Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"I used to have two copies of Alice in Wonderland when I was about seven. One everyday one for weekdays and one was my Sunday best copy. I learnt so much about ways of thinking and playing with language from reading Alice in Wonderland. I think that for me it is because it is so embedded in academic thinking and academic training. It is about sideways thinking, lateral thinking and connections. That whole focus, from a literary perspective, on language—the puns and the syllogisms. “Alice in Wonderland is about sideways thinking, lateral thinking and connections” The interesting thing about this book is that it is set in a very antagonistic world. When Alice falls down the rabbit hole she thinks she’s got to Australia. She says, “I must be in the Antipathies,” instead of the Antipodes. That ‘antipathetic’ relationship runs right underneath this text. Yes, yes. He was a very highly respected and acclaimed mathematician and that whole focus on the logic is what we do as academics. I could pick out some examples from my Alice if you like? What I picked out was a conversation at the Mad Hatter’s tea party with the March Hare: “Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare. This is the riddle about why a raven is like a writing desk. “Exactly so,” said Alice.” “Then you should say what you mean,” The March Hare went on. “I did,” Alice replied, “at least, I mean what I say, that’s the same thing, you know.” “Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that, ‘I see what I eat’ is the same as ‘I eat what I see’. You might just as well say,” said the March Hare, ‘that I like what I get” is the same thing as “I get what I like.'” In there, there is all this emphasis on exactness and then you go through to the Mock Turtle’s story when they’re talking about education: Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about it, so she turned to the Mock Turtle and said, “What else had you to learn?” “Well, there was Mystery,” the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flippers, “Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography, then Drawling, the Drawling-master’s an old conger eel, that used to come once a week, he taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.” “What was that like?” said Alice. “Well, I can’t show it you myself,” the Mock Turtle said, “I’m too stiff.” Hence, my trying to touch my toes yesterday. “And the Gryphon never learnt it.” It is a clever and humorous play on education. Lewis Carroll is also satirising the inconsistencies of nineteenth-century England—which was an increasingly bureaucratic system. England was becoming more rule-bound, especially by new pressures of time as a result of industrialisation. For example, with the institution of railways and railway timetables and town clocks being put up."

"I’m reading it to my seven-year-old twins, one of whose name is Alice so it’s easy to get her to listen. It’s about, of course, a girl who falls down a rabbit hole into a strange world populated by strange creatures. You’d have to be a zombie to miss the humour in it – it’s hilarious. Although the book is ancient [1865] the humour feels modern. It’s also very dark. I can’t tell you how many jokes there are about dead children in it. I first read it as a child and again in college. Rereading it now, I realise a lot of my comic style comes out of that book. Carroll understates everything. It’s filled with phrases like “if I should fall on my head I don’t think I’d have much to say about it” – which would certainly be true because she’d be dead. The problem, when people talk about humour, is that it becomes so dreadfully serious."

"I vividly remember how Miss White, my third-grade teacher, snatched up the copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on my desk. That was the volume I had chosen for “silent reading time.” I was a bookish child, and even Tenniel’s spidery illustrations did not put me off. In front of the entire class she declared, “If you read this book now, you will spoil it for when you are a grownup.” That was how Alice became the most important literary character in my life. “You’re nothing but a pack of cards,” became my favourite line. I love Alice’s growing sense of wonder at the topsy-turvy universe she enters. Wonder, as Plato and Aristotle tell us, is the beginning of philosophy , and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a deeply philosophical book. Alice is besieged by humans, some enraged, others just plain eccentric. Surrounded by falling objects, bewildered by beasts, and doing her best to stay afloat in a pool of tears, poor Alice is so disoriented that she’s in a state of permanent existential crisis. In the end, she stands up to all the outlandish creatures in Wonderland, and then skips off to have a cup of tea, leaving you wondering about Alice and her close encounters with nonsense, disorder, and lawlessness. Children’s books can have a sparkling, incandescent quality, drawing us into a luminous contact zone. The writer Kate DiCamillo tells us, “We let down our guard when someone we love is reading us a story. We exist together in a little patch of warmth and light.” Child and adult, reading together, are in a safe space, a “once upon a time” that may be scary but that is also decisively not in the here and now. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland gives us precisely that—a place of laughter and grief, where you can study “Mystery, ancient and modern” or take lessons with a “Drawling-master.”"

"Fascinatingly, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is in part a conversation with Phantastes . Dodgson and MacDonald were very good friends. In fact, it was MacDonald’s children to whom Dodgson read his manuscript of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , and who said: ‘You have to publish this.’ So there’s a beautiful relationship there. They were two men who loved to talk philosophy, theology, mathematics, and science together, as well as literature, and Dodgson often joined the MacDonald family in the theatre that they would put on. So, back to the social justice stuff: the MacDonald family would put on theatre and stories not just for their friends, but for widows and orphans in the neighbourhood. Dodgson was quite famously involved in those; he would join them in some of the performances. The Light Princess is one that we know he really enjoyed acting in. So it should come as no surprise that scholars have been able to find some really interesting conversation between the texts of Phantastes and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland . In structure, the novels are very similar. There are even certain sections, like the conversation with the flowers, where Dodgson is using the exact same words, the exact same names of the exact same plants as MacDonald. So they’re clearly having fun back and forth with each other, playing with the words and the ideas of someone else. Alice is a tale that is perhaps less obviously shaped by the texts that come before. Dodgson is more idea-focused: he’s playing with ideas from Locke, and from Blake, and with lots of mathematical ideas – he is a mathematician. Dodgson is passionate about the importance of the imagination, and that the imagination is not something that belongs to the uniquely to the arts – science and mathematics also cannot happen without imagination. In both of the Alice books there is this concept of a portal, an entrance into another world, but those two worlds seeping into each other – so no super hard boundaries. Dodgson is also, interestingly, pushing back against something that MacDonald less obviously pushed back against. One of the other key Victorian fantastical texts is The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley. It was hugely popular in its day, but has become decreasingly so, and one reason is that it’s really explicitly didactic and moralistic. Kingsley meant it be fun and clever with obvious wordplay and naming, but Dodgson and MacDonald found that type of writing to be too heavy-handed, and perhaps not as successful as more subtle ways of challenging and changing people. It shapes some of the levity and silliness of Dodgson, this pushback against such heavy-handed morality tales. Kingsley is also part of the social justice movement, and is concerned about child labour laws and environmental degradation –that’s part of his tale as well – but it’s definitely not Charles Dodgson’s way of addressing these issues. Dodgson pulls in poems and rhymes that are going to be familiar to his readership. Sometimes he makes light fun of them, but he’s not dissing them completely. And you can see even as he’s pushing back against the didacticism in some of those popular Victorian morality poems; he is showing another way to play. One other resonance Alice has with Phantastes , and other fantastical tales, is the whole identity issue. Alice doesn’t really know who she is when she falls down the hole, and she can’t figure out who she’s going to be – is she going to be big, is she going to be small? And interestingly, that’s compounded by her inability to remember a poem – it’s really stressful for her that she can’t remember a poem, because poetry is part of her identity. All the way up through the fantasy of the Inklings and beyond we can trace the need to remember certain poems or rhymes or stories, and how important that is for the success of a protagonist’s journey, but also as part of their identity."