In brief
Alice, bored on a riverbank by a book with “no pictures or conversations in it”, follows a rabbit with a watch down a hole (ch. 1). She shrinks and grows, nearly drowns in her own tears, is sent on errands by the Rabbit, is cross-examined by a Caterpillar, nurses a baby that turns into a pig, sits down at a tea-party where it is always six o’clock, plays croquet with flamingos and is called as a witness at the trial of the Knave of Hearts. When the Queen demands her head, she stands up at her full size and says, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” (ch. 12). She wakes up with leaves on her face. It takes about two hours to read and has never been out of print.
The argument
Carroll’s subject is what happens to a child’s sense of herself when everything she has been told stops working. Early in chapter 2 Alice asks the book’s real question, “Who in the world am I?”, and she tests the answer the only way she has been taught, by reciting. “Four times five is twelve”, it turns out, and “London is the capital of Paris” (ch. 2). She concludes that she must have been changed for Mabel, a duller child with a poky house. The joke is a real fear, and the Caterpillar repeats it to her face: “Who are you?” (ch. 5). She cannot say.
Wonderland itself is a parody of the grown-up world as a child meets it. Everyone in it is bigger, older, busier or cleverer than Alice, all of them give orders, none explains anything, and any question is taken as impertinence. “I am older than you, and must know better,” the Lory says, and that closes the matter (ch. 3). The Rabbit takes her for his housemaid. The Queen’s procedure, “Sentence first—verdict afterwards”, is the rule of the nursery at its most candid. What gets Alice out is neither virtue nor cleverness. She loses her temper: “Stuff and nonsense!”
That was a large departure. English books for children had existed to improve them, and Carroll puts their voice into the Duchess, who presses against Alice with a sharp chin, announcing, “Every thing’s got a moral, if only you can find it” (ch. 9). This book has none. Harvey Darton argued in 1932 that it ended the era of didactic writing for children, and even with some allowance for neatness the claim is fair.
The shape of the book
The twelve chapters have almost no plot and a very firm structure. A goal is set in the first chapter: Alice sees through a tiny door “the loveliest garden you ever saw” and cannot get in. Her first changes of size are attempts on that door. She does not reach the garden until chapter 8, and when she does, it is the Queen’s, where gardeners paint the roses in terror. The book is honest about that disappointment and passes on without comment. Then it narrows from episode to institution, ending in a courtroom, where all the creatures are assembled again and Alice grows as the evidence gets sillier.
Around this sit two pieces of a different mood. A prefatory poem remembers “All in the golden afternoon” (opening verses), and a coda has Alice’s sister imagine her grown, keeping “the simple and loving heart of her childhood”. These are the only sentimental pages, and they are at odds with the rest. Alice in the story is sharp, impatient and on her way out of childhood, and the frame wishes she would stay. That tension, between the child’s appetite to grow and the writer’s wish to keep her, is what gives the book its slight chill.
The parodies
Nearly every poem in the book is a school recitation gone wrong, and in Carroll’s day every child would have known the originals. Isaac Watts’s busy bee in “Against Idleness and Mischief” comes out as “How doth the little crocodile” (ch. 2), and his sluggard as “the voice of the Lobster” (ch. 10). Robert Southey’s pious old man becomes “You are old, Father William”, who stands on his head (ch. 5). “Speak Gently” becomes “Speak roughly to your little boy” (ch. 6), Jane Taylor’s star a “little bat” (ch. 7), Mary Howitt’s spider a dancing whiting (ch. 10), and a sentimental song the Liddell girls knew turns to “Beautiful Soup”.
The originals have since mostly vanished, and the parodies survive them, which is its own verdict on moral verse. Something is lost, though. For the first readers the horror was that the words came out of Alice’s mouth by themselves, and that the voice of the classroom could be possessed. The Mock Turtle’s school finishes the job, with its “Reeling and Writhing” and its arithmetic of “Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision”. Lessons, the Gryphon explains, are so called “because they lessen from day to day” (ch. 9).
The logic
Charles Dodgson lectured in mathematics at Christ Church, and the nonsense is exact. The creatures are mad in the way a logician’s examples are mad: they take language strictly at its word. Alice claims that “I mean what I say” is the same as saying what she means, and the Hatter replies, “Not the same thing a bit!”, and the table supplies parallel sentences until she falls silent (ch. 7). The Cat proves she is mad with a neat circle: “You must be,” it says, “or you wouldn’t have come here” (ch. 6). The Cat’s disappearance leaves “a grin without a cat”, an abstraction with nothing to attach to, and “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” is a riddle with no answer. Melanie Bayley has argued in New Scientist that the book satirises new mathematics of the 1860s; the case is suggestive and not proved, and the book does not need it. Its point is plainer and more unnerving: that the rules of grammar and logic are the only rules left in Wonderland, and they offer no comfort at all.
The people
Alice
Alice is the great thing in the book: curious, proud of her learning, unfailingly polite on the surface and tart underneath, given to scolding herself and to talking about her cat at the worst moments. She is not sweet. “A cat may look at a king,” she informs the King (ch. 8).
The Queen and the Duchess
The Queen of Hearts has one idea, and “Off with her head!” is it, and the King quietly pardons the condemned behind her back. Carroll himself later called her “a blind fury”. The Duchess is worse company, because she wants to be friends, and her morals are all nonsense.
The Hatter, the Hare and the Dormouse
The name “Mad Hatter” is never used in the book, which has only “the Hatter”. At his table it is always six o’clock, because he quarrelled with Time when the Queen accused him of “murdering the time”. The Dormouse’s story of three sisters, “Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie”, is a private joke on the Liddells.
The Cheshire Cat
The Cat is the one creature who treats Alice as an equal, and it does so by telling her she is insane. “We’re all mad here,” it says, and it alone escapes the Queen, since a head with no body cannot be cut off.
How it was made
On 4 July 1862 Dodgson and his friend Robinson Duckworth rowed the three daughters of Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, up the Thames from Folly Bridge to Godstow. Alice Liddell was ten. She asked him to write the story down, and in November 1864 he gave her a handwritten, illustrated manuscript, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. The boating party went into the book as birds: the Duck, the Lory for Lorina, the Eaglet for Edith and the Dodo for Do-Do-Dodgson, who stammered. Weather records suggest the day was cool and rather wet, and scholars still debate whether the story really came in one afternoon.
The manuscript text is short, about fifteen thousand words against the finished twenty-seven thousand. It has no Duchess, no Cheshire Cat and no Hatter, so the book’s strangest scenes were added for strangers. Dodgson paid for publication and hired John Tenniel of Punch, whose forty-two drawings have governed how Alice looks ever since. When Tenniel objected to the printing of the first two thousand copies, Dodgson had them withdrawn and paid about £600 for a new printing, in the shops for Christmas 1865 and dated 1866, with the rejected sheets sold to Appleton in New York.
The friendship with the Liddells ended abruptly around June 1863, nobody knows why; the relevant page of Dodgson’s diary was cut out by his family. Morton Cohen thought he may have hoped to marry Alice; Karoline Leach, working from a note in the family archive, argued the gossip concerned the governess and Lorina. Both Dodgson’s photographs of children and that gap have been read darkly since, and the evidence does not settle it. Alice Liddell, widowed, sold the manuscript at Sotheby’s in 1928 for £15,400. It later came back from America and is now in the British Library.
Readers and critics
Reviews and sales were good, and adults took it up as eagerly as children. The story that Queen Victoria, delighted, asked for his next book and received a mathematical treatise is one Dodgson himself denied. Serious criticism began in the twentieth century, with William Empson’s chapter on “The Child as Swain” in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) and with the Freudians, who found plenty of holes and bottles. Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice (1960) is still the indispensable companion, because it recovers the jokes the book’s first readers took for granted. Humphrey Carpenter read the nonsense as nihilism, which is about right for the tea-party and too heavy for the whole.
Afterlives
Through the Looking-Glass followed in 1871. Translations now number 174 languages, among them a Russian one by the young Vladimir Nabokov. The first film was Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow’s in 1903. Jonathan Miller’s BBC version of 1966 played it as a dream of Victorian melancholy, Walt Disney’s 1951 cartoon fixed the blue dress and the jolly madness for most of the world, and Jan Švankmajer’s Alice (1988) restored the menace, with stuffed animals. Tim Burton made a big-budget sequel of sorts in 2010. Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” (1967) borrowed it for the drug culture. British copyright expired in 1907, and new illustrators have not stopped since. Neurologists have a name for the sense of shifting body size: Alice in Wonderland syndrome.
How to read it
- Read it aloud. It began as speech, and the timing is in the dialogue.
- Read it as an adult too. The jokes about school and authority land harder after you have had both.
- Get Tenniel. The Gutenberg text linked here is complete and includes the opening poem, but it carries Arthur Rackham’s 1907 pictures. Tenniel’s are in most printed editions and in Gardner.
- Use Gardner on a second reading. Save the notes until the book has first worked on you without them.
Read next
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Colder, tidier and built on a game of chess, with “Jabberwocky” and the White Knight.
- Edward Lear, A Book of Nonsense (1846). The other founder of English nonsense, and a sadder one.
- Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies (1863). Macmillan’s children’s fantasy of two years earlier, and the moralising Carroll escaped.
- Tove Jansson, Finn Family Moomintroll (1948). Another child’s world with real dread under the jokes.
- Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (1944). Grown-up logical nightmares of the kind the tea-party predicts.