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By Root 423 0

cupboards and bookshelves flash by, maps and pictures hung up on pegs, and neatly labelled jars (one marked ‘ORANGE MARMALADE’). As she falls, she calls up snippets learned in geography ‘lessons in the school-room’, and enjoys the consolations of ‘nice grand words to say’ like ‘Latitude or Longitude’. At the end of the dreamily time-suspended fall, she comes to earth with a ‘thump’ on a ‘heap of sticks and dry leaves’. Maps, pictures, labels, words: Alice’s free fall takes her through the models of linguistic order she has learned at home and in the school-room. In her dream adventures, such tools cease to offer stability yet they are never lost sight of, and the world she travels through is always composed of language. Comically transfigured, it is nevertheless built out of the familiar, educational and social world of a middle-class child of her time. The playing-cards and chess-pieces which provide the narrative coherence for her dreams have no supernatural or magical dimension: they are part of familiar rule-bound household games (despite the label ‘fairy tale’, there are no fairies or supernatural powers in the Alice books, such as you find in the children’s fiction of those other religious dons, George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis). Alice clings on to her received codes even as they are put under pressure from all sides; she keeps her composure as best she can, as she travels through the discomposed linguistic halls of mirrors which are her dreams. As she says to the discouragingly moralistic Ugly Duchess, ‘“I’ve a right to think”’.

Dodgson was a logician with a taste for children, and he brings his professional thinking about questions of meaning to bear upon his fascination with childhood. The result is a ‘fairy tale’ about a seven-year-old which is not only an adventure story but a philosophical joke-book, a mixture of genially grotesque pantomime and surreal Socratic dialogue. Despite the mind-bending series of jokes about language and logic, however, this is not a philosophical divertissement disguised as a children’s book, and if Alice is subjected to perverse logical jokes, the joke is never on Alice. ‘“You shouldn’t make jokes”’, Alice tells the gnat, ‘“if they make you so unhappy”’, and the jokes other creatures tell – she makes none herself and she doesn’t generally seem to find other people’s very funny – don’t make her happy either. They do, however, enlarge her, and our, sense of the possible ways the world and words have meaning. Dodgson’s genius was to make the construction of meaning an intrinsic part of the narrative of the child’s dream experience. Like later books, such as The Game of Logic in its different way, they assume that the idea of meaning is meaningful to children.

The publication of the Alice books marks a watershed in the literature about childhood as well as children’s literature. For all their originality, they are a product of a culture with a huge and developing investment in the idea of childhood. Childhood had begun to play an increasing role in adult fiction of the period. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837), Dombey and Son (1848), David Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1861) all played a large part in colonizing modern childhood for literary representation. During the same period a new literature for children rapidly developed. In the 1820s Taylor’s translation of the Grimm brothers’ Household Tales acted as an ‘open sesame’, and Lewis Carroll’s thoroughly ‘modern’ transformation of the traditional ‘fairy tale’ in the Alice books is part of a much broader development of writing specifically directed at children in the Victorian period, much of it associated with the major writers of the time. Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense had appeared in 1846, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in 1843 and Thackeray’s pastiche fairy tale The Rose and the Ring in 1854, all of which helped clear the way for Carrollian nonsense.115 Dodgson gave the Liddell girls a copy of Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House for Christmas in 1861,