Still Alice, 150 years on

n 1865 a book written by a stammering Oxford mathematics lecturer about a young girl who undergoes a series of surreal adventures was first published. But 150 years on, why do Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its 1871 sequel Alice Through the Looking Glass, still have such a hypnotic effect on children and adults alike?

The Mad Hatter. The White Rabbit. The King and Queen of Hearts. The Mock Turtle and the Gryphon: all remain firmly in the popular imagination, together with the sequel’s Jabberwocky, Tweedledum and Tweedledee and Humpty Dumpty, not just through the agency of the original books but through countless film, TV and game spin-offs, as well as other forms of merchandising.

But what do we make of Alice’s drinking the contents of a bottle labelled “Drink Me” before undergoing a miraculous transformation and encountering a chilled caterpillar sitting on a mushroom “quietly smoking a long hookah” and a vanishing Cheshire Cat with a serial-killer grin? More seriously, what do we make of Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, a confirmed bachelor with a penchant for the company of young girls and who photograped them at every opportunity?

As Maria Warner writes in the London Review of Books of Carroll’s relationship with Alice Liddell and her sisters Lorina and Edith, the daughters of Oxford’s Christ Church dean Henry Liddell and his wife Lorina:

On the whole, the extent of parental co-operation with Carroll’s elaborate plans for mutual enjoyment is remarkable; such entrusting of little girls to a young single male isn’t common today. Part of the fun was Carroll’s effervescent parody of grown-up habits. He mimicked for his child visitors all the rituals of seduction: intimate tete-a-tete meals, picnics al fresco, rowing on the river, flurried exchanges of billets-doux full of delightful banter and jokes and compliments and fuss and names interlaced in acrostics; he took flattering, lively photographs of his friends for keepsakes, and even, as has become notorious, undressed them for the occasion — never without the consent of the mothers.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” as Alice says in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But generations have given Carroll the benefit of the doubt, and today it is still perhaps more charitable, and more useful, to see him as a typical Victorian for whom pre-adolescence was equated with pre-lapsarian, for whom childhood represented innocence, a Paradise to be regained. Maybe more J.M. Barrie than Michael Jackson, and definitely not Balthus or Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass represent the kind of freedom the best of Shakespeare’s plays also represent: neither amoral nor immoral; rather a creativity rooted in myth and the unconscious that has not a childlike simplicity but a childlike love of complexity that turns the adult world topsy-turvy and makes us all see that world afresh:

As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was going to dive in among the leaves, which she found to be nothing but the tops of the trees under which she had been wandering, when a sharp hiss made her draw back in a hurry: a large pigeon had flown into her face, and was beating her violently with its wings.

“Serpent!” screamed the Pigeon.

“I’m not a serpent!” said Alice indignantly. “Let me alone!”

The associations with the Garden of Eden and Satan as serpent cannot be ignored.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ends poignantly with Alice pondering her sister.

Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood ...

This was the hope Carroll had for Alice, for her siblings, for himself and for us all, and it is that sentiment which is at the very centre of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.