Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded Page 3

  Alice Liddell may not have been “a King’s daughter,” but her family was certainly aristocracy. The Liddells were royal favourites, guests at Buckingham Palace and hosts of Queen Victoria and the Prince and Princess of Wales. Alice’s father was the nephew of the baron of Ravensworth and first cousin of the earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. And she certainly lived like a princess. Her home in Christ Church’s Deanery had served as King Charles’s palace during the English Civil War.

  “The Dean, Chapter and Students of the Cathedral of Christ Church in Oxford of the Foundation of King Henry the Eighth,” as it was formally entitled, holds a special place in the royal history of Britain and is the only college that is also a cathedral—and under the authority of the dean. Christ Church was one of the grandest and wealthiest colleges in Britain and certainly the most influential, producing more British prime ministers than all forty-five other Oxford colleges combined. Henry Liddell had been approved as dean by Queen Victoria and the prime minister, Lord Palmerston. His qualifications were sound: not only was he the foremost classical Greek scholar of his day and co-author of the still-authoritative A Greek-English Lexicon, for a decade Liddell had been the highly praised headmaster of Britain’s most prestigious school at Westminster. He had been Prince Albert’s chaplain and was later to become mentor to his and Victoria’s sons, Prince Edward (the future King Edward VII) and Prince Leopold, while each was an Oxford undergraduate.

  All in the golden afternoon

  Full leisurely we glide;

  For both our oars, with little skill,

  By little hands are plied,

  While little hands make vain pretence

  Our wanderings to guide.

  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?

  The only college that is also a cathedral: J.M.W. Turner’s circa 1795 painting of Christ Church, with the Deanery, Alice’s childhood home, in the foreground.

  As dean, Liddell was the great architect of educational reform, working to overturn medieval statutes and rules that had been unchanged at Oxford for four hundred years. Medieval classics-based universities set up to educate a small upper-class elite could not keep up with the vast avalanche of new scientific and technological knowledge required for the running of Britain’s empire; nor could it keep up with the demands of a modern industrial-age economy. No one did more to usher in the modern secular university system in which, in theory at least, academic achievement counted more than social standing.

  The Isis at Folly Bridge: Where, as the prelude poem descibes, two young college dons in straw hats and white boating suits rowed upriver with three pretty Liddell girls.

  In the midst of this wave of liberal reform was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a junior mathematics instructor. Not yet the famous author Lewis Carroll, Dodgson’s highest post at the time of Liddell’s appointment was as the Christ Church sub-librarian; Alice’s father was his academic superior. His ecclesiastic superior was Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford. While Dean Liddell was a liberal and a prime mover in reforming the old system of privilege and favour, Bishop Wilberforce was a ferocious opponent of reform—and therefore of the dean.

  Charles Dodgson, too, was a staunch conservative who persistently conspired against virtually every one of the liberal progressive acts initiated by Dean Liddell. As Lewis Carroll—and through Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—he has his heroine unwittingly engaged in a satire about most of the major social and political issues of his time: Christian socialism, theosophy, spiritualism, Darwinian evolution and liberal educational reform.

  Wonderland begins “all in the golden afternoon” with a prelude poem about a real-life boating excursion that took place on July 4, 1862, on the Isis, a branch of the river Thames, near Oxford. Two young college dons in straw hats and white boating suits rowed the three pretty little daughters of the dean of Christ Church upriver on a three-mile expedition from Folly Bridge to Godstow village. They took tea on the embankment, then returned downriver to Oxford just after eight in the evening. The children were delivered home to the Deanery and were in bed before nine o’clock.

  The poem chronicles this boating expedition. The three Liddell sisters, with their “little arms” and “little hands” (Liddell rhymes with “fiddle” and so sounds like “little”), are drifting lazily along in a boat when they “beg a tale” from an unnamed storyteller and are rowed along by an unnamed oarsman.

  Imperious Prima flashes forth

  Her edict “to begin it”:

  In gentler tone Secunda hopes

  “There will be nonsense in it!”

  While Tertia interrupts the tale

  Not more than once a minute.

  Anon, to sudden silence won,

  In fancy they pursue

  The dream-child moving through a land

  Of wonders wild and new,

  In friendly chat with bird or beast—

  And half believe it true.

  The young college dons were the Reverend Charles Dodgson and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth. During the expedition, the girls—Lorina, Alice and Edith—begged the Reverend Dodgson to tell them a story. And so began the tale of a girl named Alice who fell down a rabbit-hole. When the party returned later that evening, Alice asked Dodgson to write down the tale so she might share it with others. “Thus grew the tale of Wonderland,” Lewis Carroll was later to write. However, this story of the writing of the fairy tale is itself something of a fable, as it seems it was nearly three years before, as Carroll wrote, all “its quaint events were hammered out.” For in this time it was written, rewritten, revised, restructured and illustrated before it was finally published in 1865.

  Beyond providing the fairy tale’s source of inspiration, Lewis Carroll is also using this poem to provide a classical literary context. The many mythological allusions imply something deeper and more archetypal is at work behind these real-life events.

  In the poem, the sisters are addressed as the “cruel Three” and ends with a description of pilgrims crowned with a “wreath of flowers.” These sisters are the three Fates of antiquity, often described as clad in white with wreaths on their heads. Writing two decades later, in his article “ ‘Alice’ on the Stage,” Lewis Carroll makes sure no one misses his point about the power the Liddell sisters had over his creative powers: “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 immutability of Fate!”

  Carroll frequently personified young girls in this way in his writing. There are many instances in his fiction, poetry and letters. To his cousin Lucy Wilcox, for example, he wrote: “I now regard you as a form of Destiny (let us say, as one of the Fates, or one of the Furies) as you are simply bringing on me a flood of strange young ladies.”

  Three Fates (and a brother): Alice, Lorina, Harry and Edith.

  And ever, as the story drained

  The wells of fancy dry,

  And faintly strove that weary one

  To put the subject by,

  “The rest next time—” “It is next time!”

  The happy voices cry.

  Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:

  Thus slowly, one by one,

  Its quaint events were hammered out—

  And now the tale is done,

  And home we steer, a merry crew,

  Beneath the setting sun.

  The music of time: The Liddell sisters and “Memory’s mystic band,” the three Fates.

  In the prelude poem, he attributes the personalities and powers of each of the Fates to a Liddell sister. He gives each of his “cruel Three” a name. “Imperious” Prima was the oldest sister, the thirteen-year-old Lorina; “gentler” Secunda was Alice, then aged ten; and Tertia was the eight-year-old
Edith. The poem states that Prima orders the story “to begin,” Secunda determines its contents, and the petulant Tertia “interrupts” as she pleases.

  The girls thus mirror the acts of each of the Fates in classical literature. As Robert Graves states in The Greek Myths: “there are three conjoined Fates, robed in white.… Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Of these, Atropos is the smallest in stature, but the most terrible.” He also explains their roles: “the thread of life, spun on Clotho’s spindle, and measured by the rod of Lachesis, is … snipped by Atropos’ shears.” The Fates were portrayed sometimes as three young maidens (as Carroll suggests), other times as maiden, woman and crone. They oversee what is, what was and what will be—the birth, life and death of mortals, nations and gods.

  Alice! A childish story take,

  And, with a gentle hand

  Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined

  In Memory’s mystic band,

  Like pilgrim’s wither’d wreath of flowers

  Pluck’d in a far-off land.

  As Carroll suggests in this poem, these three sisters are also his inspirational muses (you can see this in his photography as well as in his writing) at whose command his dry “wells of fancy” are constantly replenished. And also when Alice falls down her rabbit-hole, we are told she “found herself falling down a very deep well.”

  In the Greek underworld, there were two wells. One was known as Lethe, or the Well of Forgetting; the second was Mnemosyne, or the Well of Memory. The goddess Mnemosyne was the mother of the Muses, and linked to the three little (Liddell) sisters as Carroll’s muses and the source of his inspiration. In the poem, with his usual verbal sleight of hand, Carroll specifically and collectively identifies the sisters with the punning phrase “Memory’s mystic band.”

  VICTORIAN CLASSICAL TRADITION Classical Greek and Roman literature had enormous significance in the cultural and intellectual life of Victorian England. And nowhere was this truer than at Oxford. In 1855, when Charles Dodgson was appointed lecturer at Christ Church, all university business and financial transactions were still conducted in Latin. Every student learned Latin and Greek and the architecture of virtually every college building was based on classical models, as were cultural institutions and civic organizations far beyond the university.

  At Oxford, scores of student societies carried the names of classical figures, and it was common for students to assign the names of Greek gods and heroes to their tutors and professors—both as epithets of praise and to mock. These names frequently appeared in anonymous satires and squibs filled with classical allusions that attacked figures of authority at the university. Dodgson himself was one of the most notorious authors of these rather scurrilous publications. So, in tandem with his satiric assignment of real-life Oxford identities to each of his Wonderland characters, it was natural for him to provide many of them with classical Greek identities as well.

  The Morae: The Fates conjoined, overseeing birth, life and death for each mortal, nation and god.

  Chapter 1: Down the Rabbit-Hole

  It flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it.

  Proserpine (Persephone), 1874, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

  THE WHITE RABBIT Lewis Carroll’s fairy tale about a young girl’s descent underground is literally the oldest story in the world. Originally entitled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, Carroll’s fairy tale is based on the story of the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna’s descent into the underworld realm of the dead, the oldest recorded myth in world literature and one that is retold in the Babylonian myth of Ishtar and the Egyptian myth of Isis.

  The story is best known as that of Persephone, the Greek goddess of spring whose descent into the underworld was one of the most popular mythological motifs in art and literature throughout Carroll’s lifetime, indeed the entire Victorian age.

  The myth of Persephone begins in an idyllic meadow with her older sister, the earth goddess Demeter, who—in the scandalous way of gods and goddesses—is also her mother. Persephone is idly daydreaming and picking flowers when she falls down an infinitely deep fissure into a subterranean world. She experiences many adventures and trials, but at last escapes and returns to her sister Demeter’s arms.

  The frame story of Alice’s Adventures—in both the Under Ground and Wonderland versions—mirrors Persephone’s journey. In Alice’s case, she is sitting in an idyllic meadow with her (rather motherly) older sister, Lorina, and—while idly daydreaming and considering the picking of flowers—drifts into a dream wherein she falls down an infinitely deep hole into a subterranean world. Like Persephone, she experiences many adventures and trials, but finally escapes from the underground world and returns to the arms of her sister Lorina.

  Mysteries of the Goddess: Alice as “Queen of the May.”

  But what of the White Rabbit? As everyone knows, the fairy tale properly begins with a little girl named Alice chasing a White Rabbit down a rabbit-hole into a strange and mysterious Wonderland deep beneath the earth. Why would Lewis Carroll choose a white rabbit as Alice’s guide into this underground world?

  DOWN THE RABBIT-HOLE.

  Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversation?”

  So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.

  In classical times, pilgrims initiated into the Mysteries of the Goddess, dressed in white and wearing wreaths of flowers, entered her temple sanctuary at Eleusis where they re-enacted the descent and eventual celebrated return. Carroll alludes to this ancient pilgrimage in the prelude poem’s final line: “Like pilgrim’s wither’d wreath of flowers / Pluck’d in a far-off land.” Furthermore, and not coincidentally, he photographed Alice Liddell as “Queen of the May,” dressed in white and crowned with a garland of flowers like an initiate into the Mysteries.

  In this context, the White Rabbit is a clear example of what is known in most of the world’s mythologies as a psychopomp, or guide of souls. These are creatures, spirits or deities who escort newly deceased souls (and sometimes the souls of dreamers) to the underworld, where they are to be judged by its rulers. In a few cases, such as that of Persephone, these souls are allowed to return to the world of the living. At various times and in different cultures, psychopomps have been associated with a variety of animals.

  To some degree Carroll must have been drawing on the Celtic tradition of the Phooka, a trickster animal spirit and transformer who often takes the shape of a rabbit. The Irish Phooka is a guide to the fairy realm. (In its Welsh form, it is known as a Puca, from which Shakespeare derived his fairy spirit Puck.) And we know from his diaries that upon viewing Edwin Landseer’s painting Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Carroll observed “there are some wonderful points in it … the white rabbit especially.” And remarkably, next to the white rabbit is the miniature figure of Puck.

  However, the most likely reason for Carroll’s choice of the rabbit is linked to his inspiration for Alice’s adventure: the myth of Persephone, the goddess of spring, and even more obviously, her British manifestation, the goddess Eostre. Both goddesses were commonly portrayed in the company of a rabbit, the symbol of spring and fecundity. Although we seldom think of the ancient symbolism of this emblematic creature, it is clearly present today. After all, our Easter rabbit is a direct descendant of Eostre’s rabbit.

  Eostre, the Saxon goddess of Spring, accompanied as usual by a rabbit.

  There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit
say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but, when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

  In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.

  The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.

  Still, the Wonderland White Rabbit with his pocket watch and waistcoat is an original creation, and like all the creatures in Wonderland has a historical above-ground human counterpart. The real-life Oxford White Rabbit was Alice Liddell’s family physician, DR. HENRY WENTWORTH ACLAND (1815–1900). Dr. Acland was Oxford’s Regius Professor of Medicine who on at least one occasion brought Alice “back to life.” Like the White Rabbit who was in service to the Duchess and the King and Queen of Wonderland, Dr. Acland had served as physician to royalty: to Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the Prince of Wales (on his tour of Canada). Like the White Rabbit, the royal doctor was often seen checking his pocket watch before rushing off to his next appointment.

  Dr. Acland was also a noted anatomist and a social reformer who, in the wake of numerous epidemics in Oxford, developed an obsession with public sanitation and underground sewage systems. Consequently—and again like the White Rabbit—Dr. Acland was frequently seen climbing down into holes in the ground on his regular inspection of drainage tunnels.