When Lewis Carroll dreamed up the world of Alice in Wonderland, he gave readers one of the most famous works inviting Victorian society to escape from its troubles. Yet in contrast to his use of the story as a diversion from these problems, Carroll also created Alice and her imaginary world as a chance to comment and reflect upon the difficult situation.

          In Alice and Through the Looking Glass, he mixed real wit and appropiate gravity to explore starvation and malnutrition, paralleling his own society´s effort to survive. For example, Alice continuously looked towards eating to alter her size in this fantasy world. Carroll demonstrated an understandable preoccupation with food in Wonderland as a way of sharing his thoughts on hunger in Victorian society.

            During the 1830s and 1840s, there was an enormous shortage of food, driving the prices much higher than many could afford. Many found themselves scrounging for food, as Alice did, or even going hungry. But in Carroll´s fantasy world, Alice found something to eat in the form of a gigantic mushroom. Nature, and its ability to provide food, sheds some light on the author´s search for possible ways of saving his starving.

             In Victorian England, distinctions were drawn not upon knowledge, but upon ignorance and a label. Lewis Carroll seems implicitely to to criticise these Victorian attitudes towards race, gender and class in Through the Looking Glass.

            Alice´s seemingly nonsensical conversation with the flowers might be a satire on society´s superficial attitudes toward race and class, which considered blacks and members of the lower class to be "unreasanable, irrational, and easily childlike creatures having no religion but only superstition."

          "And can all flowers talk?"

            Carroll almost leads us to believe that Victorian social ritual merely entails a primness with the stiffness of a starched cravat. But he does not stop there; instead, he shows us the darker side of convention -the authority of the elite (here the Red Queen, the Pudding, and the creatures in Wonderland) to criticize rudely the child and others whom they perceive to be ignorant.
 
 

            The Red Queen is, as Robert Polhemus states, "the principal explicit authority figure in the book" (Through the Looking-Glass, Norton Critical Edition). The Queen is alternatively a straitjacketed governess type and a hypocrite with the manners of a wild animal; in the banquet scene, she sharply scolds Alice for acutely observing the boorishness of the guests, but herself eats like a "pig in a trough" (202). By characterizing the Red Queen in this manner, Carroll questions the "license to criticize" accorded to contemporary figures of authority and reduces them to platitude-spouting automatons.

            It is precisely the extremes of social convention and etiquette, Carroll implies, that trigger this phenomenon and have invaded Victorian society, transforming it into a farcical world of rude, hostile people reminiscent of the creatures in Wonderland. Carroll's social commentary in Through the Looking-Glass does offer a note of hope. In the end, Alice, sick of the confusion and chaos which ensues when the tableware and candles fly around the room, finally summons the courage to challenge the Red Queen, to whom she hitherto has been relatively subservient. In shaking the Queen into a harmless kitten, Alice breaks the spell of the domineering, repressive authority figures circumscribed within conventions of etiquette and manners. If rigid social structure, taken to an extreme, pigeonholes people into specific power relations, then stepping out of that circle to challenge harmful authority helps restore order. Only when Alice actively confronts the Red Queen can she free herself from the chaos of Wonderland.

                                            (http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/victorian/carroll/aiwl3.html)
 
 

            Traditional public schools emphasized Greek and Latin, house systems, school spirit, improving character, and that the goal of education was to mold the student into a young Christian gentleman. This approach can be seen in Alice, since her knowledge seems to consist mainly of maxims and morals about obedience and safety. Carroll seems to feel amusement at best, and utter contempt at worst, for this typically Victorian penchant, especially in his satirical characterization of the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it" (70), says the Duchess. Alice's experience with her, however, makes the reader laugh at the absurdity of such a character.

            Kathy Szoke, in her discussion of the Victorian audience, explains how authors make their audiences think about issues relative to their own lives. Carroll certainly made a conscious decision to make morals and tales of obedience, a large part of Victorian upbringing, nonsensical. This rejection of typical Victorian manners and education of children supports one of the themes in his

            Alice books, the idea that a child's imagination has value. Social convention, rules of etiquette, and authority are all parodied in a passage from The Looking Glass. The banquet Alice attends, with the Red Queen´s introduction of Alice to the leg of mutton and her obsession with etiquette and proper manners to the point of depriving Alice of dinner demonstrates the strait-laced rituals of Victorian society, whose absurdities Carroll mocks.

            Carroll almost leads us to believe that Victorian social ritual merely entails a primness with the stiffness of a starched cravat. But he does not stop there; instead, he shows us the darker side of convention --the authority of the elite (here the Red Queen, the Pudding, and the creatures in Wonderland) to criticize rudely the child and others whom they perceive to be ignorant .

            The Red Queen, who is, as Robert Polhemus states, "the principal explicit authority figure in the book" (Through the Looking-Glass, Norton Critical Edition). The Queen is alternatively a straitjacketed governess type and a hypocrite with the manners of a wild animal; in the banquet scene, she sharply scolds Alice for acutely observing the boorishness of the guests, but herself eats like a "pig in a trough" (202). By characterizing the Red Queen in this manner, Carroll questions the "license to criticize" accorded to contemporary figures of authority and reduces them to platitude-spouting automatons. It is precisely the extremes of social convention and etiquette, Carroll implies, that trigger this phenomenon and have invaded Victorian society, transforming it into a farcical world of rude, hostile people reminiscent of the creatures in Wonderland.

            Carroll's social commentary in Through the Looking-Glass does offer a note of hope. In the end, Alice, sick of the confusion and chaos which ensues when the tableware and candles fly around the room, finally summons the courage to challenge the Red Queen, to whom she hitherto has been relatively subservient.

            In shaking the Queen into a harmless kitten, Alice breaks the spell of the domineering, repressive authority figures circumscribed within conventions of etiquette and manners. If rigid social structure, taken to an extreme, pigeonholes people into specific power relations then stepping out of that circle to challenge harmful authority helps restore order. Only when Alice actively confronts the Red Queen can she free herself from the chaos of Wonderland.

                                                            (http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/victorian/carroll/aiwl5.html)