Research: Children’s novel: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Project 01 Identity and Space
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (commonly Alice in Wonderland) is an 1865 English children’s novel by Lewis Carroll, a mathematics don at Oxford University. It details the story of a young girl named Alice who falls through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatures. It is seen as an example of the literary nonsense genre. The artist John Tenniel provided 42 wood-engraved illustrations for the book.
It received positive reviews upon release and is now one of the best-known works of Victorian literature; its narrative, structure, characters and imagery have had a widespread influence on popular culture and literature, especially in the fantasy genre. It is credited as helping end an era of didacticism in children’s literature, inaugurating an era in which writing for children aimed to “delight or entertain”. The tale plays with logic, giving the story lasting popularity with adults as well as with children. The titular character Alice shares her name with Alice Liddell, a girl Carroll knew.
Background: “All in the golden afternoon…”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was inspired when, on 4 July 1862, Lewis Carroll and Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed up The Isis with the three young daughters of Carroll’s friend Henry Liddell: Lorina Charlotte (aged 13; “Prima” in the book’s prefatory verse); Alice Pleasance (aged 10; “Secunda” in the verse); and Edith Mary (aged 8; “Tertia” in the verse).
The journey began at Folly Bridge, Oxford, and ended 5 miles (8.0 km) away in Godstow, Oxfordshire. During the trip Carroll told the girls a story that he described in his diary as “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground” and which his journal says he “undertook to write out for Alice”. Alice Liddell recalled that she asked Carroll to write it down: unlike other stories he had told her, this one she wanted to preserve. She finally received the manuscript more than two years later.
4 July was known as the “golden afternoon”, prefaced in the novel as a poem. In fact, the weather around Oxford on 4 July was “cool and rather wet,” although at least one scholar has disputed this claim. Scholars debate whether Carroll in fact came up with Alice during the “golden afternoon” or whether the story was developed over a longer period.
Writing style and themes
Symbolism
Carroll’s biographer Morton N. Cohen reads Alice as a roman à clef populated with real figures from Carroll’s life.
- Alice: Alice Liddell
- The Dodo: Carroll
- Wonderland: Oxford
- The Mad Tea Party: Alice’s own birthday party
The critic Jan Susina rejects Cohen’s account, arguing that Alice the character bears a tenuous relationship with Alice Liddell.
Beyond its refashioning of Carroll’s everyday life, Cohen argues, Alice critiques Victorian ideals of childhood. It is an account of “the child’s plight in Victorian upper-class society” in which Alice’s mistreatment by the creatures of Wonderland reflects Carroll’s own mistreatment by older people as a child.
In the eighth chapter, three cards are painting the roses on a rose tree red, because they had accidentally planted a white-rose tree that The Queen of Hearts hates. According to Wilfrid Scott-Giles, the rose motif in Alice alludes to the English Wars of the Roses: red roses symbolised the House of Lancaster, while white roses symbolise their rival House of York.
Eating and devouring
Carina Garland notes how the world is “expressed via representations of food and appetite,” naming Alice’s frequent desire for consumption (of both food and words), her ‘Curious Appetites.’ Often, the idea of eating coincides to make gruesome images. After the riddle “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”, the Hatter claims that Alice might as well say, “I see what I eat…I eat what I see” and so the riddle’s solution, put forward by Boe Birns, could be that “A raven eats worms; a writing desk is worm-eaten”; this idea of food encapsulates idea of life feeding on life itself, for the worm is being eaten and then becomes the eater—a horrific image of mortality.
Nina Auerbach discusses how the novel revolves around eating and drinking which “motivates much of her [Alice’s] behaviour”, for the story is essentially about things “entering and leaving her mouth.” The animals of Wonderland are of particular interest, for Alice’s relation to them shifts constantly because, as Lovell-Smith states, Alice’s changes in size continually reposition her in the food chain, serving as a way to make her acutely aware of the ‘eat or be eaten’ attitude that permeates Wonderland.
Nonsense
Alice is an example of the literary nonsense genre. According to Humphrey Carpenter, Alice’s brand of nonsense embraces the nihilistic and existential. Characters in nonsensical episodes such as the Mad Tea Party, in which it is always the same time, go on posing paradoxes that are never resolved.
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