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Friday – Lewis Carroll’s Birthday
In honor of Lewis Carroll’s birthday—he was born on January 27, 1832—I repost an essay I wrote nine years ago when I was teaching the Alice books in a British Fantasy class. I used the post to sort out some of the ways that Carroll uses fantasy to protest life in Victorian England.
Reposted (and slightly revised) from March 12, 2014
…Alice is like the Gulliver of Book I insofar as she is an innocent observer wandering through a fantastical world that points to significant problems in our own. Like Gulliver, Alice herself doesn’t judge—in fact, she’s a good girl who believes what she is taught and does what people tell her to do—so it is up to us as readers to apply judgment.
And what do we find problematic? Here’s a partial list:
–the new 19th century obsession with time (the White Rabbit, the Mad Tea Party);
–boring history teachers (such as the Mouse, who helps all the animals get dry by telling them the driest story he can think of);
–utilitarian fact-based education (satirized by Alice’s wonderful distortions);
–censorious adults who order children around, making them recite poetry and follow rigid rules (the Caterpillar, the Duchess, the Mock Turtle, the Queen of Hearts);
–boring adults who pontificate (Robert Southey’s Old Father William, parodied by Carroll);
–dogmatic poetry which must be memorized for the sake of a child’s salvation (“How Doth the Little Busy Bee”);
–dominating women and timid men (the Queen and King of Hearts);
–obnoxious little boys (who are much preferable as pigs);
–the loss of childhood innocence.
Innocent child though she may be, however, Alice is also subversive. Time and again she finds ways to strike back, although always in spite of her best intentions, which allows her to retain her purity. For instance:
–she unintentionally offends the disagreeable Mouse, who has fallen into the pool with her, by talking about her cat’s hunting habits;
–she unintentionally exposes heavy-handed religious instruction for children by revising “How Doth the Little Busy Bee”–with its appalling line “For Satan finds some mischief still/For idle hands to do”–into a poem about a seemingly kindly but actually voracious crocodile, who “welcomes little fishes [children?] in with gently smiling jaws”;
–forced to recite poetry for the authoritarian caterpillar, she unintentionally ridicules both teachers and those students who take them seriously by transforming Southey’s stodgy Father William into a man who turns back somersaults in at the door and balances eels on the end of his nose;
–she exposes the Queen and King of Hearts as uttering nonsense in the trial.
Unlike her previous rebellions, however, this last act is not unintentional or innocent. She is no longer “a little girl” (as she describes herself to a pigeon) or “only a child” (the King of Hearts’ excuse for her) but suddenly “almost two miles high” (the Queen of Hearts). When she stands up to authority as if on equal terms, she is leaving childhood innocence and the fantasy life that accompanies it.
I used to find the card attack on Alice to be terrifying, perhaps because it echoed what I thought would happen to me if I stood up to adults. Alice has called out grown-ups for their absurdities and they react with fury.
But even more frightening to Carroll may be the fact that little Alice is growing up. He invested his imaginary world in her, and the danger of dull and stifling adult reality winning out is a dark theme running through both Alice books, especially the second. The world of imagination is in danger when little girls grow tall and claim that the world of the imagination is “nothing but a pack of cards.” Or when (in Alice through the Looking Glass), they change from pawns into queens and realize that their kittens are nothing more than kittens.
One senses his fear in the poem with which he ends Looking Glass. There we see a boat drifting inexorably toward the end of dreaming. Or as Carroll puts it at one point, “autumn frosts have slain July.” Note, incidentally, that assembling the first letter of each line spells out Alice’s full name: Alice Pleasance Liddell.
A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—
Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear—
Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.
Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.
Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?
In a sense, Carroll is using his dream of Alice’s childhood innocence to keep his own imagination alive. William Wordsworth famously lamented that “shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy,” and Carroll employed nonsense to hold that prison house at bay. Deep down, however, he knows that it is only a matter of time before adult common sense will collapse our fantasy imagining like a house of cards.