Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [4]
The Alice books are children’s literature, but also, as much as Dickens’s Great Expectations, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, part of the nineteenth century’s expanding literature about childhood. In foregrounding problems of language and meaning, they are as formally disorienting and psychologically searching representations of childhood subjectivity as Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist or Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse.‘Adventures’ and ‘Wonderland’ suggest ‘fairy tale’ and ‘romance’, but Alice’s most parlous adventures underground and through the mirror are intellectual and social rather than physical, dialectical rather than folkloric. The Gryphon, Monstrous Crow and Jabberwocky are comparatively harmless antagonists compared to all the querulous logicians and niggling philosophers of meaning she meets on her travels, all ready to pounce like vultures on any phrase or idiom, however ‘normal’, that can be wrested into the discomforting abnormality of ‘nonsense’. The author of the Alice books was an Oxford logician, and at every turn of her looking-glass quest, Alice’s conversations bring her into close encounters not only with figures from games of cards and chess like the Queen of Hearts and the White Knight, or from the traditional repertoire of nursery rhymes like Humpty Dumpty and the Unicorn, but with the persistent puzzles, paradoxes and riddles which haunt the apparently stable mirror theories of language which have dominated the philosophy of the West.15
The question of the meaning of nonsense haunts Alice and many of her interlocutors. ‘“It’s really dreadful”’, Alice reflects at one point, ‘“the way all the creatures argue. It’s enough to drive one crazy!”’16 Many of these maddening arguments concern the questions of meaning, identity, names, logic and the philosophy of language which have vexed philosophers since Plato. The seven-year-old Alice is caught up in a series of bad-tempered dialectical duets which call in question or put into play the conceptual foundations of her world. It is no wonder that the relation between children, jokes and meaning raised by the Red Queen should haunt readers of Lewis Carroll’s story.
2: Biographical
One familiar – and familiarizing – way of re-framing the riddle of the Alice books is biographical, to look to the life of the author for clues to the meaning of his dream texts. One answer to Alice’s last question in Through the Looking-Glass, as to ‘who it was that dreamed it all?’ is ‘Lewis Carroll’.17
‘Lewis Carroll’ was the pseudonym of the Reverend C. L. Dodgson. And if during his lifetime, as Virginia Woolf said, ‘The Rev. C. L. Dodgson had no life’,18 since his death he has been subjected to innumerable posthumous Lives, starting with his nephew Stuart Dodgson Collingwood’s The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, published in 1898, the year of his death.19 Unfortunately the Dodgson that emerges from the densely documented pages of these Lives is almost as enigmatic and controversial a figure as Alice.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born in 1832, the year of the Reform Act, into a rural parsonage in Daresbury, Cheshire. He was the third of eleven children and the eldest son. His father, a High Churchman in the mould of his friend Pusey, was a graduate of Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a First in classics and mathematics. Though his son rarely mentions him in letters or diaries, his father and Christ Church were to cast a long shadow over his entire life. The Reverend Charles Dodgson had married his cousin, Frances Jane Lutwidge (about whom we know dismayingly little beyond