IT IS the most notable boat ride in the history of literature. On July 4, 1862, Charles L. Dodgson, a mathematics scholar at Oxford, went rowing on the Thames in the company of the Rev. Robinson Duckworth, a fellow Oxonian, and the three lovely Liddell sisters — 13-year-old Lorina, 10-year-old Alice, and 8-year-old Edith. The trip began at Folly Bridge near Oxford and went as far as the village of Godstow, about 3 miles upstream. There they stopped for tea, and as they lay in the shade, Dodgson — we know him better by his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll — began to spin the tale of Alice's adventures underground.
 Alice and the White Rabbit, as drawn by John Tenniel for the first edition of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." |
"I distinctly remember . . . how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore," Carroll would later write, "I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards."
We know what Alice found at the bottom of that rabbit hole — the frantic white rabbit in the waistcoat and kid gloves, the bottle labeled "Drink Me," the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the ugly Duchess and the grinning Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter's tea party and the decapitating Queen of Hearts. But on that July 4th it was all brand-new, and Alice Liddell couldn't get enough of it. "Oh, Mr. Dodgson," she pleaded that night, when he took her and her sisters back home, "I wish you would write out Alice's adventures for me."
A few months later, he began to do so and by February 1863 had completed a handwritten draft of about 18,000 words. He showed it to his friend, the poet and novelist George MacDonald, who in turn shared it with his family. The reviews were enthusiastic: Six-year-old Greville MacDonald told his mother he "wished there were 60,000 volumes of it." Encouraged, Carroll kept reworking and expanding the manuscript. Early in 1864 he invited John Tenniel, the leading cartoonist for Punch, to illustrate it. In June 1865, the Clarendon Press printed the first 2,000 copies of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." It has never gone out of print.
Of course it has never been just a children's book, either. Queen Victoria, the story goes, was delighted with Carroll's first "Alice" masterpiece, and sent word that she would be grateful to get a copy of his next book as soon as it was published. What she received was "Condensation of Determinants," a dense mathematical tome.
The sequel Victoria was hoping for appeared in 1871. "Through the Looking-Glass" was as wonderful as "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and proved equally as beloved. In its first 12 months, it sold 25,000 copies; it, too, will be in print forever.
Of the two, "Through the Looking-Glass" is the more remarkable. At one level it is a fantasy chess game, filled with make-believe characters and comical dialogue yet closely following the rules of chess. At another level it is an extended improvisation on the theme of mirror images and logical inversion. Examples abound: Alice finds that to approach the Red Queen she must walk away from her; to serve the Looking-Glass cake, she hands it around first, then slices it; the White King has two messengers, "one to come, and one to go"; the White Queen lives backward in time — first she puts on a bandage, then she screams, then she pricks her finger.
At still another level, "Through the Looking-Glass" is an allusive splash through some of deepest waters of metaphysics. When the Tweedle brothers tell Alice that she is nothing but an character in the Red King's dream — "If that there King was to wake," Tweedledum says, "you'd go out — bang! — just like a candle!" — they are lining up with Bishop Berkeley, the English philosopher who held that matter does not exist unless it is observed. Humpty Dumpty's arrogant claim that "when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less" echoes a semantic argument dating back to the Middle Ages, the view that universal terms have no objective meaning outside the mind.
And on on top of it all, "Through the Looking-Glass" contains the greatest nonsense poem in the English language. " 'Twas brillig," begins "Jabberwocky,"
and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in he wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Don't know what it means? Alice didn't either. "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas," she mused, "only I don't exactly know what they are."
The temptation to identify secret meanings in Carroll's words can be overpowering. In the introduction o his splendid annotated edition of the "Alice" books, Martin Gardner bewails the "amateur head-shrinkers" who find all kinds of Freudian significance in he rich symbolism of Alice's dreams.
"Consider, for example, the scene in which Alice seizes the end of the White King's pencil and begins scribbling for him. In five minutes one can invent six different interpretations. Whether Carroll's unconscious had any of them in mind, however, is an altogether dubious matter. . . . The hypothesis must not be ruled out that it is only by accident that a pencil in this scene is shaped the way it is."
Thirteen decades after he first told them to Alice Liddell and her sisters, Carroll's stories remain as enchanting and enigmatic as ever. On that long-ago fourth of July, when the shy Oxford don first send his young heroine into the rabbit hole, who could have imagined that she would still be jumping down it on the even of the 21st century?
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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