On the occasion of
the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures In
Wonderland
Follow That White
Rabbit With The Fob Watch
Why is a raven like a
writing desk?-Mad Hatter, at The Mad-Tea Party
Alice had
originally gone ‘underground’, as the title of the first version had it,
following a hurrying White Rabbit in a waistcoat. A rabbit with a fob watch,
muttering to himself, determined not to be any later than late.
But what sets Alice in
Wonderland apart from all the fantasia, fairy-tales, nonsense rhyme and
make sense illogic that poured out during the mid to late Victorian era? And
why was there such a creative outpouring of enduring, other-worldly fantasia
during the grimy, early smoke-stack stage of the Industrial Revolution? But the
second question is like wondering what it was about the Seventies?
Was it the
end of the war in Vietnam or the liberation of the contraceptive pill, or both?
But in Alice, It
was surely the number of delightful characters that populate the book and its
sequel, the slightly darker Through the
Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, published six years later. They
are, without doubt, two of the most famous books in English literature.
There was an incandescent spark and wit about the Alice
books then that remains most contemporary. Much zany conversation, to animate
the animals who talked, the objects that walked, mixed with a quirky streak of
landed upper-class British eccentricity and loftiness.
That tone of voice was the norm in the leading university of
the English-speaking world, in 1865, when Britannia ruled the waves, and the paroxysms
of violent change that came with the 20th century, were still decades
into the future. Alice, like the never existent but most
evocative Wodehousian world later, has been ever- endearing. Besides, the best children’s
books have a timeless quality about them, untouched by the vagaries of history
and circumstance.
In addition, Alice has pace, crackling with a
logician/mathematician’s intelligence and invention, but softened by the
creative tenderness of romance as wide-eyed as a young man’s fancy, or indeed
the innocence of a child.
Lewis Carroll had actually been writing and illustrating amusements,
rhymes, fantasia, miscellania, right from his teens. But Alice was his block-buster, claim to instant and abiding acclaim,
and what became his defining moment. It also earned him large sums of money
throughout the rest of his life.
It was a heady coming together of creative juices and the
play of relativity, expounded later by Einstein, brought to simplicity. As the
Walrus in Looking Glass quips in this
oft-quoted snippet: ‘The time has come to
talk of many things. Of shoes and ships-and sealing wax-of cabbages and kings’.
Edward Lear, a talented
contemporary of Lewis Carroll, author of the beloved The Owl and the Pussycat, (1871), helped popularise the genre of
hilariously illustrated nonsense rhyme. His best-selling book of self-illustrated
limericks was actually published in 1846, well before Alice (1865). Alice, of
course, ranged over a scale of thought and lyricism amongst the word-play, that
went well beyond just the nonsensical.
That, a wonderful story, made up extempore by the author as
he imagined it, for the simple entertainment of three little girls, could
captivate generations ever since,
defines its inherent genius. Its sheer longevity in print and celluloid
contradicts what the Mad Hatter says
to Alice: ‘You used to be much more…muchier. You’ve lost your muchness’. Fact
is, Alice, as she asserted herself,
is still ‘real’, a century-and-a-half
later.
Published originally as
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland it was
conjured up out of the ether in fascinating outline, while rowing/punting down
the river Isis, on a picnic cum boat trip. That first of these astoundingly
productive boating excursions took place on 4th July 1862, between the
evocatively named Folly Bridge and the village of Godstow, both near Oxford.
There were many more such outings later, on other idyllic
days. Together, they helped flesh out the story- with the three Liddell sisters
as muse: There was Florine 13, Alice 10, and Edith 8, all clamorously urging
Carroll ever onwards in his invention, insisting ‘next time’ was always ‘now’.
It is now the 150th
year since the publication of the ‘first children’s story without a moral’, wrote
Melanie McDonagh recently in The
Independent . This astute observation probably accounts for the tale’s
tantalising appeal to young and not so young alike.
Alice in Wonderland was published in 1865, three years after it was
conceived. The first edition illustrated by the celebrated John Tenniel, later
knighted by Queen Victoria. And afterwards, Alice
inspired many other illustrators in subsequent editions, as well as a galaxy of
famous painters including Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Peter Blake and Yayoi
Kusama .
And this year, a
whole flotilla of Oxford rowers made a commemorative journey down the Isis.
Oxford University has long been clear about claiming its own, and this one was
the work of a life-long resident and faculty member. Alice may be global but it
is also local.
Susan Sontag, the American playwright, essayist and novelist,
wasn’t exaggerating when she called Carroll’s Alice the most famous Alice
of the 19th century.
Lewis Carroll’s muse however probably led him to an amalgam,
a composite person of the imagination that actually featured in the books, but
there is no doubt Alice Liddell figured prominently. She is mentioned directly
in the text and referred to obliquely several times.
But there was also the influence of all three Liddell girls,
daughters of Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, where Carroll alias the Rev.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a Mathematics don. He was, in fact, an Oxford prominent,
teaching there from the 1850s till 1881, and staying in residence for the rest
of his life till he died in 1898.
In any case, Lewis Carroll, prolific as he was, never again
matched the popularity and magic of the Alice books, generally published sandwiched together in later years. Everything inside and outside, up top
and underside in Alice belongs; nothing
is superfluous, not even the liberal poetic licence. That is probably why Alice thinks it is fine to be mad. She
tells the Hatter, who is suddenly
seized with anxiety that he’d gone mad: But
I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.
Marina Warner, in an
article written in 2011 for the celebrated Tate
Gallery, noted ‘Dodgson saw humour as somewhere, above all, to shelter’. This was the work of Dodgson’s nom de plume, the altogether more
prepossessing Lewis Carroll, fluent, comfortable, debonair in the company of the
Liddell sisters, but obviously his alter-ego, one that wasn’t tongue-tied or
shy.
But there is enough gossip, conjecture and anecdotal trivia
on Carroll. Any tinctures of paedophilia, suggestions of which came to the
surface in the suspicious 1990s, in Dodgson’s devotion to Alice Liddell, and
indeed little girls in general, were certainly not borne out by the facts. Neither Alice nor anyone else claimed anything
untoward in the subsequent decades of Carroll’s life. This unlike quite a few
celebrity icons of times just past.
It is true enough that
Alice Liddel’s defining moment also became Alice in Wonderland to be sure. After all, she was the possessor of
the only hand-written and self-illustrated copy of the manuscript gifted to her
in 1864. And so, she was often called
upon, after Carroll died, to preside over Alice
functions, almost up to her own death, years later, in 1934.
It is no secret that Carroll plainly loved her. He also took
photographic portraits of her, her mother, and sisters and many other little
girls, often nude or partially dressed, almost always supervised by a parent,
because the prevailing conceit of the time saw pre-pubescent little girls as
the embodiment of innocence. There was
no sleaze in it, and there were a number of other painters and photographers
who did likewise.
Dodgson, a life-long bachelor did, reassuringly, embark on
several discreet affairs with young women, some no more than in their twenties.
It is also said, in some accounts, that he wanted to marry Alice Liddell when
she grew up. This was a healthy enough sentiment for a man 20 years older. He
voiced as much to her parents, but was turned down by Alice’s mother, the
Dean’s wife.
Alice Liddel went on to marry a wealthy cricketer, one
Reginald Hargreaves, the same age as her, in fact, and had three sons by him
before he died in 1926. And she did name one of her sons Caryl, but coyly
denied it had anything to do with Lewis Carroll.
There were other colourful rumours too. Alice was a striking
beauty at 20, and before she married Hargreaves in 1880 when they were both 28,
she was said to be the love interest of Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria’s
youngest son. However, there is some confusion on whether it was actually she,
or her younger sister Edith, who died young, that interested Leopold. But the
Prince did pay Edith his last respects as one of her pall-bearers.
Also, there are missing pages of Carroll’s diary from 1863,
which are thought to refer, contrary to the popular line, to the Liddel’s elder
daughter Lorina, a blooming, hormonal young teenager by then, if underage under today’s laws, who apparently gave
inappropriate expression to her infatuation for Carroll.
This inevitably caused a rift between the Liddells and
Dodgson. A rift, from which the relationship never fully recovered, though
other reasons, including Oxford staff-room politics, were added to the mix in
later years.
Irrespective of these formative juices, once Alice in Wonderland was published, it took on
a life of its own, opening it up to a world of interpretation. What fascinated
Director Tim Burton, for example, who directed the latest Disney cinematic
version of Alice in 2010, is its
‘trippiness’.
Indeed, the
mathematician in Dodgson perhaps seemed fascinated by what another analyst
called the ‘unverifiable’, and the ‘unreliability of perception’. Others
thought he brought non-being to life in Alice,
along with a cast of hypnotic characters, including the contrapuntal Mad
Hatter, the irascible Queen of Hearts, , the Mock Turtle, the March Hare, the
Dormouse, and the Cheshire Cat, who could disappear leaving only his grin
hanging in the air. Looking Glass
introduced the duo Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the gryphon-like Jabberwock
dragon, The Walrus, and the Carpenter.
Alice’s magnetism
is probably due to its universality. It was clearly not just an outstanding
Victorian era concoction, unlike several of its less celebrated ilk. It is
still contemporary, and appeals also to adults, through its twists and turns,
and its darker hues in Looking Glass.
Carroll lost his father shortly
before writing Looking Glass, and was
quite depressed at the time.
The appeal and validity of the books has inspired a
cornucopia of painters, illustrators, musicians, graphic artists, movie-makers,
playwrights, fantasists, curators, sociologists, logicians, intellectuals,
writers, novelists, and masses of Carroll biographers. There are postage stamps featuring Alice and
the cast of characters in Wonderland, fashion, clothes, Apps, computer games, a
plethora of toys and oodles of gift-shop merchandise.
There were also a number of works, before and after, in
similar genres. A languid and intoxicatingly illustrated Water Babies, by the Rev. Charles Kingsley (1862), was a
satirical, moral fable, commenting partially on Darwinism, and a precursor to Alice, which was neither. But it was published
by the self-same Macmillan that took
on Carroll’s Alice.
JM Barrie’s Peter Pan,
the boy who wouldn’t grow up, came later, after the turn of the century, first
in a novel form (1902), and then a play, (1904); soon after the longest
reigning British monarch, Queen Victoria, died in 1902.
Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, L Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900,
marking the first acclaimed American fairy-tale and children’s fantasy ever.
The PL Travers’ series of Mary Poppins
books came further down the pike, the first of them in 1934, in the ‘modern’
era between the wars.
Walt Disney’s own parade of humanoid animal characters led
by Mickey Mouse was followed by movie
versions of several of the aforementioned. It was Disney that took a stab at
the first film version of Alice in 1951 and once again in 2010. And all the
idealised ‘worlds’ and ‘lands’ since,
from Disney World to Hogswart, arguably had their basic inspiration in Lewis
Carroll’s seminal and path-breaking work.
The Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a pastor’s son headed
for a career in the ‘High Church’ too, but though a deacon, was actually never
ordained a priest in the end. He was,additionally, a brilliant mathematician
with a dozen books on the subject written under his real name, including Notes on the First Two Books of Euclid
(1860) and Curiosa Mathematica, late
in life, published in two parts,
coming out in 1888 and 1894.
Dodgson was a teacher, mainly of geometry, an Anglican
deacon from 1861, a pioneer photographer, starting in 1856, when the medium was
just establishing itself, illustrator, comic, author, a singing bon vivant, an inventor of useful
innovations.
In himself, Dodgson was, despite his gifts, sometimes stodgy,
a stuttering, shy, conformist. But, in a Through
The Looking Glass, mirror-image kind of way, he was also, in his Lewis
Carroll avatar, an outrageous, incandescent, and fluent rebel, a soaring Superman to his mild-mannered academic
gowned Clark Kent.
Dodgson was, in fact, also an occasional temporal lobe
epileptic, given to visions, and suffered ‘aura’ migraines. These afflictions
may well account for the distortions of his vision, and not the influence of psychotropic
drugs, that some people seem to divine in the text.
The feisty Alice,
never one to be overawed, probably has the last debunking word for the motley dissectors,
analysers, critics, and sundry other authority figures over the years. She
shouts in retort at the imperious King and the bad-tempered Queen of Hearts: You’re nothing but a pack of cards! Who
cares for you!
But perhaps it is not
so much Alice, so given to holding her own, as the Mad Hatter, who sums things
up best: you might as well say that I
like what I get is the same thing as I get what I like.
Or even the Dormouse,
who says: I breathe when I sleep is the
same thing as I sleep when I breathe.
Deductive logic anyone?
For: Swarajyamag.com
(2,357 words)
January 19th,
2015
Gautam Mukherjee
