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nostalgic duet about school performed by the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon. In revising the manuscript, he also skilfully contrived to transform the looser, picaresque dream sequence he originally created into a more architecturally conceived and consciously staged work, built around the characteristic but puzzling games with language and logic that demonstrate Dodgson’s concerns as a logician. In the earlier version, the game of cards only surfaces in the last chapter, three-quarters of the way through, whereas in the final version it surfaces in Book 6, half way through. Though it takes up little more space in the final version, it provides a principle of unity which draws together the various strands and main characters. The climax too is considerably extended. The court-scene trial of the Knave of Hearts, for example, is expanded to introduce almost the entire cast list of the story, with the effect of a closing ‘number’ or theatrical finale, such as wound up the pantomimes and comedies Dodgson enjoyed so much. Throughout the rewrite, the improvised and casual thread of the dream was taken up into a larger scale, through-composed literary structure.

The gains in artistic effect and sophistication are evident to almost any reader, I think, but there is a shift of tonality and narrative mode that involves loss as well as gain, a shift comparable to that later between Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, from greater immediacy to greater control. This is most evident at the level of punctuation. Alice’s Adventures under Ground is composed in long, straggling, improvisatory paragraphs – often one or at most two sentences long – and it’s punctuated with commas and colons, with comparatively rare full stops. As to the dialogue, which provides the main thrust of the narrative, the speech of Alice and the other characters in the earlier text is riddled with exclamation marks. The overall effect is of breathlessness and headlong flow as the reader is swept along the current of the dream story, with its dizzying falls and abrupt changes of physical scale, through a world of sudden metamorphoses, exclamations and ejaculations. Dodgson’s strained, primitive drawings convey something of the same dream oddity as his ur-text. Taken together, they offer the reader of Alice’s Adventures under Ground a very different experience to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – one which, though not the ‘original’ oral tale spun out for the Liddell children in a punt on the Isis, takes us back closer to its earliest evolution and its own strange evolutionary journey.

At the heart of the book is not the Queen of Hearts, the homicidal matriarch who presides over the last chapter, but Alice, who in answer to the pigeon’s question (‘“ What are you?”’) and challenge (‘“I can see you’re trying to invent something”’) answers ‘“I’m a little girl”’, but ‘rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through’. And that of course is what the book is about, Alice’s trying to invent herself as ‘a little girl’, in the face of the dizzying changes of size and context she undergoes underground. Alice’s

Adventures under Ground offers a different, developmental narrative of Dodgson’s invented story but also of Alice’s fictional journey of growth and self-invention in a world of startling physical and biological transformations. When Dodgson arranged for its publication in 1886, he recognized that the early text, like its seven-year-old heroine, had its own identity. As we may read plural versions of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and W H. Auden’s ‘Dover’, so too we should be able to read the two texts of Alice’s Adventures, as in this edition, which transcribes Dodgson’s MS text and reproduces some of his pencilled illustrations.

Notes

1 Letter of 16 July 1885, The Letters of Lewis Carroll, ed. Morton N. Cohen, with the assistance of R. L. Green, 2 vols, Oxford, 1979, vol I, p. 591.

2 Letter to Alice (Liddell) Hargreaves, I March 1885, Letters, vol I, p. 560.

3 The MS