Alice, Everywhere
My 1954 Edition of Lewis Carroll’s works covers both Alice books, (Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass), together with The Hunting of the Snark, and a number of selected poems, taken from Sylvie and Bruno, and Phantasmagoria. It has the memorable Tenniel illustrations (copied by Dorothy Colles). It’s slowly disintegrating and should join the thousands of other books I have disposed of in recent years, but I intend to keep it, even if it falls apart. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of three books from my childhood I return to time and again: this is the only one of the three in the edition I had as a child. My copies of Winnie the Pooh and Wind in the Willows are possibly in their third or fourth iterations, although these do include reproductions of the original illustrations.
From the start, I found Alice’s adventures compelling. It was many years later that I learnt they had their origin in thirty-year-old Charles Dodgson telling stories to three young girls as they drifted on the River Thames near Oxford, accompanied by Dodgson’s friend Robinson Duckworth in July 1862. Dodgson was a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, a Deacon in the Church of England and a logician. He was a proficient storyteller, and the three Liddell girls often heard his tales, sometimes new, often retellings. However, it was the adventures of Alice, whose adventure had begun by falling down a rabbit hole, that Alice Liddell wanted written down. Dodgson agreed. He completed the basic story, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, and read it to the three girls on yet another river trip in August.
Alice Liddell received the manuscript of the book in November 1864. It was published a year later, with the title changed to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and with the author named as Lewis Carroll: Dodgson published all his novels under the alias Lewis Carroll, and during his lifetime kept his own name for his serious mathematical work. The published story was much longer than the version he gave Alice, with the addition of some entirely new scenes, like the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Dodgson commissioned (Sir) John Tenniel to provide the illustrations. Although he wrote other novels and poems, as well as important contributions to logic and mathematics, he will always be known for his Alice books.
Dodgson’s father was a conservative cleric in the Church of England; Charles was the oldest boy and the third oldest of eleven children. Initially educated at home, he was a precocious child, and at fourteen went to Rugby, one of the UKs leading private schools. He left Rugby at the end of 1849 and from there attended his father’s old college, Christ Church, where he remained until his death, teaching mathematics. At one stage he was Sub-Librarian of the Christ Church library, his office was close to the Deanery, where Alice Liddell lived. Alice had arrived in 1856, when the new Dean, Henry Liddell took up his appointment. There’s no doubt Liddell’s young family greatly influenced his writing career. Dodgson became close friends with Liddell’s wife Lorina and their children, particularly the three sisters Lorina, Edith, and Alice Liddell. Was Alice in his books was based on Alice Liddell? Dodgson claimed his character wasn’t based on real child, and he often dedicated his works to girls of his acquaintance, adding their names in acrostic poems at the beginning of the text.
There can be few people who don’t know the basic story, whether as a result of reading the book, or having had the story read to them, or having seen the film (there has been both an animation and a live action version) or the television series. The adventure begins with a bored Alice sitting by a riverbank, when she sees a White Rabbit, complete with a pocket watch and waistcoat, running past, muttering about being late. She leaps up, follows the rabbit, and finds herself falling down a rabbit hole. We are now in ‘wonderland’, where bottles accompanied by the injunction to ‘Drink Me’ can result in shrinking or growing dramatically. From that moment Alice finds herself in a fantasy: who but Lewis Carroll would think of having his character burst into tears, then shrink, then swim in the pool of her tears, and end up drying herself and the other characters by taking part in a ‘Caucus Race’?
There are two wonderful extended scenes that could have been written for film, but long before anyone was thinking that way. The first is when the White Rabbit appears searching for his gloves and fan. Mistaking Alice for his maid, the White Rabbit orders Alice to go into his house and find them. Inevitably, Alice finds another bottle and drinks from it, causing her to grow to the point she gets stuck in the house. The White Rabbit and his neighbours try to extract her, eventually taking to hurling pebbles that turn into small cakes. Alice eats one and (naturally enough) shrinks, allowing her to flee into the forest, where she meets a caterpillar smoking a hookah. Some adventures later, Alice arrives at the home of a Duchess, who owns a perpetually grinning Cheshire Cat. The Duchess’s hands her baby over to Alice, it transforms into a piglet, which Alice releases into the woods. The Cheshire Cat directs Alice to meet a Hatter, March Hare, and a sleepy Dormouse in the midst of an absurd tea party
Later, Alice finds herself in a garden, in which she discovers the Queen of Hearts playing on a croquet court, her guard consisting of living playing cards. Alice takes part in a croquet match, in which hedgehogs are used as balls, flamingos are used as mallets, and soldiers are hoops. Meanwhile, the short-tempered Queen is constantly ordering beheadings. Dismissed (and avoiding a beheading), Alice meets a Gryphon and a weeping Mock Turtle, who dance to a Lobster Quadrille, before Alice is dragged to a trial in which the Knave of Hearts is accused of stealing the Queen’s tarts. Does this all sound crazy? It is, and yet it isn’t, and you are swept along, fully immersed in this bizarre, intriguing and ‘wonderful’ world.
Alice in Wonderland changed Dodgson’s life. The fame of his alter ego ‘Lewis Carroll’ soon spread around the world. He was inundated with fan mail and sometimes with unwanted attention. Indeed, Robin Wilson suggested Queen Victoria enjoyed Alice in Wonderland so much that she commanded that he dedicate his next book to her, and was accordingly presented with his next work, a scholarly mathematical volume, An Elementary Treatise on Determinants. Sadly the story is not true. While Dodgson began earning quite substantial sums of money, he continued with his supposedly disliked post at Christ Church.
You would imagine that I would love seeing Alice in Wonderland on the screen, small or large. Both the animation and the live actor versions are good, but they lack something, at least for me. I suspect that this is because the story is fixed in my mind by Tenniel’s illustrations. Alice is the Alice I see there, and his illustrations have used in subsequent editions (thought certainly not all). However, equally stuck in my mind are the rest of the characters: those that are people, the Mad Hatter or The Queen of Hearts, are not real, but a strange distortion of a person to suit the role, and from there a short step to the guards, who are a large playing cards with heads, arms and legs added. As for the more fantastic, the Mock Turtle or the Caterpillar on the toadstool they are, well, they are fantastic.
Less well known than Alice in Wonderland is Alice Through the Looking Glass. This appeared six years later, in 1871, another fantastical tale, but even more complex. In this case, Alice enters a world by stepping through a large mirror, entering a place where everything is reversed – of course! As Alice discovers, running keeps you stationary, and walking away from an object brings you closer to it. There are chessmen, who are alive, (we’ll return to them in a moment), as are various nursery rhyme characters. If the Wonderland book included the Lobster Quadrille, Through the Looking Glass has several memorable verses. One, The Walrus and the Carpenter has a great opening stanza:
The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright–
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
And this nicely sets the tone for the bizarre story about the walrus and the carpenter persuading the oysters to join them on a walk, which ends equally memorably:
“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter,
“You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?”
But answer came there none–
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.
That sad tale is surpassed only by Jabberwocky, which has to be one of the finest surreal poems in the English language. Once again, the opening stanza is stuck in my brain:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Much as I want to cite the whole poem, I’ll have to sticky with one more stanza dealing with the Jabberwocky’s end, ideal to capture the crazy violence of this crazy poem:
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
Key to this book is the discovery, in Chapter 3 (headed Looking Glass Insects) where Alice meets the Red Queen, who explains the entire countryside is laid out in squares, like a gigantic chessboard. She offers Alice the opportunity to become a queen if she can progress all the way to the eighth row on this ‘real’ chess board. Alice starts as a white pawn (in the second row of the setting, of course). She gets on a train, and immediately begins crossing the chessboard, jumps over the third row and goes directly onto the fourth rank, following the chess rule that pawns can advance two spaces on their first move. She arrives in a forest where a depressed gnat teaches her about the looking glass insects, strange creatures part bug part object, like the bread and butterfly, and the rocking horse fly. We are about to meet a highlight for young readers as she meets the rotund twin brothers Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They recite The Walrus and the Carpenter, then put on arms for battle, only to be interrupted by a huge crow. I presume you know the rhyme:
Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.
Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel.
Now, this simple rhyme has been said to be based on John Byrom and his depiction of the competition between musicians George Frideric Handel and Giovanni Bononcini. In Byrom’s brief verse, he ends with “Strange all this Difference should be/ Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!” More to the point, the whole of Looking Glass is structured around a chess game, and most of the main characters are represented by chess pieces. The looking-glass world consists of square fields divided by streams, and each time a stream is crossed, there’s a change in scene, with Alice advancing one square at a time (except for two at the beginning, as above). At the beginning of the book, Lewis Carroll provides a chess account of the story. However, although the pieces’ movements follow the rules of chess, other basic rules are ignored. In particular one player, White, makes several successive moves while the other, Red/Black opponent has moves skipped, and there are other oddities, such as the “castling of the three Queens, which is merely a way of saying that they entered the palace”. The final mating position nearly satisfies the conditions of what is known as a ‘pure mate’, a special type of checkmate where the mated king is prevented from moving to any of the adjacent squares by exactly one enemy piece. Charles Dodgson was having fun.
He also enjoyed numerous word games. One much cited illustration is when the White Queen offers to hire Alice as her lady’s maid and to pay her “twopence a week, and jam every other day”. Alice says that she doesn’t want any jam today, to which the Queen replies, “you couldn’t have it if you did want it. The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.” This is a reference to a Latin rule that the word iam or jam – which means now, in the sense of alreadyor at that time – cannot be used to describe now in the present, which is nunc in Latin. Therefore, ‘jam’ is never available today. It’s an example of the logical fallacy of equivocation, when a key term or phrase in an argument is used in an ambiguous way, with one meaning in one portion of the argument and then another meaning in another portion. Still with me? I suppose you could say Dodgson was a ‘jammy blighter’!
Oh, there is one other matter I have to address. For some time, Charles Dodgson was accused of paedophilia, taking nude photographs of prepubescent girls. Careful analysis has disputed this. Suggestions emerged many years after his death, when his well-meaning family had suppressed all evidence of any relationships with women to preserve his reputation, thus giving a false impression of a man interested only in little girls! While he may have been a closet paedophile, it seems unlikely. Dodgson also photographed men, women, boys, and landscapes, skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues, paintings, and trees. His pictures of children were taken with a parent in attendance. He abandoned photography after 24 years because the work was too time consuming.
Photography was one among many pursuits he found fascinating, and, among things was the inventor of an early version of Scrabble, a rule for finding the day of the week for any date; a means for justifying right margins on a typewriter; a steering device for a velociman (a type of tricycle); fairer elimination rules for tennis tournaments; a new sort of postal money order; rules for reckoning postage; rules for a win in betting; rules for dividing a number by various divisors; a double-sided adhesive strip to fasten envelopes or mount things in books; a device for helping a bedridden invalid to read from a book placed sideways; and at least two cryptographic cyphers! All that leaves on one side his mathematical work, under his own name, in geometry, matrix algebra, and logic. He was an extraordinary polymath. The two Alice books gave him the excuse to play with just a few of his creative and entertaining ideas.
