Alice in Wonderland (1865), classic Victorian fairy tale by Lewis Carroll (Latinized pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832–98). First published as Alice's Adventures Under Ground (1863), it was inspired by a boating party with Alice Liddell and her sisters, daughters of an Oxford don. The fictional Alice is a 7-year-old who falls down a rabbit hole, changes from microscopic to telescopic proportions, and encounters a hookah-smoking Caterpillar, Mock Turtle, and Cheshire Cat. This early version was expanded to include the Mad Tea Party, the Pig and Pepper episode with the Ugly Duchess, Alice's trial by the Queen of Hearts, and parodies such as ‘Speak Roughly to Your Little Boy’ and ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat’. The revised text also included illustrations by John Tenniel, the political cartoonist for Punch who also worked on the sequel. Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) has Alice participating in a Rabelaisian living chess game with Red and White Queens and a White Knight. On her way to becoming a Queen, she meets talking flowers, a battling Lion and Unicorn, Humpty Dumpty, and the twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who recite ‘You Are Old, Father William’ and ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’. ‘Jabberwocky’, perhaps the most celebrated English nonsense poem, and ‘Upon the Lonely Moor’, a parody of Wordsworth, are also included.

The fact that nonsense and literary parody coexist in these novels underscores the dual nature of their child/adult readership—and their author. Often described as a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, C. L. Dodgson was a celebrated Victorian photographer, ordained deacon, and Oxford don who delivered dry mathematics lectures and published logic texts. As the pseudonymous Lewis Carroll, however, he wrote whimsical fiction that challenged the moralizing children's literature of the period. His Alice is in the tradition of the abandoned child heroine, but the Wonderland she explores borders on Victorian Gothic horror fiction. Carroll's originality was to combine the two genres. He tempered his allegorical portrait of socio-economic upheaval with humorous doses of thought-provoking paradox. This fresh didacticism made his ‘love-gift of a fairy-tale’ so popular that his books were second only to the Bible in bourgeois Victorian nurseries.

Alice's commercial value rose as she was reproduced on everything from teapots to chess sets. Marketing reached new heights with playing cards, puzzles, songs, plays, and broadcasts once the copyright expired in 1907. Alice, the Mad Hatter, and the Ugly Duchess had long entered national folklore by 1928, when Sotheby's auctioned the original manuscript for the unheard-of sum of £15, 400; it was later sold to the Parke-Bernet Galleries for $50, 000. In 1948, to show its appreciation of Britain's war efforts, the United States donated this national treasure to the British Museum—where it was received by no less than the Archbishop of Canterbury.

What in the Alice books could possibly have commanded such respect? For many, Alice is the epitome of the brave Victorian innocent in a confusing magical land. Translated into languages ranging from Swahili to Esperanto, her fairy tales are surpassed only by Shakespeare and the Bible for expressions that have entered the English language (such as ‘mad as a hatter’). Given this lofty company, it is little wonder that those who wax nostalgic for these children's books find it a sin to dissect them. Psychoanalysts, for example, puncture the Alice books' myth of childhood innocence. Focusing on the author's sexuality, they document his fantasies about becoming a little girl and cite scores of letters to ‘little-girlfriends’ whom he adored kissing, sometimes photographing or drawing them in the nude. They also speculate on his attraction and rumoured marriage proposal to young Alice Liddell, and find phallic symbolism in the fictional Alice's snake-like neck and bodily distortions from large to small. Freudians feel that this may also represent a return to the womb; others posit a hallucinogenic drug experience. Literary historians, on the other hand, note that Gulliver and Micromégas underwent similar changes, and place the Alice books in the satiric tradition of Swift and Voltaire. Socio-political criticism of a fragmented bourgeois society is also noted by historians: they find parallels with the dizzying pace at which the early Industrial Revolution reacted to technological, demographic, and political changes as it embraced industrialization, laissez-faire capitalism, and a free-market economy. Still others analyse Alice's dream and parallel universe that violate spatio-temporal laws. For them, Alice exists in an eternal moment out of time, a Heideggerian space between consciousness and reality where she poses existential questions of identity and confronts problems of maturation. Moreover, she must function in a metaphorical world where everyone is ‘quite mad’ and relationships are paradoxical. Indeed, linguistic and physical realities rarely coincide in Wonderland, and semioticians annotate disjunctions between sign and signifier whenever smiles represent Cheshire cats or boys turn into pigs. In addition to Alice's numerous meta-referential allusions to her own fairy tale, they examine Carroll's linguistic experimentation and portmanteau words with reference to Edward Lear (a contemporary) and James Joyce (who was reared on the Alice books). Carroll's marvellous images are balanced by Tenniel's illustrations, which caricatured real-life politicians like Disraeli (the Unicorn) and Gladstone (the Lion). It is in this combination of text and image, of fantasy and reality, of the abstract and the concrete that Alice's dual readership finds meaning and enjoyment.

Alice's enduring influence is attested by some 200 pastiches and parodies, some reproduced in Carolyn Sigler's Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll's Alice Books (1997). Many of these texts were produced by Victorian women writers: just as the Alice books comment on Victorian girlhood, so these imitations construct women's cultural authority. Other texts were blatantly didactic, still others were humorously political. All were subversive. Their popularity waned during the 1920s when Alice left popular culture for high culture and was appropriated by scholars and theorists. Film-makers adopted her as well, and her representations ranging from Disney animation (1951) to pornographic musicals (1976) underscore her mythic capacity to adapt to genres for both children and adults. Today's Alice, a bit wiser than Carroll's, is a postmodern empowered heroine in control of Wonderlands of her own (feminist) design.

Bibliography

• Bloom, Harold (ed.), Lewis Carroll (1987).
• Gardner, Martin, The Annotated Alice (1960).
• Heath, Peter, The Philosopher's Alice (1974).
• Rackin, Donald, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning (1991).
• Sigler, Carolyn (ed.), Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll's Alice Books (1997).

— Mary Louise Ennis