The Annotated Alice

"My second choice, just staying in the children’s sphere, is The Annotated Alice. One reason to choose it is not only that it has both volumes in it— Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass together—but it also has annotations by Martin Gardner, who wasn’t a philosopher, but a mathematician. The annotations are really so cool. Since the author Lewis Carroll —whose actual name was Charles Dodgson— was a mathematician you have many mathematical ideas in it. But you also have weird philosophical ideas about the philosophy of language , like, ‘Do cats eat bats or bats eat cats?’ If we didn’t know the meaning of ‘cats’ and ‘bats’ you might as well flip it around… That’s right. And then he interprets the Jabberwocky so well. But it all makes sense. It’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy because so many of the words in the Jabberwocky actually made their way….it’s good that we have a word like ‘slithy’ for lithe and slimy. Exactly. And it’s interesting. I once asked people, ‘What can you recite from memory?’ And for many people, it’s Jabberwocky. There’s something really enduring about it. Lewis Carroll illustrated the very first version of Alice in Wonderland himself. At that time, the manuscript was a lot shorter than it ended up being – it was under 20,000 words and there were fewer than 20 drawings, done by Lewis Carroll himself, who was not bad as an illustrator. They are really quite accomplished drawings. The book started out as a story that he told to Alice Liddell and other children, but he knew that if he wanted to publish it—and he was strongly encouraged to publish it—then he needed a professional illustrator. His own illustrations weren’t the sort of thing that people were interested in, and he wasn’t that well-trained. So he asked Sir John Tenniel, who was a well-regarded illustrator and had done other illustrations, like a collection of Aesop’s Fables . Carroll thought that he would be very good. Also, in the 1860s, there was this real taste for detailed drawings. People didn’t like cartoons, they wanted something that was realistic. You had the whole Pre-Raphaelite movement. That was part of that movement of the 1860s, having really very delicate, very well-developed drawings. If you look at the book, take just one example, the famous drawing when Alice meets the dodo… That illustration of a giant Alice trapped in a house is very interesting, because it was almost certainly based on the one by Lewis Carroll. I looked at the one by Lewis Carroll recently, and it’s not the same, but the idea of it is very similar. Also, even though we don’t have direct evidence, there is good reason to think that John Tenniel saw the drawings by Lewis Carroll: it’s not unusual if you illustrate something that you’ll talk to the author and you’ll ask things about what he or she wants. For Lewis Carroll, it was really important that this was a book with pictures – because, after all, you even have the quote, “What’s the use of a book without pictures or conversations?” early in Alice in Wonderland . He really wanted those illustrations. And I think this particular picture, as you can see, has a lot of the detail that is typical for the Tenniel drawings: in the window etc. But, at the same time, it does feel horribly uncomfortable. “If you look at philosophy as it’s done through history, it’s very open and pluralistic” It’s interesting to note that Judith Jarvis Thompson has a thought experiment in her famous abortion paper. You have the well-known example of waking up plugged into a violinist dependent on you for his existence, but you also have the people seeds that grow out of the carpets. Suppose that you live in a house and you don’t want children, but people seeds drift in the air, and if they catch in your carpets, they’ll grow there, and a child will develop. Now, since you don’t want children, you have put a fine mesh—you can see how this is an analogy for something else—on your windows, but very occasionally, a seed slips through. Should you let that child seed grow? That’s the thought experiment. But she also has a thought experiment of the child growing in the house, this child that just keeps on growing. And to me this, this feels like she must have had the Alice illustration in mind at some level. While you could read it without the pictures, it somehow feels like the drawings really help to embody the character of Alice, her attitude. I have another version as well: I have the John Tenniel, but I also have one that is illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, who made the wonderful We’re Going on a Bear Hunt . And she also makes a delightful Alice. I feel it’s really important to have an Alice in your Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , who is a physical girl. I really enjoy comics . Before I moved to the US and thought, ‘Oh, dear, it’s going to cost a fortune to move them,’ I had a lot of comics. In Belgium, there is a very established comics tradition. Lots of really famous comic artists are Belgians, like, for example, Hergé , who did the Tintin series . You have François Schuiten and steampunk comics, they do really very substantial, philosophically cool stories. There’s one I could have chosen about a girl who suddenly starts walking at a different tilt to the axis of the Earth L’enfant penchée (I don’t think it’s translated yet, literally the translation in English would be “The leaning child”). Everybody walks straight, but she walks at a 45-degree angle. She has no problem with it, but it is very disorienting to everybody around her and they try to pull her straight, and give her breeches, and various games. There’s actually nothing wrong with her, it’s just that she’s at odds with the rest of the world. I think that a lot of serious philosophy can be done in comics, even those that I don’t particularly like, like the superhero comics of the Marvel universe. I do see why other people like them, because through superhero stories you can have a lot of deep philosophical themes, about supererogatory action for example. Also, in Asian comics, you find lots of philosophical ideas, like the CLAMP writers. They have short philosophical stories about love that I think are really quite deep."

"Yes, also because of course Lewis Carroll — or Charles Dodgson as he was — was a logician. He wrote lots of books on logic, so what you get is properly informed problems. The great thing is that it doesn’t really come across as that. This is slightly different from Stephen’s book. Stephen’s book is introducing people to philosophy and in that sense it’s quite pedagogical or didactic. What Lewis Carroll does is he just tells a story, and then you notice that the whole thing is peppered with little problems and things to think about. “This is the great thing about using books with children, very often the question you need to ask is already there in the book and all you need to do is stop and put it to them.” A good example of this, for me, is Humpty Dumpty. When Alice meets Humpty Dumpty, he starts to engage with her on questions about language. He starts off by asking her what her name means. She replies, “ Must a name mean something?” Later, she picks him up on his use of the word glory, which he describes as ‘a nice knock-down argument.’ And she says “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument.’” He says, “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” What’s great about this is that while it might seem like a whole bunch of nonsense, he’s actually taken a classic debate within logic and inverted its usual use. Most people would say names don’t mean anything in themselves, that they just refer to someone. And, yet, most people would say we do have fixed meanings for words such as ‘glory’ or whatever it may be. What Humpty has done is reversed that issue, so that the name is the thing that has fixed meaning for him and it’s the other words which can mean whatever he wants them to mean. There’s a clever reversal of a classic problem within logical nominalism. It just so happens that I have a chapter in my book devoted to this. This is the great thing about using books with children, very often the question you need to ask is already there in the book and all you need to do is stop and put it to them. I could stop at virtually every sentence of the Humpty Dumpty story, but it starts with a description of him sitting on the wall and Alice says she’s as certain of who it is “as if his name were written all over his face.” Before you even tell the children that it’s Humpty you can ask them, ‘Who do you think it is and how do you know?’ Or, ‘How does she know?’ Then, when Humpty Dumpty asks what her name is you simply ask the children, ‘What do names mean? Do names mean anything?’ And see what they say. When he says, words mean exactly what I choose them to mean, nothing more or less, you can then say, ‘Can words mean exactly what you choose them to mean?’ This is the great thing about good writing, and about books that have been written to get you thinking, which a lot of these have: very often they give you the question and you just need to put it back to the child and see what they think. Sign up here for our newsletter featuring the best children’s and young adult books, as recommended by authors, teachers, librarians and, of course, kids. It’s dotted with them. The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner is the one I use. In some ways, it might show a lack — that to make this book really shine one needs to read something extra to get from it what’s there. In a way, perhaps, that reveals its hidden didacticness. One almost needs a teacher’s handbook to go with it, and that’s what The Annotated Alice does. It gives you a kind of handbook and, when I’m reading it, I read the annotated stuff as keenly as the rest. That’s where I get a lot of pleasure from. But of course children can access all this from the main text. It would be to shut up and let them think things through and let them talk. This is the key thing I see constantly with parents and even with teachers. A really good exercise is to watch yourself when you’re working with a young child doing a jigsaw puzzle. If you don’t watch yourself, you find you do it all for them. You start saying a few things to them and the moment they don’t do what they’re supposed to, you just pick out the right piece for them. But the best thing to do is just to ask them questions: ‘What do you think you should start with?’ ‘What do you think we should do?’ ‘Can you find the right piece to go there?’ And if they just can’t do it, according to your questioning, then you stop. You don’t finish it for them. It’s the same with reading books and stories. Sign up here for our newsletter featuring the best children’s and young adult books, as recommended by authors, teachers, librarians and, of course, kids. One of the problems we have as parents is that our criteria for success is that they have to have completed the puzzle, or to have correctly interpreted the story. Actually, all you need to do when reading a story is ask them, ‘What do you think this means?’ ‘What do you think he did that for?’ And if they have nothing to say, so be it. But if you keep asking those questions on a regular basis, eventually they start to say things. And if, after they’ve given their interpretation, you think they’ve got the wrong end of the stick, you don’t just give them the correct interpretation, as you see it, because then you’re doing all the work for them. Parents need to allow the child to misinterpret it. So that’s why I would say the key thing is to stand back and let the child to approach the story in their own way. Not perhaps all the time, there is perhaps a time for interpreting a story for a child, but you want them to think for themselves."