How has a little girl, in a frock with puffed sleeves and an apron, golden hair falling to the shoulders, unfazed by the absurd things happening to her, held our imagination for more than 150 years? Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or more popularly Alice in Wonderland has never been out of print since it was first published on November 26, 1865.
One afternoon, on July 4, 1862, as a socially maladjusted mathematician and Oxford don, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, tried to entertain the three young daughters of his colleague Henry Liddell, the dean of Christ Church, a story was born, perhaps to live forever. With 10-year-old Alice Liddell as muse, Dodgson, who wrote fiction as Lewis Carroll, gave her a Christmas present in 1864, a story about her: Alice’s Adventures Under Ground .
Fun and pun
It was funny, full of puns and riddles, and nonsense rhymes parodying the verses of the time like ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, little bat’, took a leap of the mind, made the impossible possible, and Dodgson’s friends urged him to go for a wider release.
The first edition, which appeared a year later with a new name, had drawings by John Tenniel, which are as essential to understanding Alice’s world as the words themselves. We meet Alice for the first time on the banks of a river, bored, peeping into her sister’s book, and wondering aloud: “What is the use of a book without pictures or conversation?” The hot day was making her feel ‘silly and stupid’, and when she sees a White Rabbit darting down a rabbit hole, she goes right after him. We follow her to her wonderful and strange world of the imagination, where many ‘out-of-the-way things’ happen; not least the fact that she changes shape every few pages, growing bigger or smaller to help her take part in the adventures. Yet, she is a determined little girl, maybe a little hot-tempered, but wise, and when she finds a bottle saying ‘Drink me’ she first checks whether it’s marked ‘Poison’ “because if you drink much from a bottle marked poison, it is almost certain to disagree with you.”
Curious characters
During the course of her day, which gets ‘curiouser and curiouser’, she meets an unforgettable cast of characters: the Mad Hatter, the King and Queen of Hearts, the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar, the Mock Turtle. When the whimsical Queen of Hearts screams at Alice, “Off with her head,” she retorts, “Nonsense!”
To the queen’s “Sentence first—verdict afterwards,” at the trial of the knave who is accused of stealing some tarts, Alice counters, “Stuff and nonsense!”
There are many delightful exchanges, like Alice’s conversation with the Mock Turtle about school. “How many hours a day did you do lessons?” Alice asks. “Ten hours the first day,” says Mock Turtle; “nine the next, and so on.” To which Alice exclaims, “What a curious plan!”
The legendary Gryphon immediately explains: “That’s the reason they are called lessons, because they lessen from day to day.”
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.
