Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [30]
Got Mabel in Rhymeland, by Edward Holland, as part of the collection I intend making of books of the Alice type. Besides this, I have From Nowhere to the North Pole by young Tom Hood; Elsie’s Expedition by F. E. Weatherly, and A Trip to Blunderland, by Jambon; and Wanted – A King by Maggie Browne. One more book I have added, The Story of a Nursery Rhyme. 116
By the end of the century Twain, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Stevenson and Kipling had extended the scope of children’s literature further, but Dodgson had every reason to be conscious of the importance of his own work in this development. The Alice books combine modern and ‘romance’ elements, psychology and comedy, in a highly original, liberating way that was at home with the real world of Victorian childhood on the one hand, and the kinds of meaning coded in fantastic fairy tales on the other, and had no truck with the ugly didacticism associated with the Ugly Duchess’s ‘Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.’
This brings us back to the altercation between Alice and the Red Queen with which we began:
“I’m sure I didn’t mean”—Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen interrupted her impatiently.
“That’s just what I complain of! You should have meant! What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning? Even a joke should have some meaning—and a child’s more important than a joke, I hope. You couldn’t deny that, even if you tried with both hands.”
The nonsense jokes, and the jokes about meaning in particular, get their resonance in the end because of the importance of the child’s experience of the contestation of meanings in which she is caught up. Dodgson was frightened of the best sources of jokes – sex and religion – and worked hard to keep his writings untainted by even the faintest humorous allusions to either; nevertheless the jokes the child Alice encounters make free with the most ‘important’ issues in her world – food and the food-chain, growing and ageing, manners and madness, childhood and adulthood, freedom and rules, authority and identity.
It was only in the twinned Alice books, and in The Hunting of the Snark of the same period, that Dodgson found a medium to explore his puzzling temperament, with its anomalous investment in young girls and questions of meaning. In these works he transformed his perverse imagination into works of art that have not only survived their moment, but have gone on to generate new meanings with every generation of readers, enlarging the possibilities not only of children’s literature but all literature. As the countless subsequent interpretations, translations and adaptations show, Alice’s adventures continue and are ‘to be continued’.
Notes
1 ‘The Lobster-Quadrille’, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, chapter 10; ‘Queen Alice’, Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 9.
2 AAIW, chapter 12.
3 AAIW, chapter 12.
4 TLG, chapter 1.
5 AAIW, chapter 12.
6 TLG, chapter 6.
7 R. L. Green, Introduction, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Oxford, 1982.
8 William Empson, ‘Alice in Wonderland: The Child as Swain’, Some Versions of Pastoral, London, 1935.
9 Martin Gardner ed. The Annotated Alice, with an introduction and notes by Martin Gardner, Harmondsworth, 1965/1970.
10 On this, see Hugh Haughton, Introduction, Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry, London, 1988; J. S. Atherton, ‘Carroll: The Unforeseen Precursor’, The Booksat the Wake, New York, 1960; Michael Holquist, ‘What is a Boojum? Nonsense and Modernism’, Yale French Studies, vol XLIII, 1970; Elizabeth Sewell,