Are you acquainted with the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, or the Cheshire
Cat? Then you are
just one of the many adults who remembers reading Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland, one of
the most popular children’s stories to come out of Victorian England.
The author often entertained
his young friends with stories, but one story, told during a picnic
on the banks of the Thames in
1862, was more entertaining than most. At the urging of his young friend,
Alice Liddell, Dodgson
put down on paper the story of Alice’s journey into a rabbit hole.
He illustrated it with his own
drawings and gave it to her as a gift, originally entitled Alice’s
Adventures Underground.
Dodgson completed the story and published it as "Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland" in 1865.
Next came a successful sequel, Through the Looking-glass and What Alice
Found There in
1871. These books, with their eccentric characters and nonsensical
verse, have been translated
into over 60 languages, from Afrikaans to Turkish, proving their universal
appeal to children.
For further information, see the Lewis Carroll
article in the Encyclopedia Britannica
(UT only), or
The Lewis Carroll article in Contemporary
Authors. (UT Only)
For more information on the Fiction of Lewis
Carroll, please see this compendium of
Carroll Texts Online, including all major
prose and poetry works, and translations.
Also, there are Lewis Carroll organisations
in the United Kingdom and North America.
See the Associations Unlimited or this listing
for other clubs and organisations.
Art & Adaptation
The Alice stories have inspired and been adapted to many different art
forms. Plays, ballets,
symphonies, sculptures (such as this one in Central Park, NYC), musicals,
and movies have all
been based upon Alice’s adventures, including Disney’s popular animated
version, "Alice in
Wonderland". What makes Carroll’s work so popular for re-creating and
adapting, especially in
dramatic or visual media? Perhaps it is the author’s child-like imagination,
the nonsensical plot, or
the powerful personalities of the characters… or all of the above.
Even in its earliest forms, the Alice stories had a visual element.
"Alice’s Adventured
Underground" was originally illustrated by the author, and the first
publication of the book was
illustrated by Sir John Tenniel, a well-known English artist. His pen
and ink drawings caught the
public fancy and influenced many, but not all, later illustrators.
Subsequent editions have been
accompanied by a wide variety of artistic styles and interpretations
of Alice and her companions.
Musical Compositions inspired by Lewis Carroll
are indexed here.
Movies based on Lewis Carroll works from the
Internet Movie Database.
This page has links to different illustrations.
Interpretation & Re-interpretation
Although Dodgson composed Alice’s adventures for the entertainment of
children, many scholars
have discovered various underlying influences in his work. The influence
of Dodgson’s logic and
mathematics on his Wonderland has been explored, the logician in him
showing up in the puzzles,
riddles, and the distorted logic of Wonderland and the land beyond
the Looking-glass. Other
schools of thought and criticism have their own perspectives on Carroll’s
writing, leading to
Freudian psychoanalysis, feminist, Jungian and other interpretations
of Alice’s dreams. Some
scholars looked at what these books say about childhood, about the
imagination, or about sense
and nonsense… the possibilities, apparently, are endless.
There is even one group which claims that Queen Victoria herself wrote
the Alice adventures, as a cryptic biography full of political intrigue
cloaked in symbolism. Whatever you believe about the
author’s conscious or unconscious influences, Carroll’s writings are
undoubtedly delightfulclassics
of children’s literature.
Charles L. Dodgson: Carroll’s ‘other’ face…
Born in Daresbury, England into the large family of a country parson,
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
grew up amusing his family and himself with language and writing. He
entered Oxford college in
1850, where he studied mathematics, later becoming a faculty member.
He was awarded a
fellowship that had the stipulation that he remain single and enter
the clergy, which he did in 1861.
Though he had no children of his own, he got along best with youngsters.
A variety of reasons for
this have been given, including his many younger siblings and that
his stammer disappeared around children.
One of his favourite avocations was photography. He had a small studio
in his rooms at Christ
Church College, Oxford, and was considered quite adept at portraiture.
Among his subjects were Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
but his favourite subjects were his child
friends, Alice Liddell among them. Though some of his photographs may
appear scandalous
today, he always got permission from the young subjects’ parents and
was above suspicion as a
deacon.
Mathematician & Scholar
Dodgson tutored in mathematics for many years at Oxford, and wrote and
studied in many fields
of the subject. He wrote mainly on geometry, including a biography
of Euclid, and on symbolic
logic. Though this may seem like a dry area of study for such an imaginative
author, he injected his mathematical lectures and books with humour, wit,
and whimsy. Many of his fiction writings also
include examples of mathematical or logic puzzles and games. Another
of his mathematical
interests was arithmetic computation, including "tricks" for division
or finding the day of the week
for a given date. He also dabbled in cryptology, the study of code-making
and -breaking.
In addition to puzzles and games, he satirised the academic politics
of Oxford in articles, booklets, and leaflets. Many pamphlets that he wrote
while at Oxford survive and show that he took an
active interest in the governance of the University. He felt that by
printing his arguments, rather
than debating, he could logically arrange his arguments, and his stammer
wouldn’t be an
impediment.
The Correspondence of Rev. Dodgson
Letter-writing is becoming a lost art in the days of the telephone and
e-mail, but was alive and well in Victorian England. Dodgson was a prolific
writer, writing almost 97,000 letters to friends,
family, and colleagues. His delight in word play, non-sense, games,
and unusual forms is evident
while reading through collections of his correspondence. Some letters
are written from back to
front, others in mirror-writing or spirals. Crytograms, rebuses, illustrations,
and word puzzles
make their appearance as well, and he addresses youngsters with a strange
mix of nonsense and
formal seriousness.
He also published a pamphlet "Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter-writing",
which fit inside
the Wonderland Postage-stamp Case. The leaflet addresses the use of
the stamp case, how to
begin a letter, twelve rules for writing a letter, and lastly, a method
of registering correspondence.
He himself used this method of record-keeping, with columns for letters
sent and received, and
dates and summaries of each letter.
