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By Root 433 0

the Alice books hinge upon death and eating. The secure domestic order of Alice’s moral universe is exposed to reveal terror and appetite. ‘Wonderland’ sounds Edenic, as do many of Dodgson’s accounts of childhood, but the world of the stories is grim as well as comic. There’s a ‘lovely garden’ there but also a ‘pool of tears’; nature in Wonderland is more akin to Tennyson’s ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ than Wordsworth’s ‘fair seed-bed’; it’s overshadowed by the fear of death and extinction (think of the Dodo), and reverberations of the Darwinian debate about evolution that had taken place in Oxford in 1859–60. The Wonderland garden is no childhood Eden, but a life-and-death croquet match presided over by a homicidal Queen shouting ‘Off with their heads’ every second minute. Faced with all this random violence and competitiveness, Alice notes ‘“they’re dreadfully fond of beheading people here”’, ‘“the great wonder is there’s anyone left alive” ’. Even Alice herself, when she gets to the ‘lovely garden’ is taken to be a marauding snake (a ‘serpent’) by the outraged maternal Pigeon of Wonderland, not a ‘human child’ (she inspires comparable terror in the fawn of Looking-Glass as soon as they leave the wood of no names). ‘“We’re all mad here” ’, says the grinning Cheshire Cat; the Carrollian grin, like the crocodile’s, reveals a disconcerting madness and violence at the heart of its order – both the ‘natural’ order of the garden, and the legal order of the Trial, with its travesty of justice. In all this, Alice emerges as the book’s nonsensometer (she dismisses the court’s verdict as ‘stuff and nonsense’) and, as much as any Jane Austen heroine, its intellectual conscience. Sense-making is imperative in this world, but it’s a lonely business.

In the tonally bleaker, more elegiac Through the Looking-Glass, the winter sequel to the Maytime trip to Wonderland, Alice’s sense of self hardens in the colder, more political climate she finds six months later behind the glass. The air grows cold in the region of mirrors. The looking-glass, like Keats’s ‘magic casement’, leads into the world of Victorian medievalism and the ‘dark wood’ of Spenserean Romance, albeit in a comically warped form. It is a world where modern railways, newspapers and postal systems interlock with Quixotic knights, lions and unicorns. It is dominated by political battling – the competing Kings and Queens, the battling Tweedle brothers, the Lion and Unicorn, the White and Red Knights, and the political images of Gladstone and Disraeli in the railway carriage. In the carriage, as in the shop, wood and palace, Alice’s attempts to decipher the world around her become more critical and anxious. Even the garden of live flowers offers a pricklier, colder pastoral than that of Wonderland, as can be seen in the less than rosy world-view of the Rose Alice chats to:

“You’re beginning to fade, you know—and then one ca’n’t help one’s petals getting a little untidy.”

Alice didn’t like this idea at all: so, to change the subject, she asked “Does she ever come out here?”

“I daresay you’ll see her soon,” said the Rose. “She’s one of the kind that has nine spikes, you know.”

“Where does she wear them?” Alice asked with some curiosity.

“Why, all round her head, of course,” the Rose replied. “I was wondering you hadn’t got some too. I thought it was the regular rule.”102

Against the cruel pathos of seeing the seven-and-a-half-year-old Alice as a fading flower, the Rose presents adulthood with a certain grim realism. She is referring to the Red Queen with her spiky chess crown (‘the essence of all Governesses’, as Dodgson called her),103 and the Queens as representatives of the queenliness Ruskin ascribed to all women, are at best a grisly duo – the one all bossiness and bile, the other all slovenliness and resignation, the one manically over-assertive (like Humpty Dumpty and the Tweedles), the other ineffectually depressive (like the gnat and Knight). In the chess world of Through the Looking-Glass it seems to be the regular rule that creatures (even the two bona