Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded Read online

  COPYRIGHT © 2015 DAVID DAY

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  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited

  Library and Archives of Canada Cataloguing in Publication is available upon request

  ISBN: 978-0-385-68226-8

  ISBN: 978-0-385-68227-5 (epub)

  Editor:

  Tim Rostron

  Editorial Assistants:

  Loribeth Gregg

  Kiara Kent

  Carly McMillan

  Zoe Maslow

  Peter Phillips

  Melanie Tutino

  Managing Editor:

  Susan Burns

  Design:

  CS Richardson

  Production Director:

  Carla Kean

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  TO RÓISÍN, MY IRISH ROSE,

  AND

  TERRY JONES, MENTOR AND FRIEND

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  i. What’s in a Name?

  ii. A Portmanteau Mind

  iii. Wonder Words and Riddles

  iv. The Reason Why

  PART ONE:

  ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

  Prelude Poem: All in the Golden Afternoon

  Three Fatal Sisters

  Chapter 1: Down the Rabbit-Hole

  The White Rabbit

  Chapter 2: The Pool of Tears

  Curious and Curiouser

  Chapter 3: A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale

  The Dodo and the Dodgson

  Chapter 4: The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill

  A Temple to Science

  Chapter 5: Advice from a Caterpillar

  De Quincey’s Caterpillar

  Chapter 6: Pig and Pepper

  The Kitchen Oracle

  Chapter 7: A Mad Tea-Party

  A Socialist Tea Party

  Chapter 8: The Queen’s Croquet-Ground

  Games in the Garden

  Chapter 9: The Mock Turtle’s Story

  Ruskin and the Gryphon

  Chapter 10: The Lobster Quadrille

  Stalking Tennyson

  Chapter 11: Who Stole the Tarts?

  Trial of the Heart

  Chapter 12: Alice’s Evidence

  A House of Cards

  PART TWO:

  AFTER WONDERLAND

  i. Sentence First—Verdict Afterwards!

  ii. From Alice to Malice

  iii. Through the Looking-Glass and Beyond

  iv. Last Years

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Image Credits

  About the Author

  “… who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable ƈharm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection,—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?…” Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, 1889.

  Tom Gate, the main entrance to Christ Church, Oxford: The college was Dodgson’s home for most of his life.

  Introduction

  I. WHAT’S IN A NAME? “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas only I don’t know what they are!” Alice might very well have been describing any reader’s first encounter with her adventures. Something peculiar and quite magical is happening in the word spell that is Wonderland.

  No one had written anything quite like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland before, and—save for its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass—no one has written anything like it since. It is a child’s adventure set in a fantastic imaginary world that is explored by a brave little girl armed only with her own common sense and an all-consuming curiosity. It is a book that can and should be read for pleasure by the young, but looking at the author’s unique use of language, it is remarkable that children can comprehend it at all. And yet somehow they do, and we do. Furthermore, it evokes in all its readers a tantalizing sense that there is something else to be revealed just under the surface of this compelling tale.

  Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a British mathematician, logician, clergyman and photographer. A resident Oxford don for almost half a century, he was famously known as Lewis Carroll, the author of two great children’s classics.

  Alice’s adventures have become part of popular culture worldwide, and have been translated into virtually every language. If these adventures were just flights of fancy, or simply “nonsense” as Dodgson/Carroll liked to call them, why, you might ask, are they so often quoted by physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, political scientists, historians, psychiatrists, logicians, poets, filmmakers, novelists and computer geeks?

  Wonderland has an undeniably strange atmosphere, in part because it is largely inhabited by literary tropes—that is, imaginary beings with no existence except as figures of speech or as characters from children’s rhymes, fairy tales or myths. These are creatures such as the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Mock Turtle, the Gryphon and the King and Queen of Hearts. In Wonderland, real things like hedgehogs and flamingos are treated as objects, while objects like playing cards and numbers behave like real things.

  Also, as many critics have pointed out, Wonderland is a complex and sophisticated construct full of literary allusions, parodies and variations of other fairy tales, rhymes and songs: Robert Southey’s Goldilocks and “The Old Man’s Comforts,” Goethe’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Aesop’s “Belling the Cat” and “The Tortoise and the Hare,” Isaac Watts’s “How Doth the Little Bee” and “The Sluggard,” James Sayles’s “Star of Evening,” William Mee’s “Alice Gray,” Mary Howitt’s “The Spider and the Fly” and Charles Lamb’s “The King and Queen of Hearts.”

  In all things, Dodgson felt the need for disguises of one form or another. Just as he always insisted on separating the life of the mathematician Charles Dodgson from that of the author Lewis Carroll, so was he careful to visually differentiate the real dark-haired Alice Liddell from his fictional blonde “dream-child moving through the land / Of wonders wild and new.”

  Charles Dodgson’s many pseudonyms included Edgar Cuthwellis and Mad Mathesis.

  Insight into the mind of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson can be gained by looking at a few of his numerous pseudonyms, such as Mad Mathesis, Balbus, Dares, Edgar Cuthwellis and Edgar U. C. Westhill. The first of these obviously refers to his vocation as a mathematician, the second is a classical allusion to the Roman Balbus the Stutterer (an affliction shared by Dodgson), the third relates to his birthplace of Daresbury and the final two are anagrams of his first two names, Charles Lutwidge.

  These are simple enough, but Dodgson also invented many other fairly obscure variations of his name or initials. One typical example was Mr. De Ciel—pronounced “Mr. D. C. L.”—a scrambling of his initials, C. L. D. Elsewhere, he used the signature “Sea l’d,” pronounced “sealed” or “C. L. D.” And even more obscurely, on one occasion Dodgson used as a pen name the initials R. W. G.: the fourth letter in each of his names.

  And then of course there is the Reverend Dodgson’s celebrated pen name, Lewis Carroll. As most Carroll fans know, Dodgson began by translating his first tw
o given names, Charles Lutwidge, into Latin, to arrive at Carolus Ludovicus. He then reversed the order of those names and translated them back into English, to arrive at “Lewis Carroll.”

  This much we know from Dodgson’s own correspondence. Yet there is another possible level of interpretation, consistent with this author’s obsession with multilingual wordplay. As the classically educated Charles Dodgson knew full well, ludo is Latin for “I play” and carol is both English and Old French for “a joyous song”—so “Lewis Carroll” could have the wonderfully appropriate meaning “I play a joyous song.”

  From an early age, Charles Dodgson wrote stories, plays, fairy tales, poems, riddles and games. He saw in literature a wide variety of types of entertainment that children loved; that would benefit them by keeping boredom, despair and temptation at bay; and that would—as he strove to do (in a manner unlike any other children’s author) in his eventual writing of the Alice books—subliminally educate them.

  In the mid-Victorian era, beyond the occasional visit to the music hall or theatre, it was up to every middle-class family to find a means to entertain themselves most evenings. Every child was required to acquire at least one party piece: the recitation of a song, poem or dramatic monologue. Dodgson organized hundreds of theatrical evenings, party games and events for, and with, children. The eldest son and third child of a family of seven sisters and four brothers, Dodgson took on this role in the family home in Daresbury, Cheshire. He also wrote plays, poems and songs for the amusement of his siblings. And later, as a bachelor don at Christ Church, he continued to find great pleasure in the organizing of such events with the children of leading members of Oxford society. Consequently, Wonderland is full of games, charades, poems, jokes, songs, conundrums, riddles and puzzles.

  Charles Dodgson had systems for just about everything. If an activity was without a clear set of rules or methodology, he seems to have been compelled to supply one. He created, for example, a cross-indexed and synopsized registration system for his personal correspondence. Over a thirty-five-year period, this personal register recorded 98,721 letters written, received, acknowledged and answered. Nor was this all by any means. Over his lifetime, Dodgson gathered and tabulated a multitude of other letter registers, diaries, accounting systems, journals, accounts, numerical tables and minutely detailed records.

  Dodgson and his alter ego also created scores of original games. Although he never played at cards until he was in his early twenties, Dodgson, only nine days after playing his first game, decided he was fully qualified to invent new ones. He created variations of whist and cribbage, and several entirely original card games, such as Court Circular and Ways and Means. As well, he invented numerous other games not involving cards: Lanrick, Croquet Castles, Circular Billiards, Doublets, Syzygies, Mischmasch, The Game of Logic and one very like what became Scrabble.

  If rules and systems were already in place, Dodgson seemed compelled to improve upon them. He reinvented the rules and scoring systems for backgammon, croquet, the postal system, railway timetables, lawn tennis, draughts, chess, charades, library cataloguing, wine storage, letter-writing etiquette, long division, calendars, money orders, picture mounting, table plans, bet placing, scales for measuring drinks and devices for writing in the dark.

  Similarly, when he found himself involved in college elections and university committees, he became obsessed with the mathematics of voting. The result was his publication of a number of complex new systems based on what we now know as proportional representation.

  Dodgson’s childhood tutor remembered him as an extremely advanced mathematics student who appeared to suffer physical pain if he could not resolve a problem. This same tutor wrote: “He is capable of acquirements and knowledge far beyond his years, while his reason is so clear and so jealous of error, that he will not rest satisfied without a most exact solution of whatever appears to him obscure.”

  Dodgson spent his entire life attempting to categorize and systematize the world around him. So when, as Lewis Carroll, he came to create his own world of Wonderland, there can be little doubt that its laws and structure were systematically organized and completely thought out in every minute detail.

  Dodgson “when I’m lecturing”: From a letter of 1868.

  II. A PORTMANTEAU MIND The popular view that Wonderland is simply a charming fairy tale full of frivolous nonsense that was made up on a summer’s day is one that Lewis Carroll was happy to foster. Just as a magician would not wish to reveal the years of hard work and machinery behind some grand illusion, the author Lewis Carroll—along with Charles Dodgson the amateur magician—did not want his fairy tale to appear as anything less than an effortless work of pure imagination.

  One of the test audiences for Alice’s Adventures Under Ground: Dodgson with the wife and children of George MacDonald, fantasy author and Christian minister.

  According to the version of events often given by the author, the fairy tale was “extemporized on the spot” at the urging of three little sisters that he and another Oxford divinity student took on a boating expedition on a branch of the river Thames on July 4, 1862. That evening, at the insistence of one of the children, the eponymous Alice, Dodgson promised to write the tale down, so it might be shared with others.

  In one account of the composition of this fairy tale, the author suggests that Wonderland was but one of scores of fairy tales that he orally composed for these and other children. “Yet none of these many tales got written down: they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon.” No doubt Dodgson/Carroll told children many clever fairy tales on scores of afternoon outings, but it is absurd to claim Wonderland was an oral composition entirely made up and recited in a single afternoon.

  In fact, aspects of the Wonderland story were composed long before. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Dodgson was telling a version of the down-the-rabbit-hole tale to children as early as 1854. And certainly, we know a version of the Knave of Hearts’s letter-poem was published in 1855, ten years before the publication of Wonderland.

  Even if we take the author’s word for it, and accept the date of July 4, 1862, as the inspirational first day of composition, Dodgson’s own diaries refute the legend of Wonderland’s instantaneous composition. Some five weeks after the seminal voyage, Charles Dodgson was struggling with its composition, and impatiently complained: “had to go on with my interminable fairy-tale of ‘Alice’s Adventures.’ ” Another five weeks pass before his diary confesses that he once again “Began writing the fairy-tale for Alice, which I told them July 4, going to Godstow—I hope to finish it by Xmas.”

  A full seven months after the boat trip, Dodgson’s diary triumphantly reports: “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground…is now finished (as to the text) though the pictures are not yet nearly done.” However, the text of the story that we know as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was not yet nearly done at all. It was not even half done.

  Alice’s Adventures Under Ground was simply the author’s earliest version, just four chapters and 12,715 words in length. This was a meagre output for seven months’ labour, if we are to believe that Dodgson was simply scribbling down a written version of an orally composed story.

  Even more significantly, this early version of the story did not contain many of Wonderland’s most complex and memorable characters and incidents. There was no Ugly Duchess, Cook or Cheshire Cat; no Mad Hatter, March Hare or Dormouse. There was no Duchess’s kitchen, Mad Tea-Party, Mock Turtle’s story, Lobster Quadrille or Trial of the Knave of Hearts.

  All of these were written in over the following two years. The full text of Wonderland was 26,211 words long. Then, Dodgson commissioned and carefully oversaw the creation of forty-two original illustrations. Its first appearance in the form of a complete published book was on July 4, 1865, exactly three years after the seminal river voyage.

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland over the last century and a half has been subjected to analysis by scores of scholars from a multi
tude of disciplines. The difficulty is that each seemingly rational insight into Wonderland is contradicted by the revelations of previous or subsequent analysis.

  Yet the key to the Alice books may be discovered in their curious manipulation of language and layers of meaning. Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass inadvertently provides us with a useful word for describing the machinations of his creator’s mind. He says of words such as slithy, a combination of lithe and slimy, that it is like a portmanteau, with “two meanings packed up into one word.” The portmanteau was a Victorian folding suitcase that could be packed in layers. It is an excellent metaphor for this author: the man with the portmanteau mind.

  The mystery of Wonderland is like the plot of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Inspector Hercule Poirot’s investigation is hampered by too many suspects and too many clues. The victim died as a result of a dozen deep knife wounds to the heart and lungs. All twelve passengers on the train had motive, opportunity and access both to the victim and to the murder weapon, but in the end everyone also proved to have an unshakable alibi provided by one or more of the other suspects. It seemed impossible that any one of the twelve could have committed the crime. Yet, as no one else was on the train, it seemed impossible that one of the twelve did not.

  Then the inspector has a flash of inspiration: if it was impossible for any one of the twelve suspects to have committed the murder, then the only other possibility is that the murder was committed by all twelve suspects. And so it proved to be.

  In Wonderland, a similar conspiracy and multiple systems of equal validity are at work. The man with the portmanteau mind has created a multi-layered world inhabited by characters with multiple identities.

  In his preface to Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll explains that there are two initial levels to the story: the fairy tale and the chess game (in which each chess piece is matched up with a character in the tale). Once within his Looking-Glass world, he has his Red Queen inform us that she is aware of five more levels of existence. The Red Queen tells Alice that she lives in a “poor thin way” by living only one day at a time, and how in the Queen’s country, rather, they live “five nights together” where it is “five times as warm, and five times as cold—just as I’m five times as rich as you are, and five times as clever!”