Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Overview

Alice is sitting on a riverbank, bored, when a White Rabbit in a waistcoat hurries past consulting a pocket watch. She follows him down a rabbit hole and lands in Wonderland, where bottles marked DRINK ME make her shrink, cakes marked EAT ME make her grow, a Cheshire Cat fades away until only its grin remains, a Mad Hatter and March Hare keep a tea party going forever, and the Queen of Hearts shouts "Off with her head!" at the slightest provocation. The book ends at a trial over stolen tarts, when Alice, grown to full size, dismisses the court as nothing but a pack of cards — and wakes.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is the great classic of literary nonsense and one of the most widely translated books in the world. It changed children's literature by doing something radical: it entertained without trying to teach.

Origins

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. On 4 July 1862 he and his friend Robinson Duckworth rowed the three daughters of the college's dean, Henry Liddell — Lorina, Alice and Edith — up the river, and Dodgson improvised the story on the way. Alice asked him to write it down. He produced a handwritten, self-illustrated manuscript, Alice's Adventures Under Ground, and gave it to her on 26 November 1864.

Encouraged by friends — including the fantasist George MacDonald, whose children loved the tale — he expanded it to nearly twice its length, adding the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Tea-Party, and engaged the Punch cartoonist John Tenniel as illustrator. Macmillan printed 2,000 copies in 1865, but Tenniel objected to the quality of the printing of his pictures, and Carroll paid for a new printing. The book went on sale in November 1865 in the red binding Carroll requested. Its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, followed in 1871 and sold even more quickly.

The story

Wonderland is a sequence of encounters rather than a quest. Alice changes size again and again, nearly drowns in a pool of her own tears, is lectured by a hookah-smoking Caterpillar, visits the violent kitchen of the Duchess, holds a baby that turns into a pig, attends the tea party, and joins the Queen's croquet game, played with flamingos for mallets and hedgehogs for balls. The Mock Turtle and the Gryphon tell her their sorrows. Throughout, Alice tries to apply the rules of her own world — lessons, manners, arithmetic — and finds that Wonderland's rules are different, consistent only in their own absurd logic. Through the Looking-Glass sends her through a mirror into a land laid out like a chessboard, where she advances from pawn to queen and hears the poem "Jabberwocky", with its "vorpal blade" that goes "snicker-snack".

Reception & impact

The book was a success in Carroll's lifetime and has never been out of print. It has been translated into well over a hundred languages, and its phrases — "curiouser and curiouser", "down the rabbit hole", "mad as a hatter" — are part of everyday English. Disney's animated Alice in Wonderland (1951) fixed the look of the characters for many later viewers, while Tenniel's engravings remain the definitive images.

For fantasy, Alice established the child who falls out of the ordinary world into a realm with its own internal logic — the foundation stone of Portal Fantasy. The line from the rabbit hole runs straight to the wardrobe of C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. J. R. R. Tolkien, however, refused to count Alice as a true fairy-story in "On Fairy-Stories": because Alice wakes at the end, the whole marvel is framed as a dream, and for Tolkien that broke the spell of a Secondary world meant to be believed.

Legacy

Carroll's inventions went straight into the dungeon. The "vorpal blade" of "Jabberwocky" became the vorpal sword, a magic weapon that can sever an opponent's head, introduced to Dungeons & Dragons in the 1975 Greyhawk supplement by Rob Kuntz and Gary Gygax. Gygax later drew on both books for two expert-level adventure modules published by TSR in 1983, Dungeonland and The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, which began as a section of his own Castle Greyhawk campaign and turn Carroll's creatures into hostile monsters with treasure — the Cheshire Cat becomes a magical smilodon eager to eat adventurers.

Video games have returned to Wonderland repeatedly, often in a darker key. American McGee's Alice (2000), developed by Rogue Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts, reimagined Wonderland as a nightmare landscape of a traumatized Alice's mind, and its sequel Alice: Madness Returns followed in 2011. Beyond direct adaptations, the book's influence is structural: a world that runs on its own consistent but alien rules, discovered by a player who must learn them by experiment, is the premise of a great deal of game design.