Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [15]
In ‘“Alice” on the Stage’, written in 1887, over twenty years after the event, Dodgson gives his own fullest account of the story:
Many a day had we rowed together on that quiet stream – the three little maidens and I – and many a fairy tale had been extemporised for their benefit – whether it were at times when the narrator was “‘i’ the vein,’” and fancies unsought came crowding thick upon him, or at times when the jaded Muse was goaded into action, and plodded meekly on, more because she had to say something than that she had something to say – yet none of these many tales got written down: they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon until there came a day when, as it chanced, one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her. That was many a year ago, but I distinctly remember, now as I write, how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards. And so, to please a child I loved (I don’t remember any other motive), I printed in manuscript, and illustrated with my own crude designs – designs that rebelled against every law of Anatomy or Art (for I had never had a lesson in drawing) – the book which I have just had published in facsimile. In writing it out, I added many fresh ideas which seemed to grow of themselves upon the original stock; and many more added themselves when, years afterwards, I wrote it all over again for publication: but (this may interest some readers of ‘Alice’ to know) every such idea and nearly every word of the dialogue, came of itself.75
What is striking about Dodgson’s account is his insistence on the automatism of it all, a founding state of dissociation comparable to psychoanalytic or Surrealistic ‘free association’. The story and the ideas ‘came of themselves’, he insists, without his conscious intervention or control. Though Dodgson reinforces the myth of the ‘golden afternoon’ of its origin, he identifies two other stages in its composition: firstly the manuscript stage completed for Alice soon afterwards and secondly (‘years afterwards’) the stage of writing up for publication. In all three stages, however, the narrative material is self-generating.
If we turn from these public and retrospective accounts of the genesis of Alice’s Adventures to the evidence of Dodgson’s diaries and letters of the time, we get a more detailed sense of its progress from improvised open-air children’s story to published book. The 1862 diary entry for the day in question sets the scene but curiously doesn’t mention storytelling at all:
July 4. (F). Atkinson brought over to my rooms some friends of his, a Mrs. and Miss Peters, of whom I took photographs, and who afterwards looked over my album and stayed to lunch. They then went off to the Museum, and Duckworth and I made an expedition up the river to Godstow with the three Liddells: we had tea on the bank there, and did not reach Christ Church again till quarter past eight, when we took them on to my rooms to see my collection of micro-photographs, and restored them to the Deanery just before nine.76
It was only the following February he annotated this on the opposite page:
On which occasion I told them the fairy-tale of Alice’s Adventures under Ground, which I undertook to write out for Alice, and which is now finished (as to the text) though the pictures are not yet nearly done.77
On this evidence, the first written text of the Adventures was completed six months after the day the oral story was pulled spontaneously out of Dodgson’s hat like the white rabbit with which it begins.
Dodgson’s diaries record