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By Root 480 0

rotating Mad Tea Party, with its parodies of a parlour-song recital, children’s story (as told by the dormouse) and tea-time etiquette; then the shambolic royal Croquet Game with the Queen, her courtiers and minions all flaunting the rules of that popular new middle-class game (regularly played by the Liddells on the Deanery lawn) and playing havoc with the garden; then, to cap it all, the Mock Turtle and Gryphon’s nostalgic Old Boys’ duet about their schooldays. The Mock Turtle and Gryphon are two highly artificial creatures, fathered not by biology but language, and their mournfully punning chronicle of distant school-days recollected in tranquillity parodies not only the established curriculum of private education in the public schools of the day, but the entire educational system based on ‘reeling and writhing’. There’s a particular pungency in the allusions to classical ‘Laughing and Grief (Latin and Greek, but also the classical genres of comedy and tragedy), since these were intimately associated with Alice’s father, Dean Liddell, co-author of the famous Greek lexicon used in schools. ‘“How the creatures order one about, and make one repeat lessons”’, Alice observes, ‘“I might just as well be at school at once”’. The Gryphon and Mock Turtle are parodic products of the education system they romanticize so tearfully, just as their performance of ‘The Lobster Quadrille’ is a galumphing parody of fashionable ballroom dancing (an institution that played a positively Darwinian role in the struggle of nineteenth-century girls for suitable husbands). Nonsense thrives on travestying authority, and Alice’s last view of Wonderland is the absurd court scene, where the Knave of Hearts is accused of stealing tarts, and tried before a court dominated by an incompetent King, tyrannical Queen and abject jury. The nonsense theatre of Wonderland, with its haywire kings and queens, comes to a climactic finale in this finely tuned satire on the social order. It offers a deadpan comedy of (bad) manners.

The social world of Through the Looking-Glass is dominated by the nominal kings and queens of chess, and is, if anything, more systematically constricting than that of the earlier book. It begins in an untidy Janus-faced version of the haute bourgeoisie drawing-room of Alice’s home, peopled by quarrelling kings and queens, but soon moves into another garden, a caricature of the lush flower garden evoked by the disappointed lover in Tennyson’s Maud and part of a wider landscape which is modelled, not on any natural or picturesque order, but on a geometrically mapped out chessboard. This may seem less anarchic than Wonderland but it’s no less threatening as a mirror of modernity. ‘It’s all a great game of chess that’s being played – all over the world’, we are told, where ‘it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place’ as the Red Queen says, and where people in the railway-carriage think (in chorus) that ‘time is worth a thousand pounds a minute’, land ‘a thousand pounds an inch’ and language ‘a thousand pounds a word’. In the ‘Looking-Glass Insects’ episode where she takes the train, Alice is caught up as a cypher in the communication networks of Victorian England. She has to produce a ticket to validate her travel, but is told she could as well be sent by luggage, telegraph or post (since, like a stamp, she ‘had a head on her’) and gets classified in terms of ticket-offices, alphabets and (in a chapter about names) her name. Throughout all this, she is confronted by two imposing male figures who in Tenniel’s drawing look suspiciously like the two politicians who dominated parliamentary politics at this time, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli (the latter appropriately dressed in paper and reading a newspaper). She is also subjected to aggressive public scrutiny.

All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera-glass. At last he said “You’re traveling the wrong way,” and shut up the window, and went away.

Alice’s progress, as befitting a pawn