Charles Lutwidge Dodgeson, famously known as Lewis Carroll, is the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871); two renowned pieces of Victorian English children’s literature. The nature of reading the Alice texts has been various and changing since the tale was first told by Carroll, orally, to three young girls on July 4, 1862 (Sundmark 171). It started as an oral text, but has since evolved into various book editions, film adaptations, and even digital editions. Although the media in which the story of Alice is read can be varied, the story remains a classic for children and continues to stand the test of time as being ever-fixed in the literary world.
Throughout the years since it was first told, the Alice stories have been retold many times over. In Alice in the Oral-Literary Continuum, Bjorn Sundmark states: “…the storytelling event itself (in the “here” and “now”) gain an importance through close involvement between narrator and reader,” (Sundmark 131). Sundmark also comments on how oral stories are unique because the exact wording and situation will never be the same when it is retold (Sundmark 171). Sundmark’s main idea is to show that tales are preformed in an “oral-literary continuum, neither entirely literary nor entirely oral,” (Sundmark 199).
Along with the many retellings of Alice stories, the readers’ responses and society’s reaction follows. In the Penguin edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, the introductory notes by Hugh Haughton emphasize the relation of the reader to these texts: “All readers of Alice… find themselves in much the same predicament as the heroine. The stories fill our hearts with ideas, but we don’t know what they are,” (Carroll x). In Mau-Lan Wong’s essay, “Generations of Re-generation” he discusses the Alice books being so difficult to define that scholars cannot agree whether they belong to children’s literature (Wong 135). In the essay “Looking Through the Spyglass” by Christine Roth, she notes that the mid-nineteenth and its turn to the twentieth century was the golden age of children’s literature; describing Carroll as a part of this era (Roth 23). In Carol Mavor’s essay “Alicious Objects”, she describes that the character Alice is like most children, because: “it is easier to believe in Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World than in growing old,” (Mavor 63).
In Jan Susina’s text, The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children’s Literature, he states that the Alice books have much in common with the popular mid-Victorian England fairy tale genre (Susina 26). Susina additionally addresses the issue of Alice being modernized: “While the hypertext allows the reader to become an active participant in the text, this version manages to reverse Carroll’s intentions of creating a children’s text free of lessons,” (Susina 150). This refers to the Que CD-ROM version of Alice in Wonderland, where they link the text to a series of multiple choice questions.
The Alice stories are about a child, specifically of the Victorian period. In Robert Polhemus’ article “Lewis Carroll and the Child in Victorian Fiction”, he suggests that Carroll shows what “child” could mean in Victorian society; that this notion develops and changes in history (Polhemus). Harvey Darton also discusses how children were able to enjoy fiction in the Victorian time period: “Fiction was now by a long way predominant over fact, magic was not rebuked but at large, nonsense was free,” (Darton 297). Andrea Tange details the setting in which children would have been read to in her text Architectural Identities; she discusses that children would be dressed in their best clothes, and that the scene of the family reading aloud would look stiffly posed (Tange 223).
Will Brooker, author of Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture, considers how the Alice texts have translated throughout history, specifically the modern reading of Alice. He focuses on the Disney Alice: “…the 1951 Disney film…have probably done more to shape the popular image of what Alice looks, sounds, and acts like than any other film or illustrated version,” (Brooker 301). Overall, the Alice stories have influenced generations of children and continue to be retold and widely received by both children and adults.
Works Cited
Brooker, Will. Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture. New York: Continuum Books, 2004. Print.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Penguin Classics, 1998. Print.
Darton, Harvey. Children’s Books in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932. Print.
Mavor, Carol. “Alicious Objects.” Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Christopher Hollingsworth. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009. 63-82. Print.
Polhemus, Robert M. “Lewis Carroll and the Child in Victorian Fiction.” The Columbia History of the British Novel. Ed. John Richetti. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 579-607. Rpt. in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Marie C. Toft and Russel Whitaker. Vol. 139. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29 Jan. 2012. <http://go.galegroup.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1420057685&v=2.1&u=utoronto_main&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w>
Roth, Christine. “Looking Through the Spyglass.” Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for theTwenty-First Century. Ed. Christopher Hollingsworth. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009. 23-35. Print.
Sundmark, Björn. Alice in the Oral-Literary Continuum. Sweden: Lund University Press, 1999. Print.
Susina, Jan. The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.
Tange, Andrea Kaston. Architectural Identities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970. Print.
Wong, Mau-Lan. “Generations of Re-Generation.” Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Christopher Hollingsworth. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009. 135-151. Print.