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120108 - Derek Hudson

Mr Hudson has published a long and short work on Lewis Carroll in 1954; and his most recent book is Sir Joshua Reynolds: a Personal Study. He has also written on W. M. Praed, on Thomas Barnes of The Times, and on that Victorian curiosity, Martin Tupper.

1. Introduction

LEWIS CARROLL (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was born on 27 January 1832 at Daresbury, Cheshire. He died at Guildford on 14th January 1898.

The story of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) is one of the most curious in Victorian literature. It is paralleled in certain respects by that of his younger contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins. The poems of Hopkins and the fantasies of Carroll were written in the heart of the Victorian era by bachelor clergy-men who led academic, ascetic, restricted, intensely religious lives. Both were fascinated by the study of words. Both were painstaking amateur draughtsmen of minor merit whose artistic preoccupations influenced their writings. For different reasons, neither was anxious publicly to acknowledge his creative work during his lifetime: Dodgson took refuge in a pseudonym; Hopkins died unknown to fame, his startlingly original poems remaining unpublished until thirty years after his death. With divergent religious views and many differences in personal character and taste, these quiet withdrawn men had in common the creation of unique and lasting masterpieces which transcended their contemporary world, and indeed ran strangely counter to Victorian conventions.

The comparison cannot be pressed further. Hopkins wrote for an adult audience (incidentally, neither he nor Mr Gladstone enjoyed Alice in Wonderland). Dodgson, like Thackeray with The Rose and the Ring, wrote his most famous books primarily for children though in language that only adults can fully appreciate.

It has taken time to establish the status of both writers. Although, in contrast with Hopkins, Lewis Carroll's Alice books were well known and thoroughly enjoyed while he lived, there was a period after his death during which public interest in him slackened, and his permanent standing was in doubt. The war of 1914-18 turned many readers back to Alice; henceforth the sale values of Lewis Carroll's manuscripts and first editions increased steadily until they reached a climax in 1928, when Dr Rosenbach paid 15,400 pounds at Sotheby's for the manuscript of the original version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. A year later he resold it to an American, Mr Eldridge R. Johnson, for nearly double that sum. The generosity of Mr Johnson and of other American sympathizers brought the manuscript to the British Museum in 1948, as a gesture of appreciation of Great Britain's part in the war of 1939-45.

The respect shown to the Alice manuscript, coupled with the remarkable tributes paid to Lewis Carroll's memory at the centenary of his birth in 1932, settled him unequivocally among the immortals. Quotations from his books have long been commonplaces of journalism and conversation. His characters are a part of national folk-lore and mythology. The Mad Hatter and the Ugly Duchess are as well known and indispensable to Englishmen as Falstaff or Sherlock Holmes.

Two Victorians, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, carried the art of nonsense to the highest point that it has so far touched, or is likely to touch. It is no accident that both were Englishmen. I would say that, after Shakespeare, there is no English author more deserving of study by a foreigner intent on exploring English character and English humour than Lewis Carroll. Although his work has long been available in translation in most of the languages of the world, and although increasing attention has been paid to it in Europe (especially in France) within the last twenty five years, foreign readers may still find him hard to appreciate. Nonsense was not a Victorian invention, but there is no tradition of nonsense in European literature comparable to the strong nonsensical element in Shakespeare, sustained even in the rational eighteenth century by Samuel Foote's well-known lines 'So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf', and continued into the nineteenth century by the superb fooleries of Sydney Smith. 'To say that a bishop deserved to be preached to death by wild curates,' remarked Chesterton, 'is not merely satire; it is a satisfaction of the fancy.' Nonsense has proved a refreshing by-path of literature, a kind of detached comedy, an unengaged view of life. It reached its full flower in England, as Emile Cammaerts pointed out, in the wake of the Romantic Movement, as a reaction to Byron and Shelley.

'The association of the names of Lear and Carroll with those of Ruskin and Tennyson seems at first almost paradoxical',

wrote Cammaerts,

'but there is nevertheless a certain connection between the attitude of mind of the old and modern Romanticists and that of Nonsense writers.... Nonsense stands, with regard to Romanticism, very much in the same position as Satire and Epigram, with regard to Classicism.'

It is equally important to realise that Lewis Carroll exemplified what G. M. Young has called a 'new, unpietistic handling of childhood'. There is throughout the Alice books a strongly marked reaction to the edifying, moralizing nursery literature typical of the early nineteenth century. Alice herself, in the fantastic adventures of her dream world, is witness to the virtues of innocence, of level-headed common sense, of patrician courage and dignity; but there is nothing goody-goody in the treatment of her adventures, which, it is essential to remember, were primarily intended to be told to and to give pleasure to children.

II: Early Life

One of the many far-fetched theories about Lewis Carroll which must be finally abandoned is that he was a split personality, a sort of literary Jekyll and Hyde, divided between a prim and pedantic mathematician named C. L. Dodgson and a delightful writer of children's stories called Lewis Carroll. True, he chose, for his own convenience, to publish his serious mathematical and logical books under his own name and to issue his fanciful creative work under a pseudonym, but there is no more justification for the theory of split-personality than this. In fact, apart from the unpredictability of genius, the outlines of his personality were foreshadowed in his heredity and are clearly recognizable in him as a child. It almost appears that his intimations of Wonderland were, one might say, photographed in his mind before he was fourteen and remained to be developed long afterwards, when he was outwardly cast in the mould of the Victorian don. Only thus, perhaps, can we explain the curiously similar freshness of outlook, the same combination of would-be sophistication and complete innocence that we recognize both in The Young Visitors by the child-author Daisy Ashford and in Alice in Wonderland. The former suggests a remarkable fusion of precocity and inspiration; the latter represents a precocious emotion recollected in tranquillity for the benefit of other children.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born at Daresbury parsonage, Cheshire, on 27 January 1832, was descended from two ancient North-country families, and inherited from the Dodgsons a tradition of service to the Church and from the Lutwidges a tradition of service to the State. His father, the Rev. Charles Dodgson, a distinguished classical scholar with a special interest in mathematical studies, combined personal generosity with a certain puritanical austerity, and yet enjoyed a rich vein of nonsensical humour. His mother Frances Jane Lutwidge, a first-cousin of his father, was a woman of unusually sweet and gentle character. The qualities of his parents descended to their son. No father, perhaps, ever sent his son a more direct invitation to devote himself to nonsense than did Canon Dodgson when he wrote to Charles at the age of eight:

. . I will not forget your commission. As soon as I get to Leeds I shall scream out in the middle of the street, Ironmongers—Ironmongers—Six hundred men will rush out of their shops in a moment—fly, fly, in all directions—ring the bells, call the constables—set the town on fire. I will have a file & a screw-driver, & a ring, & if they are not brought directly, in forty seconds I will leave nothing but one small cat alive in the whole town of Leeds, & I shall only leave that, because I am afraid I shall not have time to kill it.

Then what a bawling & a tearing of hair there will be I Pigs & babies, camels & butterflies, rolling in the gutter together—old women rushing up the chimneys & cows after them—ducks hiding themselves in coffee cups, & fat geese trying to squeeze themselves into pencil cases—at last the Mayor of Leeds will be found in a soup plate covered up with custard & stuck full of almonds to make him look like a sponge cake that he may escape the dreadful destruction of the Town . . .

To find young Dodgson brought up on parental fantasies of this kind is significant. In Alice in Wonderland he sent Bill the Lizard down the chimney and put the Dormouse into the teapot; and though he refined his nonsense into a sensitive art, there is conspicuous in it an element of ruthlessness which may have been inherited from his father. During childhood his character developed on lines which it followed consistently throughout his life. When the family moved to Croft Rectory near Darlington in 1843, Charles Dodgson set out to entertain his brothers and sisters with elaborate games in the big garden, with poems and stories, with humorous drawings, and with a series of illustrated manuscript magazines, of which the first, Useful and Instructive Poetry, produced at the age of thirteen, contains remarkable anticipations of Humpty Dumpty and of the Mouse's tail in Alice. A collection of treasures hidden under the nursery floor at Croft in 1843 included a small thimble, a child's white glove, and a child's 'left-hand shoe'—objects that had their individual significance for the Dodo, the White Rabbit and the White Knight. There was also a block of wood with these words scribbled on it in Charles's hand:

And we'll wander through the wide world and chase the buffalo.

( I am indebted to Miss Winifred Mansbridge for the suggestion that this is a misquotation of a line from the song the 'The Buffalo', dating from the early eighteenth century: 'We'll wander through the wild woods and we'll chase the buffalo' "English Folk-Songs, ed. W. A. Barrett, 1891).

Lewis Carroll may have had a subconscious longing to escape into Wonderland, but, despite the handicap of a stammer which never left him, his was a happy and active childhood. He displayed a precocious talent for mathematics, for parody, for diverting his brothers and sisters. His hand-writing at the age of twelve has been described by an expert analyst as 'outstanding in maturity, tenderness and sensitivity'. Yet by the time he was twenty he was writing a careful round hand which seems to show him decidedly introverted and rigidly set in his ways.

What was it that disturbed his development and narrowed his outlook? He had, no doubt, advanced prematurely and suffered proportionately in adolescence; but it was the miserable years he spent at Rugby and the untimely loss of his beloved mother that most affected him. His diligence as an Oxford undergraduate was rewarded by a double first in mathematics and by a Christ Church Studentship. Yet at twenty-one he could write:

I'd give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life's decay,
To be once more a little child,
For one bright summer-day.

Although this deep sense of nostalgia was to remain a dominant influence throughout his life, Lewis Carroll's character was so complex and original, his interests were so varied, that he found much to off-set his recurrent melancholy. He was by instinct a graphic and visual artist who never abandoned the struggle to draw, and who regularly visited art exhibitions and the studios of artists. Realising that he lacked the talent to become a professional artist, he turned to the new art of photography and made himself the best Photographer of children in the nineteenth century. Long before his pseudonym Lewis Carroll derived by transposition from the names Charles Lutwidge—had become famous, he was known to Ruskin, Tennyson, George MacDonald, Holman Hunt, and many other well-known people as a student of art and an ardent amateur photographer. Allied to his interest in art, a love of the theatre became a lasting passion. Literature, science and medicine all attracted him; his devotion to children proved life-long. Nevertheless, his life had its mainspring in religion. At the age of twenty-nine he was ordained Deacon of the Church of England. This was a necessary step if he was to retain a Christ Church Studentship; his conscience approved; yet, even had he been able sufficiently to overcome his stammer, it is unlikely that he would have found parochial work congenial to his temperament. He did not proceed to Priest's Orders, and in later life he considered himself 'practically a layman'.

All this varied activity lay outside the sphere which he had specially chosen for himself—the sphere of mathematical and logical studies. 'I always feel that a sermon is worth the preaching', he once wrote, 'if it has given some help to even one soul in the puzzle of Life'. The choice of words was significant, for Dodgson indeed viewed life as a great puzzle, or series of puzzles. Much of his energy went to the solving and devising of puzzles, whether the official problems of academic research or the amateur conundrums that he propounded to his child-friends. As a mathematician, his work was useful, up to a point, notably in Euclid, but has not proved sufficiently distinctive to interest his posterity. Yet, though lasting success in pure mathematics eluded him, his knowledge of mathematics and logic provided an essential element in Lewis Carroll's literary achievement. Never before had such a humorist, such a lover of children, such an artist, such a precise student of language, possessed Dodgson's equipment as mathematician and logician. The rich glow of fantasy was controlled by a scientific, analytical mind; the paradoxes were shaped and refined until they formed the inimitable crystal.
 

III: The Origins Of Alice

For all his academic success and inborn love of teaching, Dodgson's early experience as 'Mathematical Lecturer' at Christ Church—he began his duties in 1855—showed that he lacked a natural gift of communicating to an assembled class.

His lectures, it seems, were dull and uninspiringly delivered. A part-time engagement to teach the boys at St Aldate's School proved no more successful. 'School class again noisy and troublesome—I have not yet acquired the arts of keeping order', runs a diary entry of 1856. Dodgson's shyness and his stammer told heavily against him

It soon became clear, therefore, that Dodgson's main contribution to the academic life of Oxford would lie in the sphere of research and publication. He conscientiously delivered himself of some thirty works, large and small, on mathematical and logical subjects, which appeared under his own name. But, with the possible exception of Euclid and his Modern Rivals (1879)— Falconer Madan has described this as 'an outstanding example of serious argument cast in an amusing style'—our interest in him as a writer does not derive from the publications of 'Charles L. Dodgson, M.A., Student and Mathematical Lecturer of Christ Church, Oxford'. It is the boy and the man who entertained children with his fantasy, parody and humour whom we love and honour.

Nothing could be more mistaken than to imagine that the first publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 was solely the fruit of a sudden unexpected inspiration. It is true that its origin must be attributed to one particular event—a trip up-river from Oxford with three little girls in 1862—but Dodgson had been unconsciously preparing himself for Alice in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass for twenty years. We have seen that drawings in his Useful and Instructive Poetry, written in 1845, fore-shadowed Humpty Dumpty and the Mouse's tail, while a Shakespearean skit in that same little book touched upon dreams and visions and the half-state between sleeping and waking, setting them aside, as it were, for future reference. We see him here, and in his later manuscript scrapbooks, The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch, absorbed ill parody and fantasy and preoccupied by their pictorial illustration. Dr Thomas Fowler, a fellow-member with Dodgson of a mathematical reading party at Whitby in 1854, remembered that he 'used to sit on a rock on the beach, telling stories to a circle of eager young listeners of both sexes' and believed that 'it was there that Alice" was incubated'. Certainly the poem 'She's all my fancy painted him', which formed the basis of the White Rabbit's 'evidence' at the trial of the Knave of Hearts, was composed in 1854; but it is unlikely that other ingredients of Alice derive from this early date. The importance of the Whitby visit lies in the knowledge that, while he was there, Dodgson was establishing his character as a raconteur and as a free-lance humorous journalist in the pages of the Whitby Gazette. Gradually he began to give literary shape (though not always in writing) to some of those whimsical intimations and impressions which had haunted him since childhood, fantasies that belonged (as we now know) to the Wonderland country and to the other side of the Looking-Glass. For the Alice books were in some degree an autobiographical miscellany, woven together with uncanny skill.

In 1855, when he was twenty-three, Dodgson wrote a four-line stanza in parody of Anglo-Saxon poetry which has become extremely famous:

Twas bryllyg, and ye slythy toves
Did gyre and gymble in ye wabe:
All mimsy were ye borogroves;
And ye mome raths outgrabe.

We know these lines now as the opening stanza of 'Jabber-wocky' ( Mr Roger Lancdyn Green has shown that there is a strong probability that the rest of the poem was influenced by 'The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains', a translation by Menella Smedley from the German of Fouque (Times Literary Supplement, 1st March 1957). in Through the Looking-Glass. The spelling was a little altered, and Dodgson's original explanations of the words differ considerably from those provided by Humpty Dumpty:

'That's enough to begin with', Humpty Dumpty interrupted: 'there are plenty of hard words there. "Brillig" means four o'clock in the afternoon—the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.'

'That'll do very well', said Alice: 'and "slithy"?'

'Well, "slithy" means "lithe and slimy". "Lithe" is the same as "active". You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.'

'I see it now', Alice remarked thoughtfully: 'and what are "roves"?'

'Well, "totwes" are something like badgers—they're something like lizards—and they're something like cork screws.'

'They must be very curious looking creatures.'

'They are that', said Humpty Dumpty; 'also they make their nests under sun-dials - also they live on cheese.'

'And what's to "go" and to "gimble"?'

'To pyre" is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To "gamble" is to make holes like a gimlet.'

'And "the wabe" is the grass-plot round a sun-dial, I suppose?' said Alice, surprised at her own ingenuity.

'Of course it is. It's called "wabe" you know, because it goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it—'

'And a long way beyond it on each side', Alice added.

'Exactly so. Well then, "mimsy" is "flimsy and miserable" (there's another portmanteau for you). And a "borogrove" is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round—something like a live mop.'

'And then "mome raths"?' said Alice. 'I'm afraid I'm giving you a great deal of trouble.'

'Well, a "rath" is a sort of green pig: but Rome" I'm not certain about. I think it's short for "from home"—meaning that they'd lost their way, you know.'

'And what does "outgrak" mean?'

'Well "outgribing" is something between bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle....'

In 1856 Dodgson contributed to The Train a parody of Wordsworth called 'Upon the Lonely Moor', which eventually formed the basis of the White Knight's song. And in his diary of February 1856, we find an entry—

'Query: when we are dreaming and, as often happens, have a dim consciousness of the fact and try to wake, do we not say and do things which in waking life would be insane ? May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life'—a remark which suggests the Cheshire Cat's 'We're all mad here'.

Enough has been said—more perhaps might be said if the diaries of 1858-62 were not missing—to show that, when he wrote Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, Lewis Carroll gathered together loose ends of fancy and experience that stretched back many years. Much of this hoarded material appears in the Alice books in the form of humorous verse, especially parody, for Dodgson had made himself proficient in the genre since his childhood. As he developed, he also began to write serious romantic poems which were less successful, being conventional exercises lacking originality and inspiration. Yet many of the passages and prose situations in the Alice books could not have been realized without the help of an instinctive and insistent vein of poetry, associated perhaps with that 'very rebellious mind' which a graphologist has detected in his adolescent hand writing.

We cannot say with any certainty that Dodgson ever fell in love in the adult sense, although we know that his sister believed he was in love with the famous actress Ellen Terry when she was about seventeen. It is unlikely that he ever declared his love, if it existed, or that he ever seriously contemplated marriage with Ellen Terry, for she was then already married (though unhappily). From his early youth, however, he had sought the society of little girls, thus compensating himself, in part, for his inability to form friendships with women of his own age. Children were an escape from sex rather than any sort of conscious satisfaction of it, but they gave him the affection he needed and helped him to fulfil the Platonic and protective love which was characteristic of his nature. His ordeal as a stammerer may largely explain his development; for he found—as others similarly afflicted have found—that he could talk freely and naturally with children and was happiest in their company.

In 1864, before Alice in Wonderland was published, he was writing to George MacDonald's daughter, Mary, letters full of delightful nonsense in no way inferior to that in Alice. Although his letters, like the Alice books, can only be fully appreciated by adults, they are an additional proof that he wrote his nonsense primarily to give pleasure to children. And as for Alice in Wonderland itself, there is no doubt of his source of inspiration. She was Alice Liddell, one of the daughters of Dr H. G. Liddell, the formidable Dean of Christ Church. Dodgson apparently first met her on 25 April 1856, when she was not quite four years old, and he added to his diary entry a comment he reserved for outstanding occasions: 'I mark this day with a white stone.'

IV: The Alice Books

Dodgson's friendship with the Liddell children flourished, though their mother could be difficult and obstructive on occasions, and he was never on the best of terms with their father. To this serious-minded, high-principled, conscientious young man the association became increasingly important, implying as it did a release of spirit that he found nowhere else. Harry and Lorina, the older children, shared his affection with Edith, the youngest, but Alice—a pretty child with an oval face, dark hair and shy fawn-like eyes— became his favourite.

He had told them all many stories before the famous day, 4 July 1862, on which he and his friend Robinson Duckworth of Trinity took Lorina (aged thirteen), Alice (aged ten) and Edith (who was eight) on a trip upriver to Godstow. It was during that afternoon that he began the story that was later developed into Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. A suggestion of wild impromptu still clings to the opening chapters describing the fall down the rabbit-hole and the little door into the garden. The episode of the pool of tears is a reminiscence of another expedition he had made with the three Liddells to Nuneham on a rainy day a fort-night earlier.

In the six months that followed, Dodgson wrote out his story, at Alice's special request, under the title Alice's Adventures Under Ground. The drawings with which he illustrated it are not without merit. They have a private, anguish which is more moving than amusing, and the earnestness of the amateur occasionally rises in them to a weird frenzy that is almost Blake-like in its intensity. The original manuscript consists of 18,000 words only, but on George MacDonald's recommendation Dodgson determined to revise it for publication, and in the course of so doing he enlarged it to 35,000 words. John Tenniel, the Punch artist, who had made his name as a book-illustrator with his decorations for Aesop's Fables, and who was particularly skilled at drawing animals, consented to illustrate. His drawings were remarkably successful, though there is little doubt that they betray the strong influence of the French artist, J. J. Grandville ( See Creators of Wonderland by M. Mespoulet, (New York, 1934 am grateful to Mr Bryan Montagu for drawing my attention to this convincing study.) .Dodgson interested himself in their progress at every stage.

A comparison between the first manuscript version of Alice in Wonderland, now in the British Museum, and the printed book shows that the general tendency, as might be expected, is away from parochial allusions and mere child's play towards more advanced and reasoned ingenuity. The most important additions are the chapters 'Pig and Pepper' and 'A Mad Tea-party' and the trial scene, but such favourite parodies as 'Speak roughly to your little boy', 'Twinkle, twinkle little bat', ' 'Tis the voice of the Lobster', and 'Will you walk a little faster' do not appear in the first version. Many local allusions remain, some of them probably derived from the famous expedition to Godstow. Dodgson himself was the Dodo (perhaps a reproduction of his stammer as he pronounced his own name); Duckworth was the Duck, Lorina the Lory, Edith the Eaglet and Alice, of course, was Alice. The three little girls in the Dormouse's story, Elsie, Lacie and Tillie, are only the three Liddells in another disguise: Elsie stands for L. C., the initials of Lorina Charlotte; Lacie is an anagram for Alice; and Matilda (Millie) was a family nickname for Edith.

It is difficult to put oneself in the place of someone who reads Alice in Wonderland for the first time, but not difficult to say why it immediately appealed, and still appeals, to children. This is an extraordinary world of fantasy, where Alice can shrink almost to insect size or grow to the dimensions of a giant; where she can talk to a caterpillar on a mushroom; where a cat can exist merely as a grin; where there are Mock Turtles instead of real turtles; where playing-cards become persons. The animals and the jokes about lessons are easy for children to understand; the Caucus-race, the tea-party, the game of croquet, the lobster-quadrille— all are based on facts of everyday experience, suddenly turned topsy-turvy and made startlingly entertaining. Much of the play with language and many of the parodies are only fully appreciated by grown-ups, but the source of

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat !
How I wonder what you're at

can hardly be missed even nowadays ('You know the son, perhaps?' asks the Mad Hatter), while Watts's ''Tis the voice of the sluggard' still sounds recognizably behind

"Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare
You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.'

For the rest, a limpid prose that holds the attention of grown-ups is that most likely to retain the affection of children, as Kenneth Grahame and Beatrix Potter have proved, though the mixture must be infinitely subtle. Lewis Carroll was a notable master of dialogue. Consider the counterpoint of this passage from the trial scene:

'What do you know about this business?' the King said to Alice.

'Nothing', said Alice.

'Nothing whatever?' persisted the King.

'Nothing whatever', said Alice.

'That's very important', the King said, turning to the jury They were just beginning to write this down on their slates, when the White Rabbit interrupted: 'Unimportant, your Majesty means, of course', he said, in a very respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke.

'Unimportant, of course, I meant', the King hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone, 'important—unimportant—unimportant —important—' as if he were trying which word sounded best.

Some of the jury wrote it down 'important', and some 'unimportant'. Alice could see this, as she was near enough to look over their slates; 'but it doesn't matter a bit', she thought to herself.

At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in his notebook, called out 'Silence!' and read out from his book 'Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court'.

Everybody looked at Alice.

'I am not a mile high', said Alice.

'You are', said the King.

'Nearly two miles high', added the Queen.

'Well, I shan't go, at any rate', said Alice; 'besides, that's not a regular rule: you invented it just now.'

'It's the oldest rule in the book', said the King.

'Then it ought to be Number One', said Alice.

The story of the withdrawal of the first edition of Alice in Wonderland in August 1865, owing to supposed deficiencies in the printing of the illustrations, and its reissue later in the same year, makes a bibliographical adventure too complicated to be described here. The success of the 'funny pretty book', as Christina Rossetti called it, was immediate, though the advance of its sales proved gradual rather than spectacular. Time was needed for the general acceptance of the revolution in children's literature implied by Alice in Wonderland; for this was not the goody-goody book conventionally familiar to Victorians, but handled childhood freshly and without sententiousness.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (to give the book its full title once more) is best thought of in conjunction with its equally famous sequel Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there, which was published in time for Christmas, 1871, again illustrated by Tenniel. As early as August 1866, Lewis Carroll told his publishers, Macmillans, that he had 'a floating idea of writing a sort of sequel to Alice'; but he did not seriously start work on it until two years later. He had much material ready to his hand, including the poem 'Jabberwocky' and the parody of Wordsworth, 'Upon the Lonely Moor', while he drew on Halliwell-Phillips's collection of nursery rhymes for 'Tweedledum' and 'Tweedledee', 'The Lion and the Unicorn', and several similar ingredients. Alice Liddell and her sisters remained the inspiration for the second book as they had been for the first, although this time their influence cannot be so exactly documented. We know that Dodgson had told them many stories about chessmen, at a time when they were learning to play chess; and as Through the Looking-Glass was based roughly on a game of chess, some of these stories naturally took their place in the new book, along with other reminiscences of the Liddells (Dinah was a recollection of Alice's cat). The idea of going through the looking-glass into a mysterious country beyond seems to have derived, however, from a meeting between Dodgson and another Alice, his little cousin Alice Raikes. Dodgson gave her an orange and asked her in which hand she was holding it. When she said 'The right', he invited her to stand before a mirror and tell him in which hand the girl in the looking-glass held the orange. 'The left hand', came the puzzled reply. 'Exactly', agreed Dodgson, 'and how do you explain that?' 'If I was on the other side of the glass', said Alice Raikes, 'wouldn't the orange still be in my right hand?' 'Well done, little Alice', replied Dodgson, 'the best answer I've had yet.'

Lewis Carroll achieved the rare distinction of writing a worthy sequel to a masterpiece. The Looking-Glass world is a land where things go the wrong way round, where flowers talk, where the characters of popular rhymes come to life, where chess-men are humanized. Through the Looking-Glass is to some tastes an improvement on its predecessor, and has certainly impressed itself equally on the national consciousness. It was the White Queen whose rule was 'jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today'. It was the Anglo-Saxon Messenger with the 'Anglo-Saxon attitudes' who called Alice 'as large as life, and twice as natural !' In the White Knight, Carroll parodied his own passion for small inventions. And if we must choose a representative poem, or a typical stanza of Carrollian verse, it is to 'The Walrus and the Carpenter' that we turn:

'The time has come,' the Walrus said,
'To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.'

Many readers make no marked distinction between the two books, considering them as parts of the same story; Alice herself is the unifying factor, the rational being in a mad world, the Victorian child with courage, dignity and common sense. As Walter de la Mare said, 'She wends serenely on like a quiet moon in a chequered sky'. If there are times when she seems a bit of a prig, she is not the less convincing on that account, and always she is kind, courteous and considerate. She likes the Walrus 'because he was a little sorry for the poor oysters'; she is afraid that the Red King will catch cold from lying on the damp grass, being 'a very thoughtfull little girl'. Though her predicament is continually alarming, though the argument invariably goes against her, she has the resource to change the subject and hold on to her courage and common sense. I am not sure that Alice did not do more for the character of Victorian girlhood than Queen Victoria; yet even the Queen could not say this time that she was 'not amused'.

The combined Alice is a work of supreme originality. Carroll was clearly influenced by Lear's nonsense verses; conceivably he was slightly influenced by The Water Babies; I have a personal theory that he may have got some hints from Chapter XI of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss— 'Maggie Tries to Run Away from her Shadow'. But that is the most that can be said. Written in the heart of the Victorian era—and by a man who in other respects was held fast to his period—Alice is timeless in its appeal. The out-standing achievement is the creation of a dream world that is never for one moment unacceptable. Walter de la Mare has compared its atmosphere not only to those of the Songs of Innocence and Traherne's Meditations, but to the medieval descriptions of paradise and the gem-like Italian pictures of the seventeenth century. To those who deny Lewis Carroll's poetry, we can answer with de la Mare: 'What of the visionary light, the colour, the scenery; that wonderful landscape, for example, in "The Walrus and the Carpenter", as wide as Milton's in Il Penseroso—the quality of its sea, its sands, its spaces and distances ? What of the exquisite transition from one setting on to another in a serene seductive discontinuity in—for but one example— the chapter entitled "Wool and Water" ?'

Carroll's art is so well concealed, his prose so limpid that, we may fail to realize how carefully the stories are organized. And there is a sense of purpose in them that lies beneath the surface entertainment and marks the philosopher. Baffled at first in the mad world of her dream, the child learns to speak up for herself, to live with eccentricity on her own terms, and finally to sympathize. The old copybook moralizing has been mocked, but something has been taught nevertheless; the adventures of Wonderland have given spiritual encouragement to a child in the real world; the lesson has been as strange and unexpected as the book itself.

Besides this curious and almost unconscious lesson in character, Alice conveys only one further message that could possibly be termed didactic, and it is a message that came naturally from a student of language and logic: 'Pay attention to what you are saying !'

Alice asks the Cheshire Cat: 'Would you tell me, Please which way I ought to go from here ?'

'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to', said the Cat.

'I don't much care where—' said Alice.

'Then it doesn't matter which way you go', said the Cat.

'—so long as I get somewhere', Alice added as an explanation.

'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, 'if you only walk long enough.'

No child can read Alice without gaining an increased understanding of the importance of words. Inspired word-play, mixed with judicious slapstick, and set within the frame-work of an idiosyncratic view of the human situation is the essence of Alice. Lewis Carroll added at least two words to the English language—'chortle' and 'galumph'—and he revived a number of forgotten words, among them 'whip fling', 'burbled', 'beamish' and 'slithy'. For the nearest parallel to his humorous method we must turn to the cinema —to the Marx Brothers, whose dialogue not only has many verbal similarities with his, but who also, like him, assert one grand false proposition at the outset and so persuade their audiences to accept anything as possible.

Part 1 / Part 2