are bright. Hope is easy, bedraggled prey in a tempest that blows all the years of childhood. I so wish Alice and company had been me with me then.
Winged imagination is not all unjessed pleasure of course. Alice’s imaginings are miscellaneously amusing, disorienting, frightening, sad, gentle, joyful. That diversity is much to the point. Imagination is a place to play with responses to life’s opportunities and threats, perplexities and farces. It is practice for living. The more practice you get, the better. How the diversity of imaginings is managed matters as much what must be managed. Imagination is a place for testing what works with different hows and whats. We all need to imagine and to know there is a secure return from imagination. For children the task is more enveloping: they need the time and security both to imagine and to learn the skills of imagining. At the end of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, Alice wakes with a start from a courtroom drama in which she has just challenged the Queen of Hearts’ declaration that a sentence should precede the verdict, upon which the whole pack of cards fell upon Alice:
… she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face.
‘Wake up, Alice dear!’ said her sister. ‘Why that’s a long sleep you’ve had!’
‘Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!’ said Alice. And she told her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers… and when she had finished, her sister kissed her and said, ‘It was a curious dream, dear, certainly, but now run in to your tea; it’s getting late.’ (pp.108-109)
Photo by Elina Sazonova, on Pexels
There is sanctity in the way Alice’s sister allows Alice’s imagination to run, and offers Alice arms to run to. Opening up the time and place for children to imagine with freedom and safety is an act of virtue. The encouragement to imagine is handed by relay from older to younger. Carroll recognises that, I think, in the last paragraph of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland when Alice’s sister
… pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman… and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days. (p. 111)
Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and Through the looking glass are embedded in their time and place in many ways, but that does not deter Alice from daring to judge the conventions of her time and place. Seemly children of the Victorian era were seen but not heard, and often there was an understanding they would be neither seen nor heard. Alice disputes this openly as she goes toe to toe with, say, Humpty Dumpty or the March Hare. Deference paid to the powerful also comes at too high a price for Alice; she is not convinced there is any sense in bowing before a king and queen like their subjects did:
Alice was rather doubtful whether she ought not lie down on her face like the three gardeners, but she could not remember ever having heard of such a rule at processions; ‘and besides, what would be the use of a procession,’ thought she, ‘if people had all to lie down on their faces, so that they couldn’t see it?’ So she stood where she was and waited. (p.68)
It is a truth that imagination insubordinately perturbs convention.
The Alice stories gift wrap excellent messages. Speak up for yourself and others. Be curious, always (but never offensively so). Take thoughtful risks to solve problems. Everyone is interesting and surprising. Absurdity abounds – you can live with it and fiddle with it. Be open to delight. Be kind. Rudeness is sometimes fair enough, as long as you know that’s what you’re doing. Take your time.
‘There’s no use trying,’ [Alice] said: ‘one ca’n’t believe impossible things.’
‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’ (p.175)
So yes, imagine impossible things too.
‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’
In response to Alice’s question about which way to go from here, the Cheshire Cat observed with discerning composure, ‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to’ (p. 54). And so it does if you decide to investigate where writers, poets, illustrators, and readers have taken Alice and her entourage since Wonderland was published in 1865. There has been a wealth of wondering about what Wonderland could be like. Let me suggest a couple of well-wandered paths to follow, aware there is a festival of curiosities waiting you. My shortlist here is a partial demonstration of how Carroll’s tales of Alice have merged into Australian byways.
In the late 1950s Charles Blackman completed a series of paintings that animated his discovery of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. Like me, Blackman was late was to discover Alice: he was 26 or 27 when his wife, Barbara, played him a recording of the book. He had no images to look at and so he conjured them. You can view thirty of his Alice works on Wikiart.
In 1993 Alice’s adventures in Wonderland became Alitji in Dreamland / Alitjinya Ngura Tjukurmankuntjala – a reimagining of the familiar story in both English and Pitjantjatjara, a First Nations language spoken in Australia’s Central Desert region. Alitji was Nancy Shepherd’s inventive revision of the text, fabulously illustrated by Indigenous artist Donna Leslie. So fabulously illustrated was Alitji that Leslie won the 1993 Crichton Award for Children's Book Illustration, an award judged by the Children’s Book Council of Australia.
(A quick side-step beyond Australia’s Alice devotions: I recommend reading this overview of John Tenniel’s terrific woodblock illustrations for the original editions of both Wonderland and Looking glass. Vivid, eccentric, eye-fetching illustrations for a multitude of editions have extended the imaginative scaffolding of Carroll’s fantastical text.)
The State Library of Victoria (SLV), a Wunderkammer institution in itself, has an online research guide titled ‘Lewis Carroll and his “Alice” books’ which is a register of so much of what has happened for Alice across the world since 1865. The research guide offers a peek of Alice versions in the SLV’s collection. There’s also a brief blog post about a 2013 SLV exhibition of those volumes.
It depends a good deal on where you want to get to. Nowhere in particular might be a good destination for a Wonderland excursion – as long as you get somewhere, Alice might add.
Alice’s adventures in wonderland was first published in 1865. Through the looking glass was brought to book in 1872.
For this post I have referred to the Penguin English Library’s edition, 2012, which includes both books (though for reasons unknown carries only one title on the cover; that of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland).