Charles Dodgson (1832-1898) was a keen photographer who excelled at taking photographs of children. In the mid-nineteenth century photography was still in its infancy and the film Dodgson used was not nearly as sensitive as is the film used today. Instead of the 1/60th of a second or 1/125th of a second shutter speeds common to today's cameras, Dodgson had to expose his film for as long as two minutes depending on the brightness of the available light. Staying stock still for 120 seconds is no easy matter, especially for young children who are prone to fidget. To get his child models to sit still for the required exposure time, Dodgson told them stories, funny captivating stories that so entranced them they were able to maintain the same pose for the necessary duration. In his stories he invented humorous characters who did nonsensical things, and from these yarns at which he excelled Dodgson created a literary masterpiece.
On July 4 1862 Dodgson, with his friend and colleague Robinson Duckworth and the three daughters of Henry George Liddell, the dean of Christ Church, set off to row up the river Isis to Godstow (just outside of Oxford), where they stopped on the bank to have a picnic. The children urged Dodgson to tell them one of his stories, and the one he told was so captivating 10-year-old Alice urged him to write it down for her. That very same evening Dodgson put pen to paper, but it would not be until November 1864 that he presented the finished book (then entitled "Alice's Adventures Underground") to Alice as an early Christmas present. Dodgson then added to this and in 1865 "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" was published by Macmillan.
However, for reasons that remain unclear, sometime between June and October in 1863, Dodgson's friendship with the Liddell children was rudely interrupted, probably because of their mother's concern about Dodgson's suitability as a companion for her daughters. In their book "The Red King's Dream or Lewis Carroll in Wonderland" Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone talk about speculation whether Dodgson had proposed to Alice or shown any inclination to do so. Her mother, Lorina Liddell, is said to have hoped for an eventual royal wedding for Alice. 1 Whatever the real reason, the rupture in their friendship was keenly felt by Dodgson, and according to Morton Cohen led him to continue with Alice's adventures:
The sequel referred to here was of course "Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There" published in 1871. By this time his friendship with the Liddell family (and in particular the three daughters) was reduced to the level of rare visits where the exchanges could be best described as frosty, at least on the Liddells' part. The girls were entering adolescence and their mother was not happy with them spending time with an aging maths don (who would not have been seen as a suitable suitor by their snobbish mother).
While the first Alice book had its genesis in the photography sessions and the trip on the river, and was mainly written for the amusement and distraction of Dodgson's child-friends, the second Alice book is altogether darker and more melancholy in tone. This might be attributable to Dodgson's bleak realization that he is no longer as dear to his child friends and especially to Alice as he once was. To give an example of this startling difference in tone between the two Alice books, we need look no further than their respective opening chapters: in the first, it is a hot summer's afternoon and Alice is outside, lying on the river bank while her older sister reads a book in the sunshine; in the second story, it is deep midwinter with the ground covered in snow and Alice is sitting in a big armchair indoors out of the cold. The sunny warmth and gaiety of the picnic at Godstow can be seen reflected in the first Alice, while the frostiness and isolation of the second Alice (with only a cat for company) mirrors the cooling in Dodgson's relationship with Alice Liddell and the distance that had grown between them.
In much criticism and discussion of the two Alice stories, they are treated as if they were a single text. This tendency has been copied by publishers who often put the two stories together within the same covers as one tome. In 1966 Donald Rackin in his essay "Alice's Journey to the End of Night" 3 argues that this approach 'seriously violated the artistic and thematic integrity of two closely related but very different works of art.' While there is indeed a case to be made for treating the two books as separate entities, for the purpose of this paper I will lump them together under the name of the Alice books.
In this thesis I will consider what makes a work of literature 'great'; why the Alice books can be said to be great literature; how being great literature can be a mixed blessing for the author concerned; how varied a response the Alice books have provoked (showing how critics have contradicted one another, each trying to outdo the others in defining what Alice means); how easy it is when discussing the Alice books to reveal more of oneself and one's own hobby horses than of Charles Dodgson.
Not long ago a survey was carried out in the USA to find out the top 100 books of literature of all time. The rather random methodology used in this survey was to ask a group of famous writers to choose their respective top 100 books. It was naturally full of books by American authors, but perhaps surprisingly the undisputed number one was James Joyce's "Ulysses". A friend of mine jokingly remarked that the book is so widely held in critical esteem precisely because no one actually bothers to read it. This sceptical view is no doubt widely held; for many people 'great literature' means thick books that few have read (at least in their entirety), but many claim to have read or feel to have read.
If we wanted to be more exact in our definition of what marks a great work of literature out from the merely entertaining, we might consider a careful study of book sales, with particular weight given to the long sellers as opposed to the bestsellers. For a book to be considered a classic, it must transcend the fickleness of topicality and fashion. We might also see how many languages any given book has been translated into, and again at how many different translations exist of the same book in any given language. In addition, we might scour the pages of collections of famous quotations, seeing which books are best represented. These criteria can be fairly said to be objective. We might, for example, assert that the mark of a great work of literature is its resonance, its ability to strike a chord in people's hearts and minds, not just today, but over a period of many years, and indeed this resonance would surely be reflected (and quantifiable) in the book's sales.
The mark of a great work of literature is also its ability to mean different things to different people, that is to say, its wide scope for personal interpretation on the part of the reader. The wider the scope for interpretation, the wider the audience the book will reach. Another mark of a great work of literature is how often it is quote not only in literary circles but also in everyday life. A case in point is Shakespeare whose words we unconsciously mimic when we talk of someone shuffling off this mortal coil, of wanting a pound of flesh, and of all the world being a stage, to give but three well-known examples from a list that is almost endless. Another source of many quotes used in everyday life is of course the Bible, again attesting to the lasting influence it has had on the English language.
If we accept that the two most commonly quoted works of literature in the English language are the two already mentioned (to wit, Shakespeare and the Bible), which is the third? According to Donald Rackin and Morton Cohen among others, it is the Alice books. 4 According to Vicki Weissman "Alice is the world's most translated book by a single author."5 There are over fifty different translations of Alice in the French language alone. Some people may wish to disagree with me when I say that the Alice books are great literature, and qualify that assertion by saying they are classics of children's literature.
There is one little discussed drawback to being the author of a great work of literature: the attention given to the minutiae of the author's personal life. When we read a great work of literature, something that captures our imagination and transports us to a world of incredible vitality, it is natural for us to wonder who the author of the work might be, and what sort of person he or she is (or as is more often the case, was). This curiosity can lead us to seek out biographical details about the author, in the hope they will throw light on the works we have read, and give us greater understanding of its meaning. This curiosity is perhaps universal, but in many cases we have to accept only the merest scraps of information. Little is known about the life of William Shakespeare, for which he is no doubt eternally grateful (assuming his spirit is floating about somewhere above us . . .). Without salacious tidbits about his domestic arrangements and sexual proclivities to feed on, people have only his work to focus on. The study of Shakespeare does not appear to be any the poorer for this lack of biographical background detail.
Personally I think this lack of information concerning the author is something to be grateful for. It allows us to concentrate wholly on the works themselves without getting sidetracked or bogged down in biographical details of dubious relevance to the works as a whole. No doubt some people will disagree with me on this point, and will claim a study of a writer's life can throw light on his or her books giving us a greater insight into them and their genesis.
Charles Dodgson is not so fortunate. He wrote diaries (some of which were destroyed by his family after his death, perhaps in an attempt to protect his good name), and literally thousands of letters (which he carefully cataloged throughout his life). His nephew Stuart Dodgson Collingwood wrote a biography about him that appeared shortly after his death. We know who wrote Alice in Wonderland, and because of that much time and effort have been spent analysing the parallels that may be drawn between the books of Charles Dodgson and the life of Charles Dodgson. Some people have shown themselves much keener to read into the author's character, to second-guess his motives and his desires than to read the Alice books themselves.
It is no doubt unavoidable that almost as much attention will be paid to an author as to his or her work. Equally it is inescapable that many readers will base their reading of the Alice books on their knowledge of who the author was, when he lived (and where, and with whom, and why, and for how long . . .). Indeed the books are read (by certain critics) not for their resonance, for their ability to linger in our imagination like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, but as a thinly disguised roman-a-clef, with the author appearing (disguised as perhaps a little girl called Alice, or perhaps as a Dodo, or perhaps a Red Knight, perhaps even a White one!) in his own book, with his neuroses on show as clear as day. This tendency of seeing every detail in the books (which are after all works of fiction, created by liberal use of the creative imagination) as having a direct equivalent in Charles Dodgson's life is taken to its extreme in "The Red King's Dream". In it the authors think of themselves clearly as being literary detectives, tracking down the 'real' identities of the Unicorn, the Gryphon et al, as if the books had been written not as a whodunit but a who-is-it. This premise is an intriguing one, and "The Red King's Dream" makes enjoyable reading, but I cannot help but feel this approach does Dodgson no favours. There is more to the Alice books than that, surely.
"It was inevitable that once Lewis Carroll had been identified as Charles Dodgson, the quiet unassuming Oxford mathematical don, his work should have been subjected to analysis as an elaborate parody burdened with carefully thought out mathematical and logical arguments." 6
This quotation shows the dangers of reading a work of literature while keeping one eye on the biography of the author. Once we learn that Carroll was in fact Dodgson, and that Dodgson was in fact a mathematician and a logician, then we soon find ourselves jumping to conclusions about what the Alice books must mean, why they were written, and how we should interpret them. This style of biography-led reading limits us in our response to the books, and keeps us harnessed to the supposed 'facts' of the author's life, as if they had anything to do with the work of imagination he created. This tendency to see lines of cause-and-effect is pernicious and unrewarding. If we let the fact we know Dodgson was a mathematician colour our reading of the Alice stories, we are like a horse wearing blinkers, able to see in only one direction, straight ahead.
Literary criticism focuses on how books work their magic, how they operate, how they create fictional landscapes that mirror reality, and what we can learn from this knowledge. While these aims are laudable, they are also very dry, indeed as dry as the long tale told by the Mouse to Alice and the wet animals after they crawl out of the Pool of Tears. It is refreshing to find a critic who deigns to consider what it is about any given book that makes people want to read it in the first place and then enjoy re-reading it over and over throughout their lives (as countless Alice aficionados do, believe me!). Gillian Avery is one such critic, and she lists four possible reasons why the Alice books have proven so successful.
"For some children the charm of the Alice books may rest on the sheer fantasy -- Alice's extraordinary changes of size, the Cheshire Cat's grin, the pig baby; for others on the relentless logic with which Carroll works out his ideas (...) Another amusing ingredient is the clever use of words (...) But possibly the most refreshing thing of all about these books is the way the nonsense is set in sparkling contrast against a background of dull, everyday, schoolroom life." 7
The well-brought-up middle-class child of Victorian England would have been subjected to a very strict and severe education, with much emphasis placed on learning by rote and the memorization of rules and regulations concerning social etiquette and proper behaviour. Reading Alice's adventures and seeing how she can forget all she has learned in school yet still manage very well would no doubt have greatly amused Alice Liddell as well as the many other child readers of Dodgson's work. Although Alice is often frustrated, often threatened with violence ("Off with her head!"), and often treated with disdain by characters such as the school masterly Caterpillar and the argumentative Humpty Dumpty, Alice always gives as good as she gets, surviving her ordeals with her pompous interrogators on high (the Caterpillar on a mushroom, Humpty Dumpty on the wall), emerging at the end of her journeys a stronger and more confident person as a result. Even though the Caterpillar looks down on her (both literally and figuratively) as if she were something nasty he trod in on his way to the mushroom, she does not lose her self-composure and sang froid. In the case of Humpty Dumpty, it is he who ultimately suffers for his haughtiness, falling from his elevated but precarious position on the wall.
Victorian children would never dare talk back to their teacher as impudently as Alice does, so for them to read of her moral triumph over the Caterpillar would be a breath of fresh air, a chance for them to enjoy vicariously a victory denied them in everyday life. Alice acts as a mouthpiece (a 'spokeschild', perhaps) for not just Victorian children but for children everywhere who lack the courage and self-confidence to stand up to their teachers, and not let themselves be intimidated by such questions as "Who are you?"
When the Caterpillar gives his advice, she replies with almost withering contempt "Is that all?" How many children have not wished to shout out a deafening roar of "Is that all?" at the end of another tedious day of school? In Victorian England any such misbehaviour would have been severely punished with the strap or the cane coming swishing down on the outstretched palm or the bent backside. Indeed it is only in the last twenty years or so that corporal punishment has been banned from English schools. With the constant threat of corporal punishment hanging over you, school must have been a dreadful experience for many children, with the tedium of the classes compounded by the fear of being hit for transgressing rules whose logic denied comprehension. This atmosphere of violence is reflected in such characters as the Duchess, the governess-figure who shouts a lullaby to the pig-baby while shaking it violently.
By parodying teachers via the depiction of such characters as the Caterpillar, Humpty Dumpty and the Duchess, by holding them up to ridicule for his child friends to laugh at, Dodgson gave his readers a sense of power. He reassured them. As Gillian Avery says, "By treating the world of lessons and governesses with such playfulness, Lewis Carroll reduces it from the terrifying place it must sometimes have seemed to a manageable absurdity."8 The use of humour enables the child readers to laugh at something they might in many cases have feared and loathed. By helping them laugh, Dodgson is giving them back power over their teacher-tormentors. Just as Alice may be bullied or cross-questioned by the creatures she meets, she always takes final control, overcoming the hostility of the court of the Queen of Hearts with her cry "Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards!" This point is taken up and enlarged upon by Morton Cohen:
Alice is, so to speak, a role model for her child-readers. They can identify with her, and through her they can enjoy doing and saying the things to adults that in real life they might feel unable or unwilling to do.
The remarkable thing about this is that Alice is the creation of an Oxford maths don, not a species normally associated with a clear understanding of young girls' psychology. And while child readers could not care two hoots who wrote the Alice story, it is intriguing for many adult readers to ponder about what kind of man Dodgson was (or may have been). To gain an insight into his character modern readers and researchers have to rely upon his diaries and letters, as well as the reminiscences of his friends and colleagues.
As Dodgson is no longer alive, he can be (psycho)analyzed by anyone so inclined, and cannot refute any claims made about him, however objectionable or bizarre they may be. All dead authors face the same fate, but in Dodgson's case fate has not been altogether kind. Many have attacked not so much his books as his character, his moral rectitude, judging him him as if he were some nineteenth-century version of Nabokov's Humbert Humbert. Peter Coveney hardly minces his words, as this quote will bear witness:"Everything for Carroll pointed to disaster in his personal life. He was almost the casebook maladjusted neurotic."10
The "almost" in the second sentence is magnanimous in the extreme. Coveney is obviously a character-assassin with a conscience. But he has fallen into the trap that is all too common among Carroll critics: he judges the man out of his time, judging him instead by the standards of the twentieth century, without taking into account the fact that he died one hundred years ago in 1898; that he lived in the unique surroundings of Christ Church, one of the elite Oxford colleges; and that as a 'Student' (the name given in Christ Church to the dons), Dodgson was not allowed to marry. If he had married, he would have had to look for another job. To judge and damn Carroll by our own end-of twentieth-century standards is as fair as watching a Noh play and bitterly complaining its tempo is too slow and that it does not contain enough car chases. Coveney grudgingly admits that Dodgson was a "neurotic genius", before delivering his coup de grace: "Dodgson's obsession with little girls was both sexual and sexually morbid." 11 No doubt if he were still alive today, Dodgson would be up before a judge on charges of paedophilia and child pornography.
There is an undercurrent of violence running through the Alice books but as any parent will be able to tell you, children like violence, and are often robustly violent themselves (as William Golding showed to great effect in "The Lord of the Flies"). Therefore it should not come as an enormous surprise that children like reading about violence in books (as indeed many adults do, if Stephen King's popularity is anything to go by).
The charge that Dodgson's interest in Alice Liddell was sexual and that the Alice books are full of barely disguised sexual imagery is one that owes more to a reading of Freud than of Carroll. For Freud everything (and I mean everything) was to do with sex or death, or ideally sex and death. To interpret the Alice books in a Freudian way might make a good parlour game for long lonely nights in the depths of an English winter, but it is likely to tell us more about the analyst/interpreter than it does about the books themselves.
For Coveney nothing is quite as innocent as it first appears: "The initial rabbit-hole seems to serve as either a birth or copulative symbol."12 Why can it not simply be a rabbit hole, or is that too boring for you, Mr Coveney? No, the rabbit hole is a copulative symbol, so we get the little girl Alice as phallus (which as Morton Cohen observes is "a theory that at least provides us with a rhyme."13)
Perhaps for the best rebuttal of the Freudian critics' crude attempt at analysis we should turn to Nina Auerbach:"Despite critical a ttempts to psychoanalyze Charles Dodgson through the writings of Lewis Carroll, the author of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" was too precise a logician and too controlled an artist to confuse his own dream with that of his character." 14
Instead of Alice as phallus somehow miraculously impregnating the womb-like rabbit hole with herself doubling up as her own seed too (Alice as father of her own procreation?) Auerbach shows a picture of Alice that closely resembles the one described above, that of Alice as a confident survivor in a chaotic world, a child clearly in control of herself, her size and her own destiny. This self-control is symbolised by her ability to alter her size, by deciding whether to eat and drink the things she finds (such as the "Drink me" bottle, the "Eat me" cake, and the Caterpillar's mushroom).
Alice is by no means overwhelmed by the adult characters she meets. Indeed she sometimes treats them with a lack of respect that many child readers would love to ape if only they had the courage. We have already mentioned the curt way she deals with the Caterpillar. Her rebellion in the face of hostile forces takes on more direct form in the episode where she kicks Bill the Lizard up the chimney. This subversive undercurrent with Alice as the rebellious anti-heroine is no doubt one of the reasons for the books' continuing popularity among children. It is possible that some adults may agree with the Pigeon's view of Alice as 'a serpent', an evil little girl. Indeed Charles Dodgson himself said as much (if perhaps in jest) in a letter in 1867 to Dolly Argles, in which he wrote that while he forgot the story of Alice, "I think it was about malice."15
So, is it Alice with an 'm' or a 'p'? Alice, malice, phallus . . .. The joy of the books is that their openness to interpretation (as we have already seen!), so it would appear they can mean anything you want them to mean.
One of the most famous essays on Alice was written in 1935 by William Empson. In his essay Empson curiously manages to have his cake and eat it when he says: "It must seem a curious thing that there has been so little serious criticism of the Alices, and that so many critics, with so militant and eager an air of good taste have explained that they would not think of attempting it. (...) There seems to be a feeling that real criticism would involve psychoanalysis, and that the results would be so improper as to destroy the atmosphere of the books altogether. Dodgson was too conscious a writer to be caught out so easily." 16
Empson tells us that Dodgson is too clever a writer to be caught out by Freudian analysis (a view later shared by Nina Auerbach, as we have already seen), and yet he then goes on to analyse the Alice books in Freudian terms. No one ever said that critics have to be consistent.
Just as Alice falls headlong down a rabbit hole as she chases after the White Rabbit, so Freudian critics chase their phallic symbolism and unwittingly fall into the trap of assuming that everything in the Alice books must be Charles Dodgson's dream. Charles Dodgson created a fictional character called Alice, and it is her dream we read of in the Alice books. Some critics seem to forget that it is Alice who falls asleep on the river bank, and not her creator, Charles Dodgson. This confusion over who is doing the dreaming is perhaps understandable, especially in "Through the Looking-Glass" where Alice fears she may just be a part of the Red King's dream, soon to disappear when he wakes from his slumber.
Empson goes on to elaborate, "the books are so frankly about growing up that there is no great discovery in translating them into Freudian terms"17, but this does not stop him from trying. The growing-up Empson refers to is a recurring theme throughout the books: the changes in bodily size (the literal 'growing up' as she opens out "like the largest telescope there ever was", and later as her head zooms up into the treetops causing the Pigeon to take fright and call her a serpent) are everywhere, and these physical changes are mirrored by the figurative growing-up she d oes, as she learns how to cope with the chaos of the world around her.
I have chosen this last quote from Empson to show how frustrating any discussion of the Alice books can be. Trying to attach a meaning to the books is like a dog chasing its own tail: however fast the dog runs, the tail always remains elusively out of reach. The more the dog looks at its tail, the more it might see in it, but no matter how many times it looks, it will ultimately never be any closer to knowing what the tail (tale) is.
The futility of this avenue of research has been highlighted by Roger Lancelyn Green (among others) who has derided attempts at serious explication of the meaning of the Alice books. Yet in spite of this apparent frustration, critics never cease trying to explain the inexplicable. There are scholars such as Elizabeth Sewell who view the Alice books as self-contained worlds with their own rules, cut off from reality in much the same way as a game of Monopoly is. There are those who see them as carefully crafted poison-pen letters, full of barbs and satirical thrusts at figures on the periphery of Dodgson's life in nineteenth-century Oxford. No doubt in years to come, there will be new theories and new 'meanings' to be found in the Alice books. Perhaps instead of seeing this constant striving for meaning as futile, we should consider it as a joy. The book can mean whatever you want it to, and that is very liberating, is it not?
For me, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass" are an education in themselves: as Alice learns how to deal with difficult adult characters and the crazy situations they force her into, we the readers learn how to read the book from a wide variety of viewpoints. Each time we go back to the Alice books, we can see something new in them, and can learn. The books can be seen as an English form of the Bildungsroman, but instead of the hero being Goethe's Wihelm Meister, the hero is not only Alice, but the reader as well.