Almost one hundred and sixty years have already passed since the initial publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. One summer afternoon of 1862, Charles Ludwidge Dodgson, a professor in mathematics at Oxford University, created the sophisticated world of fantasy in the form of a short story told by himself to sisters Liddell during their sailing trip on the Thames, in Oxford (1). The story was published as a book and it seems reasonable to assume that Lewis Carroll may have dedicated his work to all the children who were growing up in separation from the adults’ world. Alice, one of the mentioned sisters, was only one of the children who helped the writer fulfill his artistic inspiration (2).
Charles Ludwidge Dodgson, Alias Lewis Carroll
Dodgson is famous for his pseudonym Lewis Carroll, which is the effect of Latinizing his names and translating them back into English (3). The application of such changes seems to be both original and exaggerated. The pseudonym might have played a role of the social hideout for his complex, secretive personality. To create his fairyland, Carroll introduced into his text important structures of poetry, such as word codes, elaborate word plays, nursery rhymes, puzzles, or the original ways of naming different objects (4). They all allowed him to enter the territory of fantasy and create the surrealistic world of mathematical riddles.
Text by: Marcin Gliński
Looking for the Way out from the Maze of Carroll’s Logic
The Wonderland designed by Carroll is a perfect, logical world full of fantastic characters. Alice is a player involved in a strategic game and the problems she encounters need to be solved in order to let her get into another stage. Such a statement can be justified if we take into consideration the fact that Carroll was a master of riddles and puns. Analyzing in detail every part of the magic land, we may get a premonition that it is meticulously planned by the author of the story. In 1869, Carroll wrote a letter to Isabel Standen, one of his friends, in which he asked whether she had already succeeded in looking for the answer to the riddle of The Three Squares presented below. She was asked to draw the picture of interlaced squares “without lifting her pencil from the paper, without going over the line twice, and without intersecting any other line” (5):
We can discern in the picture a strategy which could be used by Alice to test her intelligence, cross the territory of Wonderland and come back home. Her presence in the world of absurd allows Alice to learn responsibility and self-sufficiency which are necessary to survive.
Being interested in the culture of the Orient, the writer constructed Tangram shapes consisting of seven pieces each. They let the readers produce their own designs of the characters from the story. The sample interpretation is presented below (6):
Victorian Literature
Many works written in the Victorian era satirized the common vision of the world, showing such important aspects of the period as its history or social etiquette ascribed to it. They were concealed in the far-fetched context of each masterpiece in a very metaphorical way (7). Carroll’s fictitious characters communicate using the same language, present similar features - madness being the most vivid one - and distort the vision of the empirical world of the nineteenth century.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, its continuation, point out the characteristics of the division between the upper and lower classes of the Victorian society. They both focus on the relations between the groups of adults and children. Alice, the girl who unintentionally gets into the weird fairyland through the rabbit hole, is a member of the Victorian intelligentsia. They constitute a group of wealthy and highly educated people who belong to the upper social crust. As a child, the girl does not seem to be happy because she is totally concentrated on finding answers to ridiculous questions and leaving the spooky land. Exercising some discretion, she finally gains enough experience and knowledge to succeed and come back home. This happens when her mind is exhausted enough to let the girl wake up from the dream.
The Social Class Division
In the 19th century, the members of the upper social crust resided in their mansions which were run with some help provided by personal servants. It is depicted in books such as The Wind in the Willows (by Kenneth Grahame) and The Water Babies (by Charles Kingsley). The White Rabbit is presented in the book as a picturesque model of an old, rich and nervous lord living at his own residence with his maid - Mary Ann, a gardener - Pat, and a chimney sweep - Bill, a little lizard which plays a particular role being obliged to get rid of the monster occupying his lord’s house. Bill represents the lower social class. The Rabbit, its supervisor, does not show any respect for its labourer. Such a problem epitomizes the situation of other little boys in the nineteenth century who worked as chimney sweeps and were deprived of any social rights. There is no escaping the fact that the complexity of Carroll’s mind gave birth to many engrossing stories which were greeted with jubilation in the literary world and masqueraded quotidian problems of the nineteenth-century British communion.
