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On the other hand they are also riddling, aesthetically highly wrought products of a child-haunted adult, obsessed by questions of meaning, and have something of the eerie perfection of the literary sphinx about them, of Wildean contrivance as well as the vertiginous spontaneity of improvisation. On the one hand, these are two of the few widely acknowledged classics of children’s literature which helped in themselves to redefine the possibilities of writing for children. On the other hand, they are two of the most original, experimental works of literary fiction in the nineteenth century and have had a huge impact on subsequent fiction and culture. Translated by Nabokov into Russian, adopted by the Surrealists as proto-surrealist dream books in France, taken up by T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, W. H. Auden and more recently Peter Ackroyd as models, the Alice books have been taken to prefigure modernism at its most experimental as well as children’s writing at its most elemental.10 This double fate may embarrass some readers but is surely inherent in the stories Carroll wove around his heroine Alice, and surely part of their challenge and appeal to all readers, young and old.

In a sense this dispute represents a reaction to something beyond the Alice books themselves. It represents a dispute about the meaning of children’s literature (whatever that is), about childhood and literary representations of childhood, about the relation between books for children and books for adults, about ‘nonsense’ as a genre and classification, about dreams, and of course about reading.11 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland originated as a children’s story and was marketed as a book for children, yet since the day of its first publication it has always appealed to adults too and, with the Bible and Shakespeare, is reputed to be the most quoted of English texts. Carroll’s two dream books about a seven-year-old middle-class Victorian girl offer themselves as absurd and riddling parables of narrative and linguistic innocence, but they are also allegories of experience: incarnations of philosophical sophistication and perverse intellectual wit, constructed around the adventures of a child.

What is ultimately at stake in disagreements about the ‘innocence’ of such children’s classics as the Alice books is, I suspect, a debate about the relationship between adulthood and childhood – and where in that complex, troubled and mesmerizing relationship the interest of ‘innocence’ is to be found and in whose interest. Talking about Carroll, W. H. Auden wrote that ‘there are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children’.12 In this sense, it is natural for children’s books to become adult books if they are any good; since all adults have been children, books for and about children are always potentially for and about adults too. William Empson has said that the Alice books are about ‘growing up’, which is certainly true.13 They are also, perhaps more surprisingly, about grown-ups. Alice, after all, is, apart from a fleeting baby (who turns into a pig) and those stuffed archetypal schoolboys Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the only child in the books at all. Like Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, the stories give us not so much an adult’s view of childhood as a child’s view of adulthood. Seen through the lens of Alice, the world of adulthood is as dismayingly bizarre and perverse as those of Dickens and James.

Virginia Woolf resolves the question of readership in a different way. ‘The two Alices are not books for children’, she wrote in 1939, ‘they are the only books in which we become children’.14 According to Woolf, his childhood, ‘lodged whole and entire’ inside Dodgson, forming ‘an impediment at the centre of his being’ which ‘starved the mature man of nourishment’ but enabled him in fiction to ‘do what no one else has ever been able to do… return to that world’ and ‘recreate it… so that we too become children again’. This is a large claim and