Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [28]
‘The cup is MT’ is relatively easy to decode, but the ‘sense’ of the apparently empty letters has to be deciphered on quite different lines to those required to decode ‘SSSS’ in the earlier letter; they aren’t a phonetic pun but a series of initial letters which the letter writer construes as abbreviations for utterly disparate terms. At the end, after some jokes about the exchange of letters between them, Dodgson asks Edith for her other names, so that he will make a monograph for her ‘for writing all the initials at once’ – another play on isolating initial letters and devising new patterns for them. This, of course, is one of Dodgson’s specialities, as his many acrostic verses on the names of child friends illustrate – not least, the final poem of Through the Looking-Glass, where the initial letters of each line spell the full name of Alice Pleasance Liddell. The letter is partly about letter writing in the usual sense – a subject that preoccupied Dodgson who later published ‘Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter Writing’ to accompany the Wonderland Stamp-case in 1888114 – it is largely taken up with the writing of alphabetical letters (such as ‘MT’) as a code for other things. Such empty play is obviously full of meaning for the figure who signs himself in one letter ‘Yours affectionately, Lewis Carroll’, and in the other, with another abbreviation, ‘Ever yours afftely C. L. Dodgson’.
My reading of the letter is undoubtedly pedantic, but so was Dodgson, as Oxford don and children’s writer too. Making a ‘dear child’ puzzled was a central thread in Dodgson’s puzzling relationships with children, and clearly this is central to the Alice stories. It is Alice’s combination of curiosity (‘curiouser and curiouser’ indeed) and puzzlement which offers the reader a mirror through which to read the nonsense she encounters. Quite as much as Maisie in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, Alice is engaged in a quest to interpret and master the complex and strange phenomena of the largely adult world she encounters – there are no other children in her dream. What Alice knows, and how she interprets it, holds centre stage, giving her a paradoxical intellectual authority. In his letter to Edith Jebb, as apparently in many of his relationships with children, Dodgson engineers a semantic equivalent of a sado-masochistic relationship between himself as powerful adult creator of puzzles and the ‘poor dear puzzled girl’ who encounters them. Yet in the books, where variations of the same scenario occur in every episode, the same psychic economy produces a different psychological (and literary) effect. The adults in the stories – the March Hare, the Duchess, Humpty Dumpty and the Red Queen – are, for all their bossiness and superiority, shown up as perverse and childish weirdos, recognizable contemporaries of Dickens’s Quilp, Scrooge, Miss Havisham and Mr Dick. In creating Alice’s dream, and making it the centre of the books, Dodgson found not only a fertile channel for his genius for nonsense, but transformed the ways it might be meaningful. Alice, even as a seven-year-old, emerges as more than equal to her intellectual as well as social adventures, more than equal too to bullying interlocutors such as Humpty Dumpty, the first bona fide philosopher of nonsense. His presumptuous boast ‘“When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean”’ provokes Alice’s retort, ‘“The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.”’ Not to be fazed, Dumpty replies, ‘“The question is… which is to be master——that’s all.” ’
The Alice books mean ‘many different things’, as the huge critical literature they have inspired makes clear, but Alice’s struggle for mastery and meaning is at their centre. This is clear from the vertiginous start of Wonderland, where Alice, inspired by her curiosity (that key word in the book), follows the rabbit underground. During the fall down the ‘deep well’ Alice sees