"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll

The classic children's novel, first published in 1865. Lured by a White Rabbit, Alice falls down a rabbit hole and arrives in Wonderland where she meets a variety of strange characters including a hookah-smoking caterpillar, the Mad Hatter and the (also mad) March Hare, the slowly vanishing Cheshire cat, the mournful Mock Turtle and the bloodthirsty Queen of Hearts.

My U3A group (Eastbourne Central) discussed whether the story represents the transition to adulthood. Certainly the size changes reminded us of adolescence, during which some parts of the body grow faster than others, and some changes are more difficult to accommodate, sometimes leading to clumsiness. There was the suggestion that Alice learns defiance and this is a sign of maturing. But on the whole, although we could see the argument that Wonderland represents the bizarre and confusing, sometimes cruel and inhospitable, world of adults, with all its inconsistencies, as seen from the perspective of a child, it was not clear that Alice was successfully making the transition to adulthood. Perhaps this is part of the wish fulfilment of the author: it was pointed out to the group that Lewis Carroll found it difficult to remain friends with children after they had grown up.

Indeed, AiW doesn’t seem to be a conventional story at all. Although there is the real world to wonderland transition, similar to the liminal experience of many ‘Hero’s Journey’ type stories, and while one could regard Alice’s experiences as tests or trials, Alice as hero has no companions (except the incidental Cheshire cat) and learns nothing; the episodes are almost stand alone and the novel format is most like a picaresque.

It could be argued that Alice is repeatedly trying to make sense of the world but discovering that, although it has rules, these rules are always, in the end, subverted. Thus the Mad Hatter’s tea party has its own logic but when Alice asks what happens when they reach the end and all the dishes are dirty, the subject is swiftly changed. Similarly, Alice tries hard to make sense of the Croquet game played with hedgehogs and flamingos. This reminded some of us of a child repeatedly asking ‘why?’ only to be told, in the end, ‘because I say so’.

Given that LC was an academic mathematician, he must have encountered the strange and confusing world of non-Euclidean geometry. Riemann published his variant of this in 1854, eleven years before the publication of Alice, although there had been attacks on Euclid’s fifth postulate almost since he published it, including one by Omar Khayyam (of Rubaiyyat fame). Riemann’s geometries include one which works for the surface of a sphere, whilst Euclidean geometry works for a flat surface (so, for example, whereas the internal angles of Euclid’s triangles always add up to 180o they don’t in Riemann’s triangles). Perhaps Wonderland was LC’s reaction to the discovery that Euclid, the gold standard of learning for two millenia, was not necessarily the last word in maths.

What is clear is that AiW was written as a satire. It lampoons the current fashion for ‘improving’ verse for children (Robert Southey’s Father William and Isaac Watt’s Busy Bee) and it caricatures a large number of people known to LC. The nonsense tradition had already been established (Edward Lear’s limericks first appeared in 1846, nineteen years before Alice).

There was some criticism of the prose. Certainly, much of the writing appears to be staid, although this might be typical of Victorian children’s books; AiW only really comes alive in the dialogues. I suggested that the stodgy prose might be necessary when writing nonsense or fantastic prose, comparing AiW’s everyday approach to a weird world to the opening lines of Kafka’s Metamorphosis: “One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.”

We were given some personal biographical details about the author, although it was pointed out that much in his biography has been contested. AiW was, it seems, first shown to Henry Kingsley, a novelist and the brother of Charles Kingsley, a more famous novelist whose novel of magical realism, ‘The Water Babies’, in which the child hero is transported to a magical place underwater, was first published as a serial between 1862 and 1863, thus appearing shortly before AiW. On a local note, Henry Kingsley retired with his wife to Cuckfield.

Selected quotes:

• "'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'" (Ch 1) This quote has stayed with me since I first read the book as a child.
• "I'll stay down here! It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying 'Come up again, dear!' I shall only look up and say 'Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else."(Ch 1)
• "Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the general conclusion, that wherever you go to on the English coast you find a number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and behind them a railway station." (Ch 2)
• "Speak roughly to your little boy/ And beat him when he sneezes:/ He only does it to annoy,/ Because he knows it teases." (Ch 6) This also I remember from a child.
• "'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' 'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat. ''I don't much care where -' said Alice. 'Then it doesn't matter which way you go'" (Ch 6)
• "'Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on. 'I do,' Alice hastily replied: 'at least - at least I mean what I say - that's the same thing, you know.' 'Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter." (Ch 7)

March 2022

Nominated by Robert McCrum as 18th in the Guardian's 100 best novels of all time.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God