Even though we now consider Alice as perhaps the monumental book of children’s literature, it has been steeped in controversy. Yes, much of that controversy has to do with it’s enigmatic author, Lewis Carroll (ne the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson).
The conspiracy theories swirl around Carroll’s apparent fondness of children, particularly young girls. Those theories are stoked by some of Carroll’s photography of children, which by today’s standards are rather risque and creepy (the link contains tamer examples). The grandest conspiracy theory is that sometime in the mid-1850s, Carroll proposed marriage to young Alice Liddell, the very real inspiration for Alice. She was only a very young adolescent at the time. Counter theories argue that Carroll did not propose to Alice, but to one of her older teenage sisters, or perhaps made an advance to their mother. As a poor Oxford mathematics professor who supplemented his income by tutoring the Liddell children and others, the scandal, in that case, would have been more that Carroll wasn’t a socially acceptable match for the family.
- All of this is fueled by the missing pages from Carroll’s diary — pages that detail the weeks and months surrounding his supposed “break” with the Liddell family.
- The book was officially challenged in 1931 in China because of the anthropomorphic personifications of animals. In other words, animals were made to act and behave like humans.
- The book has faced criticism for its use of literary non-sense.
- You can find an electronic version of the text here.
I can’t get the Youtube video to embed in the post, but you can find the video for the famous scene from Disney’s version of “Advice from a Caterpillar” here. You’ll find it interesting to examine how Disney has shaped the scene versus Carroll’s original version (Chapter 5).
Despite all the goofiness, extreme levels of wordplay, and logic puzzles, the book is also very dark in some passages, and my students were a little shocked by that.
I’ll ask you guys the same question I asked them: How does this “children’s book” deal with “adult” themes, like death, tyranny, and what it means to be human? And what similarities and differences do we see between Carroll’s work and Rowling’s? As far as I can find, Rowling has never credited Carroll as a direct source/inspiration, but she certainly seems to owe something to his playfulness.
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Well, I did some brief research on the subject of Carroll’s controversies, especially regarding young girls. A case could be made either way on this controversy. Although most of the evidence suggests that his problems with the Liddell family were not related to Alice but to her older sister or to a governess.
You can find some of the less tame pictures on the Internet, & while they are certainly not something you’d see done nowadays, there doesn’t appear to be anything graphic or prurient about them. Some of Carroll’s defenders point out that child nudes were not all that uncommon in the Victorian Era.
This is the trouble with some of these ‘controversies.’ The farther back in time they are & the more removed from the event the ‘controversy’ is postulated makes it hard to make any good determinations on it. There’s speculation that some of Carroll’s relatives in an attempt to preserve his reputation regarding scandals with adult women destroyed much of the evidence inadvertently giving the impression that he only had problems with young girls!
Anyway, the controversy that wasn’t mentioned in Dave’s article & that might be just as fascinating is that Carroll was on the fast track for the priesthood in the C of E & backed out just before he would’ve taken orders. This one isn’t probably as interesting because it doesn’t involve young girls.
revgeorge, Carroll was the prodigy son of a strict Anglican priest who also graduated from Christ Church Oxford. Carroll grew up in a rather rigid household.
The biographical introduction in the text I chose for my students suggests that Carroll could have gone into the ministry if he preferred, but that his interests in philology and mathematics superceded his devotion to the Church.
Dave, in further research, I can’t see anything that suggests that Carroll’s strict upbringing influenced him away from Church service. By all accounts his prodigious intellect was not constrained in his upbringing as unfortunately happens sometimes in conservative households. Reading the wikipedia article, some reasons given for him not entering the priesthood had to do with his stuttering & thus his uncomfortableness with reading the lessons & preaching. And also that Bishop of Oxford was inclined against clergymen attending the theater. Plus, he had some interest in alternative, more mystical versions of Christianity, & also some personal spiritual doubts.
revgeorge, the Wikipedia article also talks about Carroll’s often expressed belief that he was a “vile and worthless” sinner, unworthy of the priesthood. That belief could have its basis in his possible predilection for pre-pubescent girls, some other unnamed sin, or be totally unfounded and unreasonable. But in any case, it’s not Carroll’s sexual preferences I’d like to talk about, but any points of resemblance between Alice and the Wonderland, and Harry and the Potterverse.
It’s been many years since I’ve read AAiW. What I recollect is an episodic book, wherein the heroine moves through a series of encounters with characters who are entirely amoral, arbitrary and while interesting, selfish and unlikable to an extreme degree, while herself going through some changes which seem quite predictable. There is, in fact, no rhyme nor reason to the narrative. It’s very much like a dream. Literary nonsense, which is the genre to which it belongs, seems like an appropriate description.
So my instinctive reaction to the question of similarities with a narrative which has a very strong story line and characters whose motives are strongly determined and a very robust set of rules governing its magical or fantastical workings would be – there aren’t any.
And for those of you who would argue that the rules which govern magic in the Potterverse seem very flexible, I would point out that that’s due to many reasons, but the author’s intent does not seem to be one of them. Whereas Carroll seems to have had no intent to create an internally consistent and coherent work of fantasy. Quite the opposite, the only law in Wonderland is that there is no law.
However, I believe that Carroll did make many references to contemporaneous characters and practices, and this would parallel JKR’s tendency to target people and practices in our world.
I would recommend a book that will not be accessible to most except through interlibrary loan. For anyone who teaches Lewis Carroll on a college level, I recommend that you have your library order it. For most people it is too expensive (about $100 dollars from Edwin Mellon Publishers). The title is: “The Literary Porducts of the Lewis Carroll/George MacDobnald Friendship.”
While the episodes in “Alice” seem random, I assure you they are not. As one example of the structure of the story, I will offer some quotations from chapter 4 of the book mentioned above:
“Dodgson probably told himself that his primary aim in publishing Wonderland was to lead children along a logical path to the understanding and practice of Christian moral virtue, employing many of the playful techniques he was subsequently to employ in attempting to teach Formal Logic to children. He intends Alice’s adventures, like those of Spenser’s Sir Guyon, to lead to the wholeness of Temperance.” (p. 111)
“Alice follows a one-year cycle like that experienced by Spenser’s knights. Each season is marked by a Trail which is in effect a spiritual rebirth.”
“The nine-fold differentiation of Virtues and parallel nine-fold diffentiation of Vices associated with Alice’s first three Trials, plus the undifferentiated Justice and Injustice of her Fourth Trial, and her experience of Faith and Hope and their two opposing Vices in Chapter 5, altogether give twelve Virtues and twelve Vices. This may derive from Aristoltle, but he is probably drawing from Spenser, who originally planned to depict twelve Virtues in “the Faerie Queen” and does depcit twelve battalions of different Vices assaulting the House of Alma. Dodgson depicts the twelve vices as having actually gained access to Alice’s ‘House’.
Alice’s First (Wisdom) Trial is related to Water. And the long hall with its many doors where the Trail takes place (see AAIW, ch. 2-3) is a conventional image of the brain and spinal cord. Traditionally this Trial involves a struggle to live humbly without dogma, and thus become receptive to new experiences. The Second (Courage) Trial, where she is confined in the White Rabbit’s room, is related to earth and associated with the loins, and thus in the female with the womb (see AAIW, ch. 4). Traditionally this Trial is related to the concept of being ‘born again’, unfettered by such ties as social pressures and memories. Her third Trial, in the pepper-filled kitchen, is related to Fire and developes what Plato terms Discipline (see AAW, ch. 6). It is associated with the heart and is often represented as the Phoenix experience, buring away illusion and false emotion. In traditional Christian imagery it is the heart itself which burns in this Trial.. By the time she comes to her Fourth Trail, at the courthouse (AAIW, ch. 11-12), she has become capable of attempting harmonization of her whole soul-body. Traditionally this is associated with Air and recognised as the struggle to act rightly, without hesitation, out of one’s own resources. Plato terms this Justice, but his conception of Justice as expressed in “The Republic” is far more authoritarian thatn what Dodgeson seems to have in mind.”
The point of the quotations above are that, if you know what to look for, there is a logical purpose to the story. It relates to Spenser’s Faerie Queen, and Aristoltle and Plato, and concepts of Coleridgean ideas of imagination and cognition that MacDonald had explored a few years earlier in Phantastes and in his fairy tale “Cross Purposes” which also explores the growing self-awareness of a little girl named “Alice.”
Bob Trexler
Curiouser and curiouser! I didn’t know that Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald were friends, but there is a lot of similarity in their literature, now that I think about it.
Too bad the book’s so expensive :-p
WTF HOW SHOULD ALICE IN WONDERLAND BE BANNED