Lewis Carroll’s famous
story for children takes us on a surreal journey into childish
dream-landscapes, meeting mad characters and experiencing bizarre concepts and
physics-bending mechanics along the way. Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland and Through
the Looking-Glass are generally entertaining, but they rather lack rhyme or
reason in terms of plot, narrative and structure. This is not inherently a bad
thing, but for these children’s stories it means they can be a little bit of a
slog to get through sometimes.
In the second half of the 19th century Lewis
Carroll (or Charles Dodgeson, to use his real name) wrote a couple of stories
for his friend’s daughter, a little girl he had an arguably suspicious
attachment to. Whatever the reasons for his ‘friendship’ with the real-life
Alice – and it’s fairly certain Carroll would be lynched if he exhibited the
same behaviour today – the literary output that was a result is generally
regarded as a children’s classic. The two books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There are of such
similar calibre that they are generally confounded as part of one whole work.
Film adaptations have made use of both stories, whilst reading one book and not
the other seems like a waste of time. Most editions I’ve seen include both
books, and as such I will be reviewing both of them here as one work.
It begins with a child called Alice (Incidentally, the
real-life Alice’s father, a certain George Henry Liddell, was largely responsible
for helping to compile a very famous dictionary of Ancient Greek, but this is
just a piece of trivial information) who, bored by her sister’s company,
decides to follow a well-dressed white rabbit down its rabbit-hole. Tumbling
into a weird little dream-like world, Alice finds herself lost and confused,
her body contorted to peculiar shapes and sizes by eating and drinking suspect
substances, while strange people and curious creatures sprout nonsense at her
and act in a generally peculiar way. Okay, that doesn’t actually sound like a
very nice, child-friendly story to me now that I say it like that. In the
context of the story it’s all perfectly fine, and Alice herself never seems to
be under any kind of threat. She is generally on top of the situation, and
seems more or less in control of herself and the world around her. As far as
protagonists go, she’s quite good at driving the story all by herself and at
facing up to the lunacy she finds throughout the titular Wonderland. Maybe it’s
alright as a children’s story after all.
So after Alice wakes up and proves
it-was-all-a-dream-after-all, she must then encounter another dream-world in
the sequel. This second adventure, which takes place in a world on the other
side of a mirror (the titular looking-glass), lands Alice in a giant and rather
abstract game of chess. She must make her way from one side of the land to the
other, with the promise that she will become a queen when she arrives at her
destination. In many ways this second story feels substantially more dream-like
than its prequel, for scenes and landscapes suddenly change from one thing to
another, characters completely alter their outward forms in the blink of an eye
(a Queen becomes a sheep, for instance), and at one point Alice finds herself
running along as fast as she can but making no progress whatsoever. Like the
first story this one has little that can be described as a plot, but the more
believably dream-like nature of the story makes it just an ounce more
interesting to read. If I had to pick a preference between the two, I’d have to
choose Through the Looking-Glass for
this arbitrary reason.
Interspersed throughout the narrative are a number of short
nonsense poems, playful little rhyming stanzas that demonstrate Carroll’s
affinity for the entertainingly ludicrous. The legendary poem ‘Jabberwocky’ is
featured in the early pages of Through
the Looking-Glass, but this is just one of many such verses that can be
found in the Alice books. Here is a
taster:
“’Tis the voice of the Lobster’, I heard him
declare,
‘You have baked me too brown, I must
sugar my hair.’
As a duck with its eyelids, so he with
his nose
Trims his belt and his buttons, and
turns out his toes.
When the sands are all dry, he is gay
as a lark,
And will talk in contemptuous tones of
the Shark:
But, when the tide rises and the
sharks are around,
His voice has a timid and tremulous
sound.”
[L.
Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland. Wordsworth, 1992. pg. 87]
You see? We all need a bit more of that in our lives.
Generally they are fun little diversions, and to see the characters’ confusion
over saying or hearing these words of nonsense is where the novels are at their
best.
Any severe criticisms? Besides the lack of appeal to any
who are not prepared to read a fairly nonsensical story, I suppose I could also
offer a warning about the language register. Being Victorian, sometimes the
language can come across a little old-fashioned – I’m not sure if children
would find this a hindrance at all. In many ways this only ends up with the
book feeling quaint, rather than inaccessible. It’s far from being Jane Austen,
so it should be all right.
So
then, my original criticism stands; that the stories just don’t go anywhere. They
serve only to dump Alice and the reader into the middle of a mad world, so that
she can interact with a few dozen lunatics in weird situations over the course
of a hundred pages, until it’s time to wake up and close the book. It’s worth
reading for the poems at least, and to have ‘Jabberwocky’ deconstructed and
explained by Humpty Dumpty is as good a reason as any for delving into these
things. At any rate they’re on the list, so you should totally have read by
now; and if not, then what are you waiting for? Do it now! I shouldn’t have to
tell you again.
Biblioland
Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Wordsworth: Ware.
(1992 [First published 1865 {1871 for Through
the Looking-Glass}])
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