Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [25]
Looking-Glass is much preoccupied by passing time, violence, ageing and death, as well as the potential for linguistic aberration and disorder discovered in Wonderland. The obsessively tidy Dodgson was acutely concerned by contemporary debates which threatened the established order. The dreams of Alice, that Oxford child, and her author abut on to the universe of mid nineteenth-century Oxford, a place that considered itself with good reason to be at the centre of British intellectual life at the time. In An Oxford Chiel, published in 1874, only four years after Through the Looking-Glass, Dodgson published a series of highly political satirical squibs on university issues written over the previous nine years – about the new belfry commissioned by Liddell for Christ Church, the defeat of Gladstone as MP for Oxford, the salary and status of the Liberal Jowett (who was Professor of Greek and a notoriously ‘heretical’ contributor to the Essays and Reviews of 1861), the terms of Max Müller’s professorship of comparative philology, among other burning issues of the time. Though Dodgson disclaimed making any such topical or political allusions in the Alice books, controversy is the very air breathed by the embattled creatures in both; Humpty Dumpty is the most belligerently radical of the many philosophers of language who haunt their pages, but the majority of the creatures Alice meets are comparably argumentative, and constitutionally prone to wrangle about the interpretation of words, names, rules and logic. We should remember that in between the two Alice books in 1869, Dodgson published one of his own most sustained exercises in academic controversy, Euclid and His Modern Rivals, a work intended to champion and popularize Euclidean geometry for a modern audience. It’s a dramatic dialogue, featuring the ghost of Euclid, in which a modern mathematics lecturer (ominously called Minos) and his antagonist Professor Niemand (the German for ‘Nobody’), sit in judgement over thirteen rival theorists who challenge the secure order of Euclidean geometry which Dodgson wished to defend. In the disputatious world of Wonderland it is possible to hear echoes of such controversies, as well as the more stirring controversies aroused by the Oxford Movement, the Darwinian debate of the 1860s, Ruskinian aesthetics, Max Müller’s brand of comparative philology and Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869). In one of his Popean satires of the time, Dodgson ironically takes the Liberal side, warning readers to ‘shun Conservatism’s evil star’, and affirm ‘the march of Mind’ against Oxford’s ‘wisely slow’ traditional order, in which intellectual values were tempered by moral and Christian ones:
Neglect the heart and cultivate the brain –
Then this shall be the burden of our song,
‘All change is good – whatever is, is wrong –’
Then Intellect’s proud flag shall be unfurled,
And Brain and Brain alone, shall rule the world!106
Possible ripples and aftershocks of these ideological contests may be detected playing over and under the elusively nonsensical surface of the two children’s books the conservative Dodgson wrote for the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church he christened ‘the relentless reformer’ Liddell.107
But if there are echoes of such contemporary debates, they are muted and indirect. The main focus of the two books is Alice’s own consciousness, as she struggles to make sense of a world through the looking-glass that is more unstable, changeable and radically nonsensical than her author could acknowledge elsewhere. The ‘innocent’ language of nonsense associated with Alice, ‘the child of [his] dreams’,108 gives expression to more things than are dreamed