Alice Liddell

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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