Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

   

John Tenniel's illustration for "A Mad Tea-Party", 1865
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John Tenniel's illustration for "A Mad Tea-Party", 1865

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a work of children's literature by the British mathematician and author Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. The tale is fraught with satirical allusions to Dodgson's friends and to the lessons which British schoolchildren were expected to memorize. The Wonderland described in the tale plays with logic in ways that has made the story of lasting popularity with children, mathematicians, and users of psychedelic drugs.

In 1998 a first-edition copy of the book sold at auction for $1.5 million USD, becoming the most expensive children's book ever sold. Only twenty-two copies of the 1865 first edition are known to have survived; 17 are owned by libraries, the other 5 being in private hands.

The book has a sequel, called Through the Looking-Glass, and movie adaptations often combine elements from both books.

The American writer Martin Gardner has produced a work entitled The Annotated Alice, incorporating the text of both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. It has extensive annotations explaining them, including the Victorian poems that Dodgson parodies in the two books.

Like the Bible and the works of Shakespeare Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has been translated into many languages, including Esperanto.

History

The book was published on July 4, 1865, exactly three years after Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed in a boat up the River Thames with three little girls:

  • Lorina Charlotte Liddell (aged 13) (Primus in the opening verse)
  • Alice Pleasance Liddell (aged 10) (Seconda in the opening verse)
  • Edith Mary Liddell (aged 8)

The journey had started at Folly Bridge near Oxford, England and ended five miles away in a village of Godstow. During the journey the Reverend Dodgson made up and told the girls a story, which he later developed into Alice's Adventures Underground which then became Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Contents

Illustration by Arthur Rackham
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Illustration by Arthur Rackham
  • Chapter 1 -- Down the Rabbit-Hole
  • Chapter 2 -- The Pool of Tears
  • Chapter 3 -- A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale
  • Chapter 4 -- The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill
  • Chapter 5 -- Advice from a Caterpillar
  • Chapter 6 -- Pig and Pepper
  • Chapter 7 -- A Mad Tea-Party
  • Chapter 8 -- The Queen's Croquet-Ground
  • Chapter 9 -- The Mock Turtle's story
  • Chapter 10 -- The Lobster-Quadrille
  • Chapter 11 -- Who Stole the Tarts?
  • Chapter 12 -- Alice's Evidence

The plot

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

A girl named Alice is bored while on a picnic with her sister. She finds interest in a white rabbit, dressed in a topcoat and muttering "I'm late!", which she follows down a rabbit's hole. She drops down into dream underworld of paradox, the absurd and the improbable. As she attempts to follow the rabbit, she has several misadventures. She grows to gigantic size and to half her original height; she meets a group of small animals stranded in a sea of her own tears; gets trapped in the rabbit's house; meets a baby which changes into a pig, and a cat which disappears; goes to a never-ending tea party; plays croquet with an anthropomorphised deck of cards; goes to the shore and meets some more odd creatures; and attends a courtroom trial of the Knave of Hearts, who has been accused of stealing some tarts. Eventually Alice wakes up underneath a tree back with her sister.

Characters in order of appearance

Caterpillar using a hookah; an illustration by John Tenniel
Caterpillar using a hookah; an illustration by John Tenniel

Poems and songs

  • "How doth the little crocodile..." (a parody of the Victorian-era child's rhyme, "How doth the little busy bee")
  • "You are old, Father William..."
  • The Duchess' lullaby: "Speak roughly to your little boy..."
  • "Twinkle, twinkle little bat..." -a parody of Twinkle twinkle little star.
  • The Lobster Quadrille
  • "’Tis the voice of the lobster, I heard him declare..." -a parody of Tis the voice of the Sluggard.
  • Turtle Soup
  • "The Queen of Hearts..." -an actual nursery rhyme.
  • The White Rabbit's evidence
  • The Mouse's Tale (http://bootless.net/mouse.html)

Thematic elements

  • Puns
  • Games and riddles
  • Nonsense
  • Sexual undertones
  • Psychedelic undertones


Cinematic adaptations

Alice in Alice in Wonderland

Inspired

In addition to Carroll's own sequel (see the link above), Alice has inspired or influenced many other works of art.

The Goon Show followed similarly skewed ideas of logic. The Beatles had similarly surreal ideas in such songs as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "I am the Walrus" (the Walrus being the one in Through the Looking Glass).

Jefferson Airplane's 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow captures the fantasy's psychedelic undertones, in particular with the song "White Rabbit" (see 1967 in music). Appropriately, journalist Hunter S. Thompson incorporated "White Rabbit" into his classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as part of an LSD trip's scenery. The Blue Man Group also covered "White Rabbit" on their 2003 album The Complex (see 2003 in music), as did metal band Sanctuary on their Refuge Denied album, with Dave Mustaine.

Worth mentioning at this stage is a rash of Alice related material in the music industry during the 1980s. It was around 1982 when it began and was mainly centered around goth and indie music. Siouxsie & the Banshees, for instance named their label Wonderland and cut an album called Through The Looking Glass. The former London-based Batcave Club changed its name to "Alice In Wonderland". The Sisters Of Mercy, who were male and a spin off from Mission, had a hit single called Alice which was about the image of the Lewis Carroll heroine.

As a young man, Vladimir Nabokov translated Alice into his native Russian. His later novels include many Carroll allusions, such as the spoof book titles which run through his Ada, or Ardor. Nabokov told his student and annotator Alfred Appel that the infamous Lolita contained no conscious allusions to Carroll (despite the novel's photography theme and Carroll's interest in the art form).

Alice Liddell was a character in the Riverworld series of science fiction books by Philip José Farmer.

Alice has recently been seen in two comic book series by Alan Moore: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (in passing), and Lost Girls (as a grown up). She appears in American McGee's Alice, a dark and bloody computer game, as well as in the RPG Kingdom Hearts. Furthermore, Tom Waits recorded an Alice album.

Allusions to Alice's adventures are also rife in the film The Matrix.

The film Resident Evil also has several references to the stories, including the main character who is revealed to be named Alice in the credits.

The computer game Thief: The Dark Project has an early level that invovles breaking into a huge mansion. The inside is somewhat normal at the front end, but as one gets deeper and deeper into it, it becomes "curiouser and curiouser"—resembling Alice more and more. The game Thief: Gold expanded this idea with an section added to the mansion, affectionaly known to fans as "Little Big World", that involves first going through very small village and then ending up in a gigantic kitchen. Thief was developed by Looking Glass Studios.

The music video for the Gwen Stefani song "What you Waiting For?" is inspired by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and features the Queen of Heart's maze, and the mad tea party.

Culture and Collecting

Alice continues to be a cultural phenomenon today, spawning hundreds of collectors' items, websites, and works of art.

There is a vast Alice-collecting cottage industry, which has recently increased due to the Internet. There are often more than 2500 items up for auction via eBay at any given time, from rare books to more recent commissioned art. Just about every kind of Alice merchandise imaginable is available, from clocks to earrings to pillow cases. They are not always easy to locate, but can often be found in so-called "Alice shops". In England, such shops include the Rabbit Hole in Llandudno and Alice's Shop in Oxford. Smaller ones can be found in Halton Cheshire and in Bournemouth where there is an Alice Theme Park. In the United States they include the White Rabbit in California. In fact, there is a lot of Alice merchandise in America that is not available anywhere else. One of these is an book called Sherlock Holmes and the Alice In Wonderland Murders.

On the Internet itself there are over 100 Alice-related sites which range from the basic pictures-and-text (i.e. the On Line readers), to the more academic. Those are nearer to discussion groups which analyse every last word of Lewis Carroll's. There are also biographical websites which are give information on the real-life Alice Liddell, as well as the author Lewis Caroll.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.


Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland



da:Alice i eventyrland de:Alice im Wunderland fr:Alice au pays des merveilles nl:Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ja:不思議の国のアリス

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