Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded Read online

  In his introduction to his later fairy novel, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Lewis Carroll explains: “It may interest some of my Readers to know the theory on which this story is constructed.… I have supposed a Human being to be capable of various psychical states, with varying degrees of consciousness.” He provides the reader with a listing of five levels of existence, and “supposing that Fairies really existed; and that they were sometimes visible to us, and we to them,” he then presents an indexed chart identifying which level each of his characters assumes in each chapter—as well as which identity each character assumes on each of these levels.

  The characters in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland also have multiple identities that may operate on different levels of existence. And so we have a conspiracy of the entire cast of Wonderland characters in this assumption of multiple identities.

  All these levels stem directly from Dodgson’s studies and personal interests. He graduated from Oxford with a First in mathematics, a Second in classics and a Third in philosophy and history. Added to this, there was his lifelong fascination with spiritualism and his immense interest in and enjoyment of music both sacred and profane. Each of these themes is to be discovered in this multi-layered story.

  The primary level of the fairy tale provides the framework for all other levels: historic, philosophic, mythological, theosophical and mathematical interpretations are all possible. These and other disciplines all make their contributions, and many of these are discussed in this book’s extensive annotations, notes and running commentaries on each chapter.

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is—among all the many things it can be viewed as—a time capsule from a time and place that was at a historic turning point in human intellectual history: Oxford University in the Victorian age. The novel, it emerges, is a who’s who of Oxford at the height of its power and influence in the world.

  Consequently, the commentary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Decoded primarily concerns itself with the life and times of Charles Dodgson, Alice Liddell and the other real mid-Victorian historical figures who are the basis for the characters and creatures that inhabit Wonderland.

  III. WONDER WORDS AND RIDDLES Today, most children have some experience of Carroll’s kind of storytelling through playing computer games. On entering an underground labyrinth, Alice is given the choice of golden keys, magic mushrooms, cakes and potions that allow her to change her size or shape or to gain entry into other regions. She encounters strange and wonderful creatures: sometimes hostile, sometimes friendly.

  Riddles and hidden clues are to be found everywhere in this fairy tale. Like a modern gamer at her computer, Alice must make critical choices to find her way through this maze. She must endure adventures and trials before discovering the means of triumphing over the tyrannical Queen of Hearts and safely returning to her waking life.

  It is only in Wonderland’s triggering mechanisms that this fairy-tale game varies superficially from contemporary multi-levelled computer games. Language is the key to Wonderland’s mysteries. The facility and flexibility of language informs all literature, of course. But nobody has ever used language in quite the way Lewis Carroll did in his Alice books. Carroll makes the English language—and the story he is telling—operate on many levels simultaneously. In Wonderland, icons in the form of key characters or images, puns, homophones and allusions serve as clues and signposts to indicate the various levels of Alice’s adventures.

  Take, for example, the meaning of the word mean: signify, intend, clarify, define, stingy, poor and nasty. In his satire The Vision of the Three T’s, Carroll absurdly stretches out the meaning of mean: “You must know, then, that there be three Means treated of in Mathematics. For there is the Arithmetic Mean, the Geometric and the Harmonic. And note further, that a Man is that which falleth between two magnitudes.… and is in truth the Non-harmonic Mean, the Mean Absolute. But that the Mean, or Middle, is ever the safer course.…” etc.

  Elsewhere, Carroll suggests that if we have the means to study time, we will soon discover a day in mean-time is quite different from a day in mean solar time, or a day in terms of a mean sun. Then, too, one might suggest it is no mean feat to find any means to live within one’s means … ad infinitum.

  Humpty Dumpty might have been describing Carroll’s approach when he says, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” Or as Carroll himself said in a letter to a friend, writing about his stance as a logician: “I shall take the line ‘any writer may mean exactly what he pleases by a phrase so long as he explains it beforehand.’ ”

  Except in Wonderland, the author doesn’t explain it beforehand. And poor Alice’s problem is that most of the entities she encounters speak a formal language that is logical from the perspective of a philosopher or a mathematician, say, but nonsense in everyday ordinary speech. This is particularly true on the mathematical level.

  At the tea party, for instance, Alice is bewildered by the bizarre wordplay of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, and complains: “The Hatter’s remark seemed to her to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English.” She recognizes that they are speaking in logically structured English sentences, but is also correct in concluding that the conversation has no sort of meaning—or perhaps no more meaning than an algebraic expression has in ordinary speech.

  Similarly, when the King of Hearts in the trial ponders “ ‘Important—unimportant—unimportant—important—’ as if he were trying which word sounded the best,” the regent is not being frivolous. He is quite properly conducting a trial to test each word for “soundness” (in what mathematicians call a “well-formed formula” or “wff”). The King’s judgment is based on the logically “sound” structure of a sentence or formula, not on its meaning in ordinary speech.

  Formal languages and rules were developed by such specialists as mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists in order to eliminate the ambiguities inherent in natural languages like English, Latin and Greek. Carroll has reversed this process by employing formal languages and rules in the context of everyday English (and sometimes Latin, Greek and French) to create more ambiguities, thereby allowing a vast expansion of wordplay.

  Carroll has stretched to its limits the power of language to communicate, and it is astonishing that the Alice fairy tales do not collapse under the weight of all these parallel meanings. Rather, the tales actually make sense—albeit comic nonsense. In fact, no real nonsense is spoken by any character: each is making sense on a different level by using everyday words with different definitions. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is like a symphony comprising many separate tunes, each one fully independent and coherent in its own right, and all combining to make a masterpiece.

  IV. THE REASON WHY But why? Why would anybody write a children’s story in a code that is almost impenetrable even to adults? Why in God’s name would anyone want to inflict complex theories of mathematics, theosophy, politics and philosophy on an unsuspecting child?

  Well, if you were the Reverend Charles Dodgson, you would do it in God’s name. I suppose these days we would call it subliminal advertising for Christ. The Reverend Dodgson was a devout High Anglican Churchman. The education and spiritual enlightenment of children was one of the most hotly debated political and religious issues of the nineteenth century, and an obsession of Dodgson himself.

  Time and again he spoke and wrote about the church’s insensitivity to children. He deplored how they were forced to endure hours of boredom in services that only alienated them from the beauty and wonder of worship. Dodgson was a fan of the theatre, much to the displeasure and embarrassment of his fellow clergy, including his own father. But his rebuttal was that the theatre at its best was doing what the church was failing to do: engaging and enlightening the young.

  What Charles Dodgson loved about the theatre was, first, its capacity to communicate spiritual and emotional realities and, second, its capacity “to convey a higher truth stra
ight to the soul, bypassing the intellect.” This is exactly what Lewis Carroll was attempting with the Alice stories.

  Wonderland is a kind of memory palace constructed exactly as a cathedral is constructed: as an analog of the world and all its secrets. The magnificence of High Mass in a cathedral will fill the worshipper with wonder, but its great spiritual secrets are hidden in the sacred geometry of its architecture, the deep philosophy of its language and the mathematical complexities of its music.

  For Alice, his wonder child, Lewis Carroll created an enthralling secular equivalent to High Mass in a specially constructed temple of wisdom. Alice’s journey through Wonderland was based on the classical myths and ancient mystery cults that enacted a maiden’s descent into the underworld. It came complete with initiation rites, baptisms, processions, catechisms, epiphanies and dialogues with saints, mystics and sages.

  Christ Church Library: Dodgson first saw Alice Liddell through the window overlooking the Deanery garden.

  Dodgson lived in rooms in Tom Quad, Oxford’s largest and grandest quadrangle: Its Rosicrucian and Freemason influences are reflected in Wonderland.

  With Wonderland, Lewis Carroll gave Alice Liddell the great gift of a classical education. It was delivered secretly and subliminally, but in the Victorian age, it was a gift no girl would have been permitted to receive in any other way.

  Not that Carroll was always entirely secretive about the pedagogical subtext of his stories—especially when it came to mathematics. Fifteen years after the publication of Wonderland, he began publishing a series of stories (described as Knots) under the collective title A Tangled Tale in a magazine called The Monthly Packet. In the preface, Carroll was uncharacteristically revealing about the subtext: “The writer’s intention was to embody in each Knot (like medicine so dexterously, but ineffectually, concealed in the jam of our early childhood) one or more mathematical questions—in Arithmetic, Algebra, or Geometry, as the case might be—for the amusement, and possible edification, of the fair readers of that Magazine.”

  Carroll’s belief in the mystical significance and subliminal power of symbols and language was not a personal quirk; rather, it was fundamental to his religion. The High Anglican Church (like the Catholic and Orthodox faiths) believed that the souls and spirits of its followers should be guided toward the truth of religion not by logical mental forces but by the symbolic and mystical forces of sacred language, ritual and images—ideas that Carl Jung would later confirm in his own psychological studies in Man and His Symbols.

  He noted, too, that the beauty of choral music extended its healing influence on the faithful, even though its composition was based on a complex mathematical system of harmonics that was far beyond their understanding, and that church architecture lifted the spirits not just of the elite within the priesthood who understood the philosophical significance of the sacred geometry behind it. And by many it was also believed that when High Mass was delivered in Latin, the power behind the words reached the soul of even someone ignorant of the language.

  A founding tenet of the Anglican Church was that its esoteric wisdom could only be entrusted to an enlightened priesthood. The average worshipper could not possibly be expected to understand. The best and the brightest of Churchmen took this stance, not because they believed that God’s creations were devoid of logical forces and reason—many, Charles Dodgson among them, believed absolutely that the logical constructs of sacred geometry, mathematics and harmonics were God’s plan built into every material thing. But they believed—with some justification—that all these theories would confuse the general population and result in a sea of bafflement and doubt.

  It has been said of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, another famous underground adventure: “Well-nigh all the encyclopedic erudition of the Middle Ages was forged and welded, in the white heat of an indomitable will, into [its] steel-knit structure.” Although Lewis Carroll’s descent into his underworld makes for lighter reading than Dante’s, something similar might be said of his creation of Wonderland. Carroll compresses into his fairy tale the entire syllabus of a classical education of his time, and the book is a time capsule of the intellectual history of the Victorian Age.

  The Wonderland years marked the turning point at which the ancient classical education system was gradually coming to an end and the university as we know it today was born. And as unfit as it was to survive intact in the modern world, it must be said there was much to admire in the ancient tradition of a classical education and its preservation of the deep roots of Western civilization through the Latin and Greek languages. It was a pan-European, Latin-speaking culture that attempted to reclaim the wisdom and ideals of ancients through the efforts of the medieval Scholastics, the Renaissance Neoplatonists and the Enlightenment philosophers. It was a belief in an enlightened classical system that preceded academia’s modern age that resulted in the specialization and fragmentation of the arts and sciences. It was a belief that all human knowledge could be encompassed in a single aesthetically beautiful system.

  Matthew Arnold, the Oxford Professor of Poetry during the Wonderland years, was the first to deliver his lectures in English instead of Latin and was a major force on the side of liberal reform, but he also gave full expression to the almost sacred trust embodied in the conservative classical tradition of Oxford:

  Beautiful city!—so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!…Steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, 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?—nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

  This was certainly the Oxford that the Reverend Charles Dodgson and his literary persona Lewis Carroll stubbornly embraced. Dodgson/Carroll wished to preserve the elite tradition of Oxford at all costs. But in the rapidly changing industrial world of the vastly expanding British Empire and the unprecedented expansion of science and all fields of human knowledge, this was clearly impossible.

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland could only have been written by a multi-disciplined mind schooled in this ancient tradition, and one who believed education was the most important driving force in the creation of a great civilization. And, wrong-headed as history has proved Carroll to be, in his Wonderland we have a literary monument that allows us to see what has been lost and what has been gained.

  There were many fine things to admire in a classical education, and there was great beauty to be found even in its obsolescence. Like some kind of bejewelled mechanical singing nightingale in an age of the invention of the gramophone, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a demonstration of the mastery of brilliant precision and intricate beauty without any real category or obvious purpose—something aesthetic theorists might argue was the true test of a civilization’s highest art forms.

  Christ Church Meadow: An idyllic spot for picking flowers, drifting into a dream and falling down an infinitely deep rabbit-hole.

  “Three eager faces, hungry for news of fairy-land, and who would not be said ‘nay’ to: from whose lips ‘Tell us a story, please,’ had all the stern immutablity of Fate!” Charles Dodgson describing Alice Liddell and her sisters.

  Part One: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  Prelude Poem: All in the Golden Afternoon

  Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour,

  Beneath such dreamy weather,

  To beg a tale of breath too weak

  To stir the tiniest feather!

  Yet what can one poor voice avail

  Against three tongues together?

/>   Dream child and aristocrat: Alice Liddell, photographed by Dodgson.

  THREE FATAL SISTERS From the beginning, it was apparent that just beneath the fairy-tale surface of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, there was a strong element of autobiography and social satire. It was obvious that many of the characters and places clearly had real-life counterparts in mid-Victorian Oxford. Some Lewis Carroll was happy to identify; others he was at pains to keep secret.

  As Carroll always acknowledged, the real Alice was Alice Liddell (1852–1934), daughter of Lorina Hanna Liddell (née Reeve) and Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church college, Oxford. Oxford in that era was at the very core of Victorian Britain’s academic, ecclesiastic and political life, and most of the characters in Wonderland are satirical caricatures of some of the most significant figures of Victorian society. This, Alice Liddell would have known. Indeed, as the daughter of the most influential educator of the age, she knew nearly all of these luminaries personally.

  In his 1887 article “ ‘Alice’ on the Stage,” Carroll describes his “dream-Alice” as being loving and gentle and “courteous—courteous to all, high and low, grand or grotesque, King or Caterpillar, even though she were herself a King’s daughter.”