Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Week 15: Children's Literature - Assignments - Reading - Resources - Images

Background Reading

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is the work of an university lecturer in mathematics, the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who published his literary works under the pen name Lewis Carroll. The way that he came up with this name demonstrates the playful attitude towards names and words that you will find in all of his writings: he started with his first and middle names, Charles Lutwidge, and turned them into Latin, Carolus Lodovicus, and then inverted this name and put it back into English: Lewis Carroll.

Dodgson was born in 1832, the son of a clergyman. In 1850, when he was 18 years old, Dodgson went to Oxford University and enrolled as a student. He lived in Oxford for the rest of his life, based at Christ Church College where he became a lecturer in Mathematics.

The Dean of Christ Church was Henry Liddell, a famous scholar of Greek. Anybody who has ever studied Greek is acquainted with Professor Liddell, since he was the author of the Greek-English dictionary that is still used by all Greek students; it comes in three sizes: the little Liddell, the middle Liddell, and the big Liddell.

Dodgson became friends with Liddell and with his three daughters, one of whom was named Alice. You can look at some photographs of Alice and her sisters taken during this time. Dodgson was a pioneering photographer, having bought his first camera in 1856. (In 1851, the "Collodion" process made photography dramatically more practical than it had been previously.)

On July 4 1862, Dodgson went on a picnic with Alice and her two sisters, and he composed the first version of Alice's adventures when Alice, who was ten years old at the time, said to him: "Tell us a story." Two years later, in 1864, Dodgson gave a handwritten and illustrated manuscript of the story to Alice as a Christmas present. This manuscript version of the book with Dodgson's illustrations was later published in a facsimile version in 1885; you can see that many of the ideas for Tenniel's illustrations were originally developed by Dodgson, who was an accomplished artist.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was then issued by Macmillan Publishers in 1865, with the famous illustrations by John Tenniel that you will see when reading this unit. The story of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland concerns the adventures of a little girl, Alice, who wanders into a strange land filled with talking animals, like the White Rabbit, and magical objects, such as the Queen of Hearts and the pack of cards who are her subjects.

In 1871, Dodgson published a sequel, called Through the Looking Glass. In this book, Alice crosses through to the other side of a mirror and finds another strange world, this time inhabited by a set of animated chess pieces. In the plot of this story, Alice's goal is to reach the other end of the chessboard and be crowned a queen. There are some famous characters and incidents in Through the Looking Glass that you might be familiar with, such as Tweedledum and Tweedledee and Humpty-Dumpty. The poem "Jabberwocky" also appears in this book.

Although Dodgson wrote the "Alice" books for children, there is an incredible quantity of wordplay, paradox and parody in these books which are not exactly easy to read! In order to accommodate truly young readers, Dodgson published a "simplified" version in 1899 called The Nursery Alice. The illustrations for this book were done in color, and the text was completely rewritten to accommodate younger readers. Here, for example, is how Dodgson describes the White Rabbit in The Nursery Alice:

"Oh dear, oh dear!" said the Rabbit. "I shall be too late!" What would it be too late for, I wonder? Well, you see, it had to go and visit the Duchess (you'll see a picture of the Duchess, soon, sitting in her kitchen): and the Duchess was a very cross old lady: and the Rabbit knew she'd be very angry indeed if he kept her waiting. So the poor thing was as frightened as frightened could be (Don't you see how he's trembling? Just shake the book a little, from side to side, and you'll soon see him tremble), because he thought the Duchess would have his head cut off, for a punishment.

Some of you have done "children's versions" of stories for your assignments in this class; if so, you might enjoy taking a look at this alternate version of Alice's adventures to see how Dodgson changed his own story with small children in mind!

Dodgson also composed all kinds of puzzles and riddles, such as the following riddle about three sisters and their cat (probably also composed for the Liddell sisters and their cat, Dinah):

Three sisters at breakfast were feeding the cat,
The first gave it sole--Puss was grateful for that:
The next gave it salmon--which Puss thought a treat:
The third gave it herring--which Puss wouldn't eat.
(Explain the conduct of the cat.)

As a mathematician, Dodgson also created "symbolic logic games" for children to play, with a game board and pieces that allow you to work out syllogisms using the principles of symbolic logic. The syllogisms start off in a simple form:

Babies are illogical;
Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile;
Illogical persons are despised.
Answer: Babies cannot manage crocodiles.

and attain an absurd complexity:

The only animals in this house are cats;
Every animal is suitable for a pet, that loves to gaze at the moon;
When I detest an animal, I avoid it;
No animals are carnivorous, unless they prowl at night;
No cat fails to kill mice;
No animals ever take to me, except what are in this house;
Kangaroos are not suitable for pets;
None but carnivora kill mice;
I detest animals that do not take to me;
Animals, that prowl at night, always love to gaze at the moon.
Answer: I always avoid a kangaroo.

Dodgson's games and puzzles are still of interest, and he is famous world-wide as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but the work that he did for his "real" job, as a professor of mathematics, is almost entirely forgotten! If you are curious (curiosity is the key ingredient to Alice's adventures!), here are the titles of some of his works on mathematics: A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry (1860), The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry (1861), Condensation of Determinants (1866), and Curiosa Mathematica: A New Theory of Parallels (1888).

Dodgson died in 1898, at the age of 66. There were many events in 1998 to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of his death.

And yes, there is a Disney animated version of Alice from 1951, but if you are looking for a film version of Alice, I highly recommend a 1933 film directed by Norman McLeod, who is best known as a director of Marx Brothers films, such as Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. Directing Marx Brothers movies is great preparation for directing a film version of Alice in Wonderland. The film combines both the Wonderland and Looking-Glass adventures and it stars, among others, Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, W.C. Fields as Humpty-Dumpty, and Gary Cooper as the White Knight. The 1985 film Dreamchild is about Alice Liddell as an adult and her memories of her childhood.