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By Root 416 0

of the Dean of Christ Church, born into the heart of the English establishment, a well-educated upper-middle-class Oxonian girl, versed in good manners, good verse, and the rules of chess, cards and croquet.100 Christ Church was the smartest Oxbridge college, where the Prince of Wales became an undergraduate in 1859, and Queen Victoria visited the Liddells in the Deanery in 1860. Not long after Through the Looking-Glass, Alice was briefly involved with Prince Leopold (who’d attended her sister Lorina’s wedding in 1874 and had been photographed by Dodgson), so that the royal scenario that pervades both stories reflects on her own social status, as well as on the romance conventions of fairy tales and the games of cards and chess she is caught up in. The fictional Alice measures herself by her superior knowledge and social status: ‘“I’m sure I ca’n’t be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh, she knows such a very little! Besides, she’s she, and I’m I, and—oh dear, how puzzling it all is!”’ Her adventures test her sense of identity to the full. Her worries have something in common with those Elizabeth Bishop dramatizes in her searching autobiographical poem ‘In the Waiting Room’ about a young girl exactly Alice’s age, who, looking into the mirror of other people, reflects on who she is herself. ‘Why should I be my aunt,/or me, or anyone?’ she asks:

I said to myself: three days

And you’ll be seven years old.

I was saying it to stop

the sensation of falling off

the round, turning world

into a cold, blue-black space.

But I felt: you are an I,

you are an Elizabeth,

you are one of them.101

Alice’s fall down the rabbit-hole induces a comparable identity crisis. The descent into the ‘deep well’ shakes all the assumptions of her waking self. When she tries to re-establish her poise by reciting the improving verses of Isaac Watts’s ‘How doth the little busy bee’, the admirably industrious bee turns into a predatory crocodile with ‘gently smiling Jaws.’ Having travestied the pious hymn, she fears she must be Mabel after all: ‘“I shall have to go and live in that poky little house, and have next to no toys to play with, and, oh, ever so many lessons to learn! No, I’ve made up my mind about it: if I’m Mabel, I’ll stay down here!”’

When the White Rabbit takes her for a ‘housemaid’ soon afterwards, Alice exclaims, ‘“How surprised he’ll be when he finds out who I am.”’ Whoever she is, she couldn’t be one of the servant classes in a ‘poky little house’. Hers is a world of governesses, school-rooms, middle-class etiquette, tea-parties, croquet lawns, visiting royalty, and querulous pedants – just like Alice Liddell’s (and Dodgson’s own). By and large those she meets in her adventures are upper and middle class too; with the exception of the Rabbit’s stage-Irish gardener, Hattan and Haigha and a few other bit-part players with vaguely cockneyfied voices, the creatures generally speak what Alice calls ‘good English’. As I hope the notes to this edition show, Dodgson constructed Alice’s dream worlds out of the details of Alice Liddell’s actual environment, and did so with something of the meticulous literalism of contemporary paintings such as Ford Maddox Brown’s Work, Frith’s Derby Day, or the domestic genre scenes of painters admired by Dodgson, such as Arthur Hughes and Millais. Tenniel therefore proved an inspired choice of illustrator for Alice and her world. His graphic idiom, however fantastic and allegorically grotesque, is as pedantically referential as an exhibition catalogue of Victorian social types, settings, furniture and costume – just like Dodgson’s own. When Alice travels underground and through the glass, it is not only her unconscious dream world that she finds – but Victorian England, and the world of the Oxford establishment she shared with Dodgson.

Alice’s unconscious parody of Watts’s hymn about the busy bee invokes not Protestant industry and moral purposiveness, but a crocodile’s ‘jaws’ and ‘claws’, and William Empson has pointed out how high a proportion of the jokes, poems and parodies in