History of Literature








Lewis Carroll



Lewis Carroll - photographer



"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Illustrations by John Tenniel





"Through the Looking-Glass" 

Illustrations by John Tenniel




Illustrations by Arthur Rackham 


Walt Disney’s "Alice in Wonderland" 

Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll


Encyclopaedia Britannica


born Jan. 27, 1832, Daresbury, Cheshire, Eng.
died Jan. 14, 1898, Guildford, Surrey


pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson English logician, mathematician, photographer, and novelist, especially remembered for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871). His poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876) is nonsense literature of the highest order.

Dodgson was the eldest son and third child in a family of seven girls and four boys born to Frances Jane Lutwidge, the wife of the Rev. Charles Dodgson. He was born in the old parsonage at Daresbury. His father was perpetual curate there from 1827 until 1843, when he became rector of Croft in Yorkshire—a post he held for the rest of his life (though later he became also archdeacon of Richmond and a canon of Ripon cathedral).

The Dodgson children, living as they did in an isolated country village, had few friends outside the family but, like many other families in similar circumstances, found little difficulty in entertaining themselves. Charles from the first showed a great aptitude for inventing games to amuse them. With the move to Croft when he was 12 came the beginning of the “Rectory Magazines,” manuscript compilations to which all the family were supposed to contribute. In fact, Charles wrote nearly all of those that survive, beginning withUseful and Instructive Poetry (1845; published 1954) and following with The Rectory Magazine (c. 1850, mostly unpublished), The Rectory Umbrella (1850–53), and Mischmasch (1853–62; published with The Rectory Umbrella in 1932).

Meanwhile, young Dodgson attended Richmond School, Yorkshire (1844–45), and then proceeded to Rugby School (1846–50). He disliked his four years at public school, principally because of his innate shyness, although he was also subjected to a certain amount of bullying; he also endured several illnesses, one of which left him deaf in one ear. After Rugby he spent a further year being tutored by his father, during which time he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford (May 23, 1850). He went into residence as an undergraduate there on Jan. 24, 1851.

Dodgson excelled in his mathematical and classical studies in 1852; on the strength of his performance in examinations, he was nominated to a studentship (called a scholarship in other colleges). In 1854 he gained a first in mathematical Finals—coming out at the head of the class—and proceeded to a bachelor of arts degree in December of the same year. He was made a “Master of the House” and a senior student (called a fellow in other colleges) the following year and was appointed lecturer in mathematics (the equivalent of today'stutor), a post he resigned in 1881. He held his studentship until the end of his life.




As was the case with all fellowships at that time, the studentship at Christ Church was dependent upon his remaining unmarried, and, by the terms of this particular endowment, proceeding to holy orders. Dodgson was ordained a deacon in the Church of England on Dec. 22, 1861.Had he gone on to become a priest he could have married and would then have been appointed to a parish by the college. But he felt himself unsuited for parish work and, though he considered the possibility of marriage, decided that he was perfectly content to remain a bachelor.

Dodgson's association with children grew naturally enough out of his position as an eldest son with eight younger brothers and sisters. He also suffered from a bad stammer (which he never wholly overcame, although he was able to preach with considerable success in later life) and, like manyothers who suffer from the disability, found that he was able to speak naturally and easily to children. It is therefore not surprising that he should begin to entertain the children of Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church. Alice Liddell and her sisters Lorina and Edith were not, of course, the first of Dodgson's child friends. They had been preceded or were overlapped by the children of the writer George Macdonald, the sons of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and various otherchance acquaintances. But the Liddell children undoubtedly held an especially high place in his affections—partly because they were the only children in Christ Church, since only heads of houses were free both to marry and to continuein residence.

Properly chaperoned by their governess, Miss Prickett (nicknamed “Pricks”—“one of the thorny kind,” and so the prototype of the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass), the three little girls paid many visits to the young mathematics lecturer in his college rooms. As Alice remembered in 1932, they

used to sit on the big sofa on each side of him, while he told us stories, illustrating them by pencil or ink drawings as he went along . . . . He seemed to have an endless store of these fantastical tales, which he made up as he told them, drawing busily on a large sheet of paper all the time. They were not always entirely new. Sometimes they were new versions of old stories; sometimes they started on the old basis, but grew into new tales owing to the frequent interruptions which opened up fresh and undreamed-of possibilities.

On July 4, 1862, Dodgson and his friend Robinson Duckworth, fellow of Trinity, rowed the three children up the Thames from Oxford to Godstow, picnicked on the bank, and returnedto Christ Church late in the evening: “On which occasion,” wrote Dodgson in his diary, “I told them the fairy-tale of Alice's Adventures Underground, which I undertook to write out for Alice.” Much of the story was based on a picnic a couple of weeks earlier when they had all been caught in the rain; for some reason, this inspired Dodgson to tell so much better a story than usual that both Duckworth and Alice noticed the difference, and Alice went so far as to cry, when they parted at the door of the deanery, “Oh, Mr. Dodgson, I wish you would write out Alice's adventures for me!”
Dodgson himself recollected in 1887


how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new lineof fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards.


Dodgson was able to write down the story more or less as told and added to it several extra adventures that had been told on other occasions. He illustrated it with his own crude but distinctive drawings and gave the finished product to Alice Liddell, with no thought of hearing of it again. But the novelist Henry Kingsley, while visiting the deanery, chanced to pick it up from the drawing-room table, read it, and urged Mrs. Liddell to persuade the author to publish it. Dodgson, honestly surprised, consulted his friend George Macdonald, author of some of the best children's stories of the period. Macdonald took it home to be read to his children, and his son Greville, aged six, declared that he “wished there were 60,000 volumes of it.”




Accordingly, Dodgson revised it for publication. He cut out the more particular references to the previous picnic (they may be found in the facsimile of the original manuscript, later published by him as Alice's Adventures Underground in 1886) and added some additional stories, told to the Liddellsat other times, to make up a volume of the desired length. At Duckworth's suggestion he got an introduction to John Tenniel, the Punch magazine cartoonist, whom he commissioned to make illustrations to his specification. The book was published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. (The first edition was withdrawn because of bad printing, and only about 21 copies survive—one of the rare books of the 19th century—and the reprint was ready for publication by Christmas of the same year, though dated 1866.)

The book was a slow but steadily increasing success, and by the following year Dodgson was already considering a sequel to it, based on further stories told to the Liddells. The result was Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (dated 1872; actually published December 1871), a work as good as, or better than, its predecessor.

By the time of Dodgson's death, Alice (taking the two volumes as a single artistic triumph) had become the most popular children's book in England: by the time of his centenary in 1932 it was one of the most popular and perhaps the most famous in the world.

There is no answer to the mystery of Alice's success. Many explanations have been suggested, but, like the Mad Hatter's riddle (“The riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all”), they are no more than afterthoughts. The book is not an allegory; it has no hidden meaning or message, either religious, political, or psychological, as some have tried to prove; and its only undertones are some touches of gentle satire—on education for the children's special benefit and on familiar university types, whom the Liddells may or may not have recognized. Various attempts have been made to solve the “riddle of Lewis Carroll” himself; these include the efforts to prove that his friendships with little girls were some sort of subconscious substitute for a married life, that he showed symptoms of jealousy when his favourites came to tell him that they were engaged to be married, that he contemplated marriage with some of them—notably with Alice Liddell. But there is little orno evidence to back up such theorizing. He in fact dropped the acquaintance of Alice Liddell when she was 12, as he did with most of his young friends. In the case of the Liddells, hisfriendship with the younger children, Rhoda and Violet, was cut short at the time of his skits on some of Dean Liddell's Christ Church “reforms.” For besides children's stories, Dodgson also produced humorous pamphlets on university affairs, which still make good reading. The best of these werecollected by him as Notes by an Oxford Chiel (1874).

Besides writing for them, Dodgson is also to be remembered as a fine photographer of children and of adults as well (notable portraits of the actress Ellen Terry, the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and many others survive and have been often reproduced). Dodgson had an early ambition to be an artist: failing in this, he turned to photography. He photographed children in every possible costume and situation, finally making nude studies of them. But in 1880 Dodgson abandoned his hobby altogether, feeling that it was taking up too much time that might be better spent. Suggestions that this sudden decision was reached because of an impurity of motive for his nude studies have been made, but again without any evidence.

Before he had told the original tale of Alice's Adventures, Dodgson had, in fact, published a number of humorous items in verse and prose and a few inferior serious poems. The earliest of these appeared anonymously, but in March 1856 apoem called “Solitude” was published over the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. Dodgson arrived at this pen name by taking his own names Charles Lutwidge, translating them into Latin as Carolus Ludovicus, then reversing and retranslating them into English. He used the name afterward for all his nonacademic works. As Charles L. Dodgson, he was the author of a fair number of books on mathematics, none of enduring importance, although Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879) is of some historical interest.

His humorous and other verses were collected in 1869 as Phantasmagoria and Other Poems and later separated (with additions) as Rhyme? and Reason? (1883) and Three Sunsets and Other Poems (published posthumously, 1898). The 1883 volume also contained The Hunting of the Snark, a narrative nonsense poem that is rivalled only by the best of Edward Lear.

Later in life, Dodgson had attempted a return to the Alice vein but only produced Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and its second volume, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), which has been described aptly as “one of the most interesting failures in English literature.” This elaborate combination of fairy-tale, social novel, and collection of ethical discussions is unduly neglected and ridiculed. It presents the truest available portrait of the man. Alice, the perfect creation of the logical and mathematical mind applied to the pure and unadulterated amusement of children, was struck out of him as if by chance; while making full use of his specialized knowledge, it transcends his weaknesses and remains unique.

Roger Lancelyn Green

"ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND"
 

Type of work: Imaginative tale
Author: Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898)
Type of plot: Fantasy
Time of plot: Victorian England
Locale: The dream world of an imaginative child
First published: 1865
 

Carroll's classic fantasy can be read on many levels and appreciated by diverse audiences: it is at once a biting social and political satire sufficiently complex to satisfy the most sophisticated adult, and a delightfully whimsical fairytale to capture the fancy of the imaginative child.

Principal Characters

Alice, a curious, imaginative strong-willed, and honest young English girl. She falls asleep by the side of a stream in a meadow and dreams that she follows a White Rabbit down his hole. She has many adventures in a Wonderland peopled by all kinds of strange characters and animals.
The White Rabbit, anxious, aristocratic, dandified. Alice follows him down his hole, which leads to an enchanted house and garden. The White Rabbit is a Prime Minister of sorts in this Wonderland, for he has close contact with the royalty there and carries out their orders, although he does not institute policy.
The Queen of Hearts, the ill-tempered Queen of Wonderland. She constantly demands that everyone who crosses her to be beheaded. Fond of croquet, she orders Alice to take part in a game in which flamingos are used for mallets and hedgehogs for balls. She issues an order for Alice's execution at the end of the book, but this order is never carried out because Alice accuses the Queen and all her company of being only a pack of cards, an assertion that turns out to be true.
The King of Hearts, a timid, kindly man. Although he is completely under his wife's power because of her temper, he manages to pardon all her victims surreptitiously.
The Duchess, another member of royalty in Wonderland, a platitude-quoting, moralizing, ugly old woman who lives in a chaotic house. Deathly afraid of the Queen, she is ordered to be beheaded, but the sentence is never carried out.
The Cook, the Duchess' servant. She flavors everything with pepper, insults her mistress, and throws cooking pans at her.
The Cheshire Cat, the Duchess' grinning cat. Continually vanishing and reappearing, he is a great conversationalist, and he tells Alice much of the gossip in Wonderland.
The Duchess' Baby, a strange, howling, little infant. The baby turns into a pig when the Duchess entrusts it to Alice's care.
The Knave of Hearts, a timid, poetry-writing fellow accused of stealing some tarts that the Queen has made.
The March Hare, the rude host of a mad tea party to which Alice invites herself and then wishes that she had not.
The Mad Hatter, a riddle-making, blunt, outspoken guest at the tea party. He is a good friend of the March Hare, and at the party the two try to prove to Alice that she is stupid.
The Dormouse, another guest at the tea party. He is a sleepy creature, aroused long enough to recite for Alice and then pushed headfirst into the teapot.
The Gryphon, a mythical creature, half bird, half animal, who escorts Alice to the home of the Mock Turtle so that she may hear the recital of the Turtle's life story.
The Mock Turtle, an ever-sobbing animal. He recites his life's story to Alice and everyone else within earshot.
The Caterpillar, a hookah-smoking insect who perches on the top of a magic mushroom. Officious and easily offended, he tests Alice's intelligence with a series of ridiculous riddles.
Bill, The Lizard, an unfortunate fellow picked by the other animals to go down the chimney of the White Rabbit's house and try to force out Alice, who has assumed gigantic proportions after drinking a magic potion she found on the table.
The Mouse, who greets Alice in the pool of tears which she had made by crying while she was of gigantic size. Now of minute proportions, she is almost overwhelmed by the Mouse, a creature easily offended.
The Lorry, The Duck, The Dodo, The Eaglet, The Crab, and The Baby Crab, all creatures whom Alice meets in the pool of her tears and who swim around with her.
Father William and His Son, characters in a poem that Alice recites. The old man, a former athlete, can still balance an eel on his nose, much to the amazement of his curious and impertinent son. The poem is a parody of Robert Southey's "The Old Man's Comforts."
The Pigeon, a bird Alice meets after she has made
herself tall by eating part of the Caterpillar's mushroom.
The Fish Footman, the bearer of a note from the Queen inviting the Duchess to play croquet.
The Frog Footman, the impolite servant of the Duchess; his wig becomes entangled with that of the Fish Footman when the two bow in greeting each other.
The Puppy, a playful animal Alice meets while she is in her small state.
The Flamingo, the bird Alice uses for a croquet mallet in the game with the Queen.
The Hedgehog, the animal that acts as the ball in the croquet game.
Five, Two, and Seven, three quarrelsome gardeners of the Queen. When Alice meets them, they are painting red all the white roses in the garden to obliterate the mistake someone had made in ordering white ones.
Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie, three sisters in the Dormouse's story. They live at the bottom of a well and exist solely on treacle.
Dinah, Alice's pet cat in real life.
Alice's Sister, the wise older sister who is charmed by Alice's tales of her adventures in Wonderland.

The Story

Alice was quietly reading over her sister's shoulder when she saw a White Rabbit dash across the lawn and disappear into its hole. She jumped up to rush after him and found herself falling down the rabbit hole. At the bottom, she saw the White Rabbit hurrying along a corridor ahead of her and murmuring that he would be late. He disappeared around a corner, leaving Alice standing in front of several locked doors.
On a glass table, she found a tiny golden key that unlocked a little door hidden behind a curtain. The door opened upon a lovely miniature garden, but she could not get through the doorway because it was too small. She sadly replaced the key on the table. A little bottle mysteriously appeared. Alice drank the contents and immediately began to grow smaller, so much so that she could no longer reach the key on the table. Next, she ate a piece of cake she found nearby, and soon she began to grow to such enormous size that she could only squint through the door. In despair, she began to weep tears as big as raindrops. As she sat crying, the White Rabbit appeared, bewailing the fact that the Duchess would be angry if he kept her waiting.
The White Rabbit dropped his fan and gloves. Alice picked them up, and as she did so. she began to grow smaller. Again she rushed to the garden door, but she found it shut and the golden key once more on the table out of reach.
Then she fell into a pond of her own tears. Splashing along, she encountered a mouse who had stumbled into the pool. Alice tactlessly began a conversation about her cat Dinah, and the mouse became speechless with terror. Soon the pool of tears was filled with living creatures— birds and animals of all kinds. An old Dodo suggested that they run a Caucus Race to get dry. Having asked what a Caucus Race was, Alice was told that the best way to explain it was to do it, whereupon the animals ran themselves quite breathless and finally became dry.
Afterward, the mouse told a "Tail" to match its own appendage. Alice was asked to tell something, but the only thing she could think of was her cat Dinah. Frightened, the other creatures went away, and Alice was left alone.
The White Rabbit appeared once more, this time hunting for his gloves and fan. Catching sight of Alice, he sent her to his home to get him a fresh pair of gloves and another fan. In the Rabbit's house, she found the fan and gloves and also took a drink from a bottle. Instantly, she grew to be a giant size and was forced to put her leg up the chimney and her elbow out of the window in order to keep from being squeezed to death.
She managed to eat a little cake and shrink herself again. As soon as she was small enough to get through the door, she ran into a nearby wood where she found a caterpillar sitting on a mushroom. The caterpillar was very rude to Alice, and he scornfully asked her to prove her worth by reciting "You Are Old, Father William." Alice did so. but the words sounded very strange. Disgusted, he left her after giving her some valuable information about increasing or decreasing her size. She broke off pieces of the mushroom and found to her delight that by eating from the piece in her left hand she could become taller, and from the piece in her right hand, smaller.




She came to a little house among the trees. There a footman, who looked very much like a fish, presented to another footman, who closely resembled a frog, an invitation for the Duchess to play croquet with the Queen. The two amphibians bowed to each other with great formality, tangling their wigs together. Alice opened the door and found herself in the chaotic house of the Duchess . The cook was stirring a large pot of soup and pouring plenty of pepper into the mixture. Everyone was sneezing except the cook and a Cheshire cat, which sat on the hearth grinning. The Duchess herself held a sneezing, squalling baby and sang a blaring lullaby to it. Alice, in sympathy with the poor child, picked it up and carried it out into the fresh air, whereupon the baby turned slowly into a pig, squirmed out of her arms, and waddled into the forest.
Standing in bewilderment, Alice saw the grinning Cheshire cat sitting in a tree. He was able to appear and disappear at will, and after exercising his talents, he advised Alice to go to a tea party given by the Mad Hatter. The cat vanished, all but the grin. Finally, that, too, disappeared, and Alice left for the party.
There, Alice found she had to deal with the strangest people she had ever seen—a March Hare, a Mad Hatter, and a sleepy Dormouse. All were too lazy to set the table properly; dirty dishes were everywhere. The Dormouse fell asleep in its teacup; the Mad Hatter told Alice her hair needed cutting; the March Hare offered her wine and then told her there was none. They asked her foolish riddles that had no answers. Then, worse, they ignored her completely and carried on a ridiculous conversation among themselves. She escaped after the Dormouse fell asleep in the middle of a story he was telling.
Next, she found herself in a garden of talking flowers. Just as the conversation was beginning, some gardeners appeared with paintbrushes and began to splash red paint on a rosebush. Alice learned that the Queen had ordered a red bush to be placed in that spot, and the gardeners had made a mistake and planted a white one. Now they were busily and fearfully trying to cover their error before the Queen arrived. The poor gardeners, however, were not swift enough. The Queen caught them in the act, and the wretched gardeners were led off to be decapitated. Alice saved them by shoving them down into a large flowerpot, out of sight of the dreadful Queen.
A croquet game began. The mallets were live flamingos, and the balls were hedgehogs which thought nothing of uncurling themselves and running rapidly over the field. The Duchess cornered Alice and led her away to the seaside to introduce her to the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon.
While engaged in a Lobster Quadrille, they heard the news of a trial. A thief had stolen some tarts. Rushing to the courtroom where a trial by jury was already in session, Alice was called upon to act as a witness before the King and Queen of Hearts, but the excited child upset the jury box and spilled out all of its occupants. After replacing all the animals in the box, Alice said she knew nothing of the matter. Her speech infuriated the Queen, who ordered that Alice's head be cut off. The whole court rushed at her, and Alice defiantly called them nothing but a pack of cards. She awoke from her dream as her sister brushed away some dead leaves blowing over her face.

Critical Evaluation

One summer afternoon in 1862, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford friend, and three little girls set out on a boat trip. Somewhere along the way, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was born. Although it was not the first story that Dodgson had told the girls, children of Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church, Oxford, it was one that immediately captured Alice Liddell, the prototype for the fictional seven-year-old heroine. Her later requests for Dodgson to "write it down" were to turn him into one of the world's favorite authors, with his work translated into many languages and part of the heritage of most literate people.
Dodgson, who transposed his first two names into the pen name Lewis Carroll, was on the surface a shy but seemingly conventional Oxford mathematician. Today, however, his outwardly harmless affinity for little girls is viewed as the sign of a serious neurosis, an inability to grow up, which also revealed itself in his writings. Alice was only one of many young girls who would provide Carroll with the only love—innocent and sexless as it seemed—to which he could respond. As she matured, each child was replaced in Carroll's affections by another young lady who shared the secret world of childhood in which he spent much of his adult life.
Expressing itself in many ways, this attraction to fantasy gave rise to Carroll's love of whimsical letters, gadgets, theatricals, toys, and, of course, to the Alice stories. First prepared in a handwritten manuscript book for Alice Liddell (then called Alice's Adventures Under Ground), the book was published in its present form in 1865 and was almost immediately popular. Adding to its originality were the famous illustrations by Sir John Ten-niel, who did not use the real Alice for his model. (She, unlike the pictured child, had short dark hair and bangs.)
Followed in 1871 by the even more brilliant sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, the book has always been enjoyed on several levels. Initially, it is a very special children's story, but it is also a book teeming with fascination for certain specialists— mathematicians, linguists, logicians, Freudians, and even those who envision the book as an example of a drug trip. Yet, perhaps its philosophical suggestions give the work most of its never-ending appeal for adults.

If readers examine the book as children's literature, readers see that it offered its young audience a charming new outlook, dispensing with the moralistic viewpoint then prevalent in almost all tales for youngsters. Alice is neither continuously nice nor thoroughly naughty, for she is simply a curious child whose queries lead her into strange situations, and in the end, she is neither punished nor rewarded. A moral, proposing that she do this or that, is absent. Departing even further from the saccharine stories praising standard virtues, Carroll pokes fun at many of the ideas with which Alice, a well-bred English child, has been imbued. The Mock Turtle, for example, chides the sacred subject of learning by terming the branches of arithmetic Ambition, Distraction, Uglifica-tion, and Derision. Children who read the book are permitted to see adults quite unlike the perfect beings usually portrayed. It is the story's adults rather than Alice who are rude, demanding, and ridiculous.
As a work for the specialist, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland touches on many puzzles more thoroughly presented in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Its playfulness with language, for example, involves puns, parodies, and clever phrasing, but it does not deal as fully with the basic nature of language as does its sequel. Even in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, however, Carroll's casual amusement with words often has deeper meaning. When he parodies the well-known poems and songs of his day, he is again questioning their supercilious platitudes. When he makes a pun (the Gryphon tells the reader that boots and shoes under the sea are "done" with whiting rather than blacking and are, of course, made of soles and eels), Carroll is asserting the total logic of illogic. When he designs a Cheshire cat, he is taking a common but unclear phrase of his time ("Grin like a Cheshire cat" referred either to inn signs in the county of Cheshire depicting a grinning lion or to Cheshire cheeses modeled in the shape of a smiling cat) and turning it into a concrete reality. Logicians also find a multitude of tidbits. The Cheshire cat "proves" it is not mad by adopting the premise that if a dog is not mad, anyone who reacts in ways opposite to a dog must be. The March Hare offers a nice exercise in logic and language with his discussion of taking "more" versus taking "less" and his challenge as to whether "I mean what I say" is the same as "I say what I mean."
For Freudians, the book is also a mass of complicated mysteries. Freudians see significance in most of the characters and incidents, but the fall down the rabbit hole, the changes in size, the great interest in eating and drinking, the obnoxious mature females, and Alice's continual anxiety are some of the most revealing topics, all of them suggesting Carroll's neuroses about women and sex.
The larger philosophical questions raised by Alice center on the order of life as readers know it. Set in the context of the dream vision, a journey different from a conscious quest, the book asks whether there is indeed any pattern or meaning to life. Alice is the curious innocent who compares so favorably with the jaded and even wicked grown-ups. Always sensible and open to experience, she would seem the ideal messenger to bring readers a true concept, yet her adventures hint that all readers may know is the ridiculousness of logic and what readers imagine to be reality and the logic of nonsense. Readers see that Wonderland is no more incomprehensible than Victorian England, that the Mad Duchess lives next door, that as the Cheshire cat says, "We're all mad here."
Alice brings to Wonderland a strong belief in order and certain concepts, and she must continually refuse to accept the chaos that she finds there. When Wonderland turns her views askew, she can withstand the strain for only so long. Then she must rebel. The trial, which is the last refuge of justice in man's world, is the key factor in Alice's rejection of Wonderland, for it is a trial of Wonderland itself, with many of the earlier encountered creatures reassembled to assert forcefully, once more, that expectations and rules are meaningless. Like the child of the world that she is, Alice (and Carroll) must deny the truth that there is no truth. She must shout "Nonsense* to it all. As one critic has pointed out, she rejects "mad sanity in favor of the sane madness of the ordinary existence." Facing the same confusion and frightened by what it hints, the reader also rebels, laughing and turning to more serious considerations.

"THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS, AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE"

Type of work: Imaginative tale
Author: Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898)
Type of plot: Fantasy
Time of plot: Nineteenth century
Locale: The dream world of an imaginative child
First published: 1871
 

Its plot structured around moves in a chess game, the story of this fantasy, which continues Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, is set in a land peopled by live chessmen and talking insects, a land where everything happens backwards. Carroll's book may be read as a madcap children's fairy tale or interpreted as a complex, sophisticated adult fable laced with subtle ironies and inspired by inimitable humor.

Principal Characters

Alice, an imaginative English child who has fantastic adventures in Looking-Glass House.
The White Kitten, a good kitten who is not responsible for Alice's adventures.
The Black Kitten, told by Alice to pretend that they can go through the mirror to Looking-Glass House.
Dinah, the kittens' mother.
The White Queen, a live chess piece. In Alice's adventures she becomes a sheep, gives Alice some needles, and tells the little girl to knit. She reappears throughout the story in various guises.
The White King, a live chess piece. He has Alice serve a cake which cuts itself.
Tiger Lily, Rose, and Violet, flowers Alice questions regarding which path to take.
Gnat, a pleasant insect as big as a chicken. He melts away.
The Red Queen, a live chess piece. She tells Alice that one has to run to stay in the same place. Later she turns into the black kitten.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee, two odd, fat, little men. They speak in ambiguities and recite poems to Alice. They fight over a rattle until frightened away by a crow.
The Red King, a live chess piece. He dreams about Alice, says Tweedledee, and thus gives her reality.
Humpty Dumpty, who has a conversation in riddles with Alice. He explains to her the Jabberwocky poem.
The Lion and the Unicorn, who fight over the White King's crown.
The Red Knight, a live chess piece who claims Alice as his prisoner.
The White Knight, a live chess piece who also claims Alice as his prisoner. He leads Alice to a brook and tells her to jump into the next square in order to become a queen herself.

The Story

Alice was sure the whole thing was not the white kitten's fault. It must surely have been the fault of the black kitten. Dinah, the mother cat, had been washing the white kitten's face when it happened; she certainly had had nothing to do with it. The mischievous black kitten, however, had been unwinding Alice's yarn and in all ways acting naughty enough to cause the whole strange affair.
While the black kitten was curled up in Alice's lap playing with the yarn, Alice told it to pretend that the two of them could go right through the mirror and into Looking-Glass House. As she talked, the glass grew misty and soft; in a moment, Alice was through the mirror and in the Looking-Glass room. The place was very strange; although the room looked just the same as the real room she had seen in the mirror, the clock and the fire and the other things in the room seemed to be alive. Even the chessmen, for Alice loved to play chess, were alive.
When Alice picked up the White Queen and set her on the table, the White Queen screamed in terror, thinking that a volcano had shaken her about. The White King had the same fear, but he was too astonished to cry out. They did not seem to see or hear Alice, and although she wanted to stay and watch them and read the king's rather funny poetry, she felt she must look at the garden before she had to go back through the Looking Glass. When she started down the stairs, she seemed to float, not even once touching the steps.
In the garden, every path Alice took led her straight back to the house. She asked Tiger Lily, Rose, and Violet whether there were any other people in the garden; she hoped they might help her find the right path. The flowers told her there was only one, and Alice found her to be the Red Queen—but a very strange chess figure, for the Red Queen was taller than Alice herself. As Alice walked toward the Red Queen, she once more found herself back at the door of the house. Then Alice figured out that in order to get to any place in this queer land, one must walk in the opposite direction. She did so and came face-to-face with the Red Queen.
The queen took Alice to the top of a hill. There, spread out below them, was a countryside that looked like a large chessboard. Alice was delighted and said that she would love to play on this board. Then the Red Queen told her that they would play and that Alice could be the White Queen's Pawn. They would start on the Second Square; but at that moment, the Red Queen grabbed Alice's hand and they started to run. Alice had never run so fast in her life, but although she was breathless from such fast running, the things around them never changed a tiny bit. When they finally stopped running, the queen told Alice that in this land one had to run as fast as she could to stay in the same place and twice as fast as she could to get somewhere else. Then the queen showed Alice the pegs in the Second Square and told her how to move. At the last peg, the Red Queen disappeared, leaving Alice alone to continue the game.
Alice started to run down the hill. The next thing she knew she was on a train filled with insects and having quite an unpleasant time because she did not have a ticket. All the insects talked unkindly to her, and to add to her discomfort, the train jumped over the brook and took them all straight up in the air. When she came down, she was sitting under a tree, talking to a Gnat. Gnat was as big as a chicken but very pleasant. He told her about the other insects that lived in the woods; then he too melted away, and Alice had to go on alone.
Turning a corner, she bumped into two fat little men, called Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the funniest little creatures she had ever seen. Everything they said seemed to have two meanings. It was fun to listen to the merry little men as they recited a long poem about a Walrus and a Carpenter and some Oysters. While they were explaining the poem to Alice, she heard a puffing noise, like the sound of a steam engine. Tweedledee told her it was the Red King snoring. Sure enough, they found him asleep. Tweedledee told Alice that the Red King was dreaming about her and that if he stopped dreaming Alice would be gone for good. Alice cried when they told her she was not real but only a part of the Red King's dream.
As she brushed her tears away, she saw Tweedledum staring in terror at something on the ground. It was an old broken rattle, over which the two foolish men got into a terrible fight—that is, they talked a terrible fight, but neither seemed very anxious to have a real battle. The Crow flew over and frightened them so that the funny men ran away into the wood. Alice ran too, and as she ran, she saw a shawl blowing about.
Looking for the owner of the shawl, Alice saw the White Queen running toward her. The White Queen was a very queer person; she lived backward and remembered things before they happened. For example, she hurt before she pricked her finger. While the queen was telling these strange things to Alice, the queen turned into a Sheep and was in a shop with Alice. It was a very curious shop; the shelves were full of things that disappeared when Alice looked at them. Sometimes the boxes went right through the ceiling. Then Sheep gave Alice some needles and told her to knit.
As she started to knit, the needles became oars, and she found herself and Sheep in a little boat rowing in a stream. The oars kept sticking in the water. Sheep explained that the crabs were catching them. Alice picked some beautiful, fragrant rushes that melted away as soon as she picked them. To her surprise, the river and boat soon vanished, and Alice and Sheep were back in the shop. She bought an egg, although in this shop two were cheaper than one, but when she started to get the egg, as Sheep would not reach it for her, the egg began to grow larger and larger and more and more real, with eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Then Alice could tell plain as day that the egg was Humpty Dumpty.
She had a queer conversation with Humpty Dumpty, a conversation filled with riddles. They took turns at choosing the topic to discuss, but most of the subjects turned into arguments, although Alice tried to be polite. Humpty Dumpty explained to Alice what the "Jabber-wocky" poem meant, the one she had seen in the White King's book. Then while reciting another poem, Humpty Dumpty stopped right in the middle and said that was all. Alice thought it very queer but did not tell him so. She thought it time for her to leave, but as she walked away, there was a terrible crash that shook the whole forest.
Thousands of soldiers and horses came rushing toward her, and the riders constantly fell off their horses. Frightened, she escaped from the wood into the open. There she found the White King, who told her that he had sent the soldiers and horses and that the loud crash she had heard was the noise of the Lion and Unicorn fighting for the crown. She went with the king to watch the fight, which was indeed a terrible one. It was silly of them to fight for the crown, since it belonged to the White King and he had no notion of giving it away. After the fight, Alice met the Unicorn and the Lion. At the king's order, she served them cake, a very strange cake that cut itself when she carried the dish around.
A great noise interrupted the party. When it stopped, Alice thought she might have dreamed the whole thing until the Red Knight came along, followed soon by a White Knight. Each claimed her as a prisoner. Alice thought the whole business silly, since neither of them could do anything except fall off his horse and climb back on again, over and over and over. At last the Red Knight galloped off, and the White Knight told her that she would be a queen as soon as she crossed the next brook. He was supposed to lead her to the end of the wood, but she spent the whole journey helping him back on his horse each time he fell off. The trip was filled with more queer conversation. By that time, Alice was used to strange talk from her Looking-Glass friends. At last, they reached the brook. The knight rode away, and Alice jumped over the brook and into the last square of the chessboard. To her delight, when she reached that square she felt something tight on her head—a crown! She was a queen.
Soon she found the Red Queen and the White Queen confronting her; they were very cross because she also thought she was a queen. They gave her a test for queens which she must have passed, for before long they were calling her "Your Majesty" and inviting people to a party that she was to give. After a time, the Red Queen and the White Queen went to sleep. Alice watched them until they disappeared. Then she found herself before a doorway marked "Queen Alice." All of her new friends were there, including the queens who had just vanished. The party was the most amazing experience of all. Puddings talked, guests poured wine over their heads, and the White Queen turned into a leg of mutton. Alice was exasperated, so much so that she seized the tablecloth and jerked it and everything on it to the floor. Then she grabbed the Red Queen and shook her as she would a kitten. But what was this? It was a kitten she was shaking, the black kitten.
Alice talked to Dinah and both the kittens about the adventure they had all experienced, but the silly kittens did nothing but purr.

Critical Evaluation

It is rare for the sequel to a highly creative literary work to surpass the original. Nevertheless, such is the case with Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, which in 1871 followed Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published seven years earlier. For most readers, the two books are so closely entwined that they are considered a unit, and many of Lewis Carroll's most famous Looking-Glass creations (Tweedledee, Tweedledum, and Humpty Dumpty, for example) are often mistakenly placed in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Each book, however, is a distinct entity. Through the Looking-Glass is most attractive to adults, for in this second fantasy Lewis Carroll (the pen name for Oxford mathematics lecturer and tutor the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodg-son) presented an even more sophisticated puzzle about reality and logic than he did in the earlier story. It is in Through the Looking-Glass that one finds conscious suggestion of the cruel questions rather delicately presented in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
The books share many characteristics: each has twelve chapters, and both merge the fairy tale with science. Alice is seven years old in the first book and is seven and one-half years old on her second venture. A slight shift in scene turns the pleasant outdoor summer setting of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland into the more somber indoor winter stage of Through the Looking-Glass. Corresponding to the card game of the first book is chess in Through the Looking-Glass, another game that involves kings and queens. Within the chess-and-mirror framework of the Looking-Glass world, Carroll has, however, constructed an intricate symbolic plan unlike the seemingly spontaneous movement of Wonderland.
Although medieval and Renaissance sportsmen sometimes enjoyed chess that used human players on a giant field, Carroll was apparently the first to use the idea in literature. Science fiction has since, of course, often employed the technique. In the game plan, Alice is a white pawn on a giant chessboard of life in which the rows of the board are separated by brooks and the columns by hedges. Alice never speaks to any piece who is not in a square beside her, as appropriate for the pawn that never knows what is happening except at its spot on the board. Alice remains in the queen's field except for her last move, by which time she has become a queen and captures the Red Queen (and shakes her into a kitten); as a result, she checkmates the Red King, who has slept throughout the game. Her behavior complements the personalities assigned to the other pieces, for each assumes the qualities of the figure it represents. As in chess, the queens are the most powerful and active beings, and the kings are impotent. Erratic and stumbling, the White Knight recalls the movement of the chess knight, which moves two squares in any direction, then again one square in a different direction.
Critics have noted inconsistencies in the chess game, charging that the White side makes nine consecutive moves; the White King is placed in an unnoticed check by the queen's castle; and the White Queen misses a chance to take the Red Knight. In a later explanatory note, however, Carroll said that the game is correct in relation to the moves, although the alternation of sides is not strictly consistent, and that the "castling" of the queens is merely his phrase to indicate that they have entered the palace. Not interested in the game as an example of chess strategy, Carroll conceived of it as a learning experience for a child who was to be a pawn warring against all the other pieces, controlled by an adult—an idea apparently stimulated by the chess tales Carroll had fashioned for Alice Liddell, a young friend who was learning the game. Alice, the daughter of the dean of Christ Church, Oxford, had also been, of course, the Alice whom he had placed in Wonderland.
Arising from Carroll's use of this structure has been the proposal that Alice is Everyman and that chess is Life. Like a human being who exists from birth to death only vaguely comprehending the forces directing his moves, Alice never understands her experience. Indeed, none of the pieces really assimilates the total concept of the game. Even the mobile queens do not really grasp the idea that beyond the board there is a room and people who are determining the game. Man's own reality thus becomes very unreal if he, like the chess pieces, has such a limited perception of the total environment.
Carroll pursues still another definition of reality when Alice confronts the Red King and is told that she exists merely as a part of his dreams, not as an objective being. Upsetting to Alice is the sage advice of Tweedledum and Tweedledee to the effect that if the king were to wake, Alice would vanish like the flame of a candle. The incident recalls Bishop Berkeley's empirical proposal that nothing exists except as it is perceived. Alice, like Samuel Johnson, who refuted Berkeley by painfully kicking a stone, insists that she is "real," for she cries "real" tears. When she leaves the world of the Looking-Glass and supposedly awakens, Carroll mischievously permits her to ask herself: Which dreamed it? His final poem apparently provides the answer, for the last words are: "Life, what is it but a dream?"
In examining the second structural device of the book, the mirror reversal theme, readers find that Carroll has achieved another tour de force. The reversals—including, for example, the Tweedle brothers, Alice's attempt to reach the Red Queen by walking backward, memory that occurs before the event, and running to stay in the same place—are not merely mind teasers. Scientists now seriously propose the existence of antimatter, which is, in effect, a mirror image of matter, just like Alice's Looking-Glass milk. And again readers wonder: Which is the real matter, the real milk?
Further developing this continuing paradox are Carroll's damaging attacks on our understanding of language. Humpty Dumpty (like the Tweedles, the Lion, the Unicorn, and Wonderland's Jack of Hearts, a nursery rhyme character) says a person's ideas are formulated in his mind; to express them, he may use any word he pleases. Alice and the White Knight debate the difference between the name of the song and the song, between what the name is and what the name is called. The fawn becomes frightened of Alice only when it realizes she is a "child." In these and many more incidents, Carroll explores how our language works, directly and indirectly making fun of our misconceptions: We see language as part of a totally objective system of reality, forgetting how language actually helps create that reality. His nonsense words and poems are his final jibe at our so-called logical language, for they are no more and no less disorderly than ordinary table talk.

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"       Contents:   I Down the Rabbit-Hole II The Pool of Tears III A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale IV The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill V Advice from a Caterpillar VI Pig and Pepper VII A Mad Tea-Party VIII The Queen's Croquet-Ground IX The Mock Turtle's Story X The Lobster Quadrille XI Who Stole the Tarts? XII Alice's Evidence                   "Through the Looking-Glass"       Contents: Chapter 1   "Looking-glass house" Chapter 2  "The Garden of Live Flowers" Chapter 3   "Looking-glass Insects" Chapter 4   Tweedledum and Tweedledee Chapter 5   Wool and Water Chapter 6   "Humpty Dumpty" Chapter 7   "The Lion and The Unicorn" Chapter 8   "It's my own Invention" Chapter 9   "Queen Alice" Chapter 10 "Shaking" Chapter 11 "Waking" Chapter 12 "Which Dreamed It?"