Tom Gate, the main entrance to Christ Church, Oxford: The college was Dodgson’s home for most of his life.
I. WHAT’S IN A NAME? “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas only I don’t know what they are!” Alice might very well have been describing any reader’s first encounter with her adventures. Something peculiar and quite magical is happening in the word spell that is Wonderland.
No one had written anything quite like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland before, and—save for its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass—no one has written anything like it since. It is a child’s adventure set in a fantastic imaginary world that is explored by a brave little girl armed only with her own common sense and an all-consuming curiosity. It is a book that can and should be read for pleasure by the young, but looking at the author’s unique use of language, it is remarkable that children can comprehend it at all. And yet somehow they do, and we do. Furthermore, it evokes in all its readers a tantalizing sense that there is something else to be revealed just under the surface of this compelling tale.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a British mathematician, logician, clergyman and photographer. A resident Oxford don for almost half a century, he was famously known as Lewis Carroll, the author of two great children’s classics.
Alice’s adventures have become part of popular culture worldwide, and have been translated into virtually every language. If these adventures were just flights of fancy, or simply “nonsense” as Dodgson/Carroll liked to call them, why, you might ask, are they so often quoted by physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, political scientists, historians, psychiatrists, logicians, poets, filmmakers, novelists and computer geeks?
Wonderland has an undeniably strange atmosphere, in part because it is largely inhabited by literary tropes—that is, imaginary beings with no existence except as figures of speech or as characters from children’s rhymes, fairy tales or myths. These are creatures such as the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Mock Turtle, the Gryphon and the King and Queen of Hearts. In Wonderland, real things like hedgehogs and flamingos are treated as objects, while objects like playing cards and numbers behave like real things.
Also, as many critics have pointed out, Wonderland is a complex and sophisticated construct full of literary allusions, parodies and variations of other fairy tales, rhymes and songs: Robert Southey’s Goldilocks and “The Old Man’s Comforts,” Goethe’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Aesop’s “Belling the Cat” and “The Tortoise and the Hare,” Isaac Watts’s “How Doth the Little Bee” and “The Sluggard,” James Sayles’s “Star of Evening,” William Mee’s “Alice Gray,” Mary Howitt’s “The Spider and the Fly” and Charles Lamb’s “The King and Queen of Hearts.”
In all things, Dodgson felt the need for disguises of one form or another. Just as he always insisted on separating the life of the mathematician Charles Dodgson from that of the author Lewis Carroll, so was he careful to visually differentiate the real dark-haired Alice Liddell from his fictional blonde “dream-child moving through the land / Of wonders wild and new.”
Charles Dodgson’s many pseudonyms included Edgar Cuthwellis and Mad Mathesis.
Insight into the mind of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson can be gained by looking at a few of his numerous pseudonyms, such as Mad Mathesis, Balbus, Dares, Edgar Cuthwellis and Edgar U. C. Westhill. The first of these obviously refers to his vocation as a mathematician, the second is a classical allusion to the Roman Balbus the Stutterer (an affliction shared by Dodgson), the third relates to his birthplace of Daresbury and the final two are anagrams of his first two names, Charles Lutwidge.
These are simple enough, but Dodgson also invented many other fairly obscure variations of his name or initials. One typical example was Mr. De Ciel—pronounced “Mr. D. C. L.”—a scrambling of his initials, C. L. D. Elsewhere, he used the signature “Sea l’d,” pronounced “sealed” or “C. L. D.” And even more obscurely, on one occasion Dodgson used as a pen name the initials R. W. G.: the fourth letter in each of his names.
And then of course there is the Reverend Dodgson’s celebrated pen name, Lewis Carroll. As most Carroll fans know, Dodgson began by translating his first two given names, Charles Lutwidge, into Latin, to arrive at Carolus Ludovicus. He then reversed the order of those names and translated them back into English, to arrive at “Lewis Carroll.”
This much we know from Dodgson’s own correspondence. Yet there is another possible level of interpretation, consistent with this author’s obsession with multilingual wordplay. As the classically educated Charles Dodgson knew full well, ludo is Latin for “I play” and carol is both English and Old French for “a joyous song”—so “Lewis Carroll” could have the wonderfully appropriate meaning “I play a joyous song.”
From an early age, Charles Dodgson wrote stories, plays, fairy tales, poems, riddles and games. He saw in literature a wide variety of types of entertainment that children loved; that would benefit them by keeping boredom, despair and temptation at bay; and that would—as he strove to do (in a manner unlike any other children’s author) in his eventual writing of the Alice books—subliminally educate them.
In the mid-Victorian era, beyond the occasional visit to the music hall or theatre, it was up to every middle-class family to find a means to entertain themselves most evenings. Every child was required to acquire at least one party piece: the recitation of a song, poem or dramatic monologue. Dodgson organized hundreds of theatrical evenings, party games and events for, and with, children. The eldest son and third child of a family of seven sisters and four brothers, Dodgson took on this role in the family home in Daresbury, Cheshire. He also wrote plays, poems and songs for the amusement of his siblings. And later, as a bachelor don at Christ Church, he continued to find great pleasure in the organizing of such events with the children of leading members of Oxford society. Consequently, Wonderland is full of games, charades, poems, jokes, songs, conundrums, riddles and puzzles.
Charles Dodgson had systems for just about everything. If an activity was without a clear set of rules or methodology, he seems to have been compelled to supply one. He created, for example, a cross-indexed and synopsized registration system for his personal correspondence. Over a thirty-five-year period, this personal register recorded 98,721 letters written, received, acknowledged and answered. Nor was this all by any means. Over his lifetime, Dodgson gathered and tabulated a multitude of other letter registers, diaries, accounting systems, journals, accounts, numerical tables and minutely detailed records.
Dodgson and his alter ego also created scores of original games. Although he never played at cards until he was in his early twenties, Dodgson, only nine days after playing his first game, decided he was fully qualified to invent new ones. He created variations of whist and cribbage, and several entirely original card games, such as Court Circular and Ways and Means. As well, he invented numerous other games not involving cards: Lanrick, Croquet Castles, Circular Billiards, Doublets, Syzygies, Mischmasch, The Game of Logic and one very like what became Scrabble.
If rules and systems were already in place, Dodgson seemed compelled to improve upon them. He reinvented the rules and scoring systems for backgammon, croquet, the postal system, railway timetables, lawn tennis, draughts, chess, charades, library cataloguing, wine storage, letter-writing etiquette, long division, calendars, money orders, picture mounting, table plans, bet placing, scales for measuring drinks and devices for writing in the dark.
Similarly, when he found himself involved in college elections and university committees, he became obsessed with the mathematics of voting. The result was his publication of a number of complex new systems based on what we now know as proportional representation.
Dodgson’s childhood tutor remembered him as an extremely advanced mathematics student who appeared to suffer physical pain if he could not resolve a problem. This same tutor wrote: “He is capable of acquirements and knowledge far beyond his years, while his reason is so clear and so jealous of error, that he will not rest satisfied without a most exact solution of whatever appears to him obscure.”
Dodgson spent his entire life attempting to categorize and systematize the world around him. So when, as Lewis Carroll, he came to create his own world of Wonderland, there can be little doubt that its laws and structure were systematically organized and completely thought out in every minute detail.
Dodgson “when I’m lecturing”: From a letter of 1868.
II. A PORTMANTEAU MIND The popular view that Wonderland is simply a charming fairy tale full of frivolous nonsense that was made up on a summer’s day is one that Lewis Carroll was happy to foster. Just as a magician would not wish to reveal the years of hard work and machinery behind some grand illusion, the author Lewis Carroll—along with Charles Dodgson the amateur magician—did not want his fairy tale to appear as anything less than an effortless work of pure imagination.
One of the test audiences for Alice’s Adventures Under Ground: Dodgson with the wife and children of George MacDonald, fantasy author and Christian minister.
According to the version of events often given by the author, the fairy tale was “extemporized on the spot” at the urging of three little sisters that he and another Oxford divinity student took on a boating expedition on a branch of the river Thames on July 4, 1862. That evening, at the insistence of one of the children, the eponymous Alice, Dodgson promised to write the tale down, so it might be shared with others.
In one account of the composition of this fairy tale, the author suggests that Wonderland was but one of scores of fairy tales that he orally composed for these and other children. “Yet none of these many tales got written down: they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon.” No doubt Dodgson/Carroll told children many clever fairy tales on scores of afternoon outings, but it is absurd to claim Wonderland was an oral composition entirely made up and recited in a single afternoon.
In fact, aspects of the Wonderland story were composed long before. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Dodgson was telling a version of the down-the-rabbit-hole tale to children as early as 1854. And certainly, we know a version of the Knave of Hearts’s letter-poem was published in 1855, ten years before the publication of Wonderland.
Even if we take the author’s word for it, and accept the date of July 4, 1862, as the inspirational first day of composition, Dodgson’s own diaries refute the legend of Wonderland’s instantaneous composition. Some five weeks after the seminal voyage, Charles Dodgson was struggling with its composition, and impatiently complained: “had to go on with my interminable fairy-tale of ‘Alice’s Adventures.’ ” Another five weeks pass before his diary confesses that he once again “Began writing the fairy-tale for Alice, which I told them July 4, going to Godstow—I hope to finish it by Xmas.”
A full seven months after the boat trip, Dodgson’s diary triumphantly reports: “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground…is now finished (as to the text) though the pictures are not yet nearly done.” However, the text of the story that we know as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was not yet nearly done at all. It was not even half done.
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground was simply the author’s earliest version, just four chapters and 12,715 words in length. This was a meagre output for seven months’ labour, if we are to believe that Dodgson was simply scribbling down a written version of an orally composed story.
Even more significantly, this early version of the story did not contain many of Wonderland’s most complex and memorable characters and incidents. There was no Ugly Duchess, Cook or Cheshire Cat; no Mad Hatter, March Hare or Dormouse. There was no Duchess’s kitchen, Mad Tea-Party, Mock Turtle’s story, Lobster Quadrille or Trial of the Knave of Hearts.
All of these were written in over the following two years. The full text of Wonderland was 26,211 words long. Then, Dodgson commissioned and carefully oversaw the creation of forty-two original illustrations. Its first appearance in the form of a complete published book was on July 4, 1865, exactly three years after the seminal river voyage.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland over the last century and a half has been subjected to analysis by scores of scholars from a multitude of disciplines. The difficulty is that each seemingly rational insight into Wonderland is contradicted by the revelations of previous or subsequent analysis.
Yet the key to the Alice books may be discovered in their curious manipulation of language and layers of meaning. Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass inadvertently provides us with a useful word for describing the machinations of his creator’s mind. He says of words such as slithy, a combination of lithe and slimy, that it is like a portmanteau, with “two meanings packed up into one word.” The portmanteau was a Victorian folding suitcase that could be packed in layers. It is an excellent metaphor for this author: the man with the portmanteau mind.
The mystery of Wonderland is like the plot of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Inspector Hercule Poirot’s investigation is hampered by too many suspects and too many clues. The victim died as a result of a dozen deep knife wounds to the heart and lungs. All twelve passengers on the train had motive, opportunity and access both to the victim and to the murder weapon, but in the end everyone also proved to have an unshakable alibi provided by one or more of the other suspects. It seemed impossible that any one of the twelve could have committed the crime. Yet, as no one else was on the train, it seemed impossible that one of the twelve did not.
Then the inspector has a flash of inspiration: if it was impossible for any one of the twelve suspects to have committed the murder, then the only other possibility is that the murder was committed by all twelve suspects. And so it proved to be.
In Wonderland, a similar conspiracy and multiple systems of equal validity are at work. The man with the portmanteau mind has created a multi-layered world inhabited by characters with multiple identities.
In his preface to Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll explains that there are two initial levels to the story: the fairy tale and the chess game (in which each chess piece is matched up with a character in the tale). Once within his Looking-Glass world, he has his Red Queen inform us that she is aware of five more levels of existence. The Red Queen tells Alice that she lives in a “poor thin way” by living only one day at a time, and how in the Queen’s country, rather, they live “five nights together” where it is “five times as warm, and five times as cold—just as I’m five times as rich as you are, and five times as clever!”
In his introduction to his later fairy novel, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Lewis Carroll explains: “It may interest some of my Readers to know the theory on which this story is constructed.… I have supposed a Human being to be capable of various psychical states, with varying degrees of consciousness.” He provides the reader with a listing of five levels of existence, and “supposing that Fairies really existed; and that they were sometimes visible to us, and we to them,” he then presents an indexed chart identifying which level each of his characters assumes in each chapter—as well as which identity each character assumes on each of these levels.
The characters in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland also have multiple identities that may operate on different levels of existence. And so we have a conspiracy of the entire cast of Wonderland characters in this assumption of multiple identities.
All these levels stem directly from Dodgson’s studies and personal interests. He graduated from Oxford with a First in mathematics, a Second in classics and a Third in philosophy and history. Added to this, there was his lifelong fascination with spiritualism and his immense interest in and enjoyment of music both sacred and profane. Each of these themes is to be discovered in this multi-layered story.
The primary level of the fairy tale provides the framework for all other levels: historic, philosophic, mythological, theosophical and mathematical interpretations are all possible. These and other disciplines all make their contributions, and many of these are discussed in this book’s extensive annotations, notes and running commentaries on each chapter.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is—among all the many things it can be viewed as—a time capsule from a time and place that was at a historic turning point in human intellectual history: Oxford University in the Victorian age. The novel, it emerges, is a who’s who of Oxford at the height of its power and influence in the world.
Consequently, the commentary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Decoded primarily concerns itself with the life and times of Charles Dodgson, Alice Liddell and the other real mid-Victorian historical figures who are the basis for the characters and creatures that inhabit Wonderland.
III. WONDER WORDS AND RIDDLES Today, most children have some experience of Carroll’s kind of storytelling through playing computer games. On entering an underground labyrinth, Alice is given the choice of golden keys, magic mushrooms, cakes and potions that allow her to change her size or shape or to gain entry into other regions. She encounters strange and wonderful creatures: sometimes hostile, sometimes friendly.
Riddles and hidden clues are to be found everywhere in this fairy tale. Like a modern gamer at her computer, Alice must make critical choices to find her way through this maze. She must endure adventures and trials before discovering the means of triumphing over the tyrannical Queen of Hearts and safely returning to her waking life.
It is only in Wonderland’s triggering mechanisms that this fairy-tale game varies superficially from contemporary multi-levelled computer games. Language is the key to Wonderland’s mysteries. The facility and flexibility of language informs all literature, of course. But nobody has ever used language in quite the way Lewis Carroll did in his Alice books. Carroll makes the English language—and the story he is telling—operate on many levels simultaneously. In Wonderland, icons in the form of key characters or images, puns, homophones and allusions serve as clues and signposts to indicate the various levels of Alice’s adventures.
Take, for example, the meaning of the word mean: signify, intend, clarify, define, stingy, poor and nasty. In his satire The Vision of the Three T’s, Carroll absurdly stretches out the meaning of mean: “You must know, then, that there be three Means treated of in Mathematics. For there is the Arithmetic Mean, the Geometric and the Harmonic. And note further, that a Man is that which falleth between two magnitudes.… and is in truth the Non-harmonic Mean, the Mean Absolute. But that the Mean, or Middle, is ever the safer course.…” etc.
Elsewhere, Carroll suggests that if we have the means to study time, we will soon discover a day in mean-time is quite different from a day in mean solar time, or a day in terms of a mean sun. Then, too, one might suggest it is no mean feat to find any means to live within one’s means … ad infinitum.
Humpty Dumpty might have been describing Carroll’s approach when he says, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” Or as Carroll himself said in a letter to a friend, writing about his stance as a logician: “I shall take the line ‘any writer may mean exactly what he pleases by a phrase so long as he explains it beforehand.’ ”
Except in Wonderland, the author doesn’t explain it beforehand. And poor Alice’s problem is that most of the entities she encounters speak a formal language that is logical from the perspective of a philosopher or a mathematician, say, but nonsense in everyday ordinary speech. This is particularly true on the mathematical level.
At the tea party, for instance, Alice is bewildered by the bizarre wordplay of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, and complains: “The Hatter’s remark seemed to her to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English.” She recognizes that they are speaking in logically structured English sentences, but is also correct in concluding that the conversation has no sort of meaning—or perhaps no more meaning than an algebraic expression has in ordinary speech.
Similarly, when the King of Hearts in the trial ponders “ ‘Important—unimportant—unimportant—important—’ as if he were trying which word sounded the best,” the regent is not being frivolous. He is quite properly conducting a trial to test each word for “soundness” (in what mathematicians call a “well-formed formula” or “wff”). The King’s judgment is based on the logically “sound” structure of a sentence or formula, not on its meaning in ordinary speech.
Formal languages and rules were developed by such specialists as mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists in order to eliminate the ambiguities inherent in natural languages like English, Latin and Greek. Carroll has reversed this process by employing formal languages and rules in the context of everyday English (and sometimes Latin, Greek and French) to create more ambiguities, thereby allowing a vast expansion of wordplay.
Carroll has stretched to its limits the power of language to communicate, and it is astonishing that the Alice fairy tales do not collapse under the weight of all these parallel meanings. Rather, the tales actually make sense—albeit comic nonsense. In fact, no real nonsense is spoken by any character: each is making sense on a different level by using everyday words with different definitions. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is like a symphony comprising many separate tunes, each one fully independent and coherent in its own right, and all combining to make a masterpiece.
IV. THE REASON WHY But why? Why would anybody write a children’s story in a code that is almost impenetrable even to adults? Why in God’s name would anyone want to inflict complex theories of mathematics, theosophy, politics and philosophy on an unsuspecting child?
Well, if you were the Reverend Charles Dodgson, you would do it in God’s name. I suppose these days we would call it subliminal advertising for Christ. The Reverend Dodgson was a devout High Anglican Churchman. The education and spiritual enlightenment of children was one of the most hotly debated political and religious issues of the nineteenth century, and an obsession of Dodgson himself.
Time and again he spoke and wrote about the church’s insensitivity to children. He deplored how they were forced to endure hours of boredom in services that only alienated them from the beauty and wonder of worship. Dodgson was a fan of the theatre, much to the displeasure and embarrassment of his fellow clergy, including his own father. But his rebuttal was that the theatre at its best was doing what the church was failing to do: engaging and enlightening the young.
What Charles Dodgson loved about the theatre was, first, its capacity to communicate spiritual and emotional realities and, second, its capacity “to convey a higher truth straight to the soul, bypassing the intellect.” This is exactly what Lewis Carroll was attempting with the Alice stories.
Wonderland is a kind of memory palace constructed exactly as a cathedral is constructed: as an analog of the world and all its secrets. The magnificence of High Mass in a cathedral will fill the worshipper with wonder, but its great spiritual secrets are hidden in the sacred geometry of its architecture, the deep philosophy of its language and the mathematical complexities of its music.
For Alice, his wonder child, Lewis Carroll created an enthralling secular equivalent to High Mass in a specially constructed temple of wisdom. Alice’s journey through Wonderland was based on the classical myths and ancient mystery cults that enacted a maiden’s descent into the underworld. It came complete with initiation rites, baptisms, processions, catechisms, epiphanies and dialogues with saints, mystics and sages.
Christ Church Library: Dodgson first saw Alice Liddell through the window overlooking the Deanery garden.
Dodgson lived in rooms in Tom Quad, Oxford’s largest and grandest quadrangle: Its Rosicrucian and Freemason influences are reflected in Wonderland.
With Wonderland, Lewis Carroll gave Alice Liddell the great gift of a classical education. It was delivered secretly and subliminally, but in the Victorian age, it was a gift no girl would have been permitted to receive in any other way.
Not that Carroll was always entirely secretive about the pedagogical subtext of his stories—especially when it came to mathematics. Fifteen years after the publication of Wonderland, he began publishing a series of stories (described as Knots) under the collective title A Tangled Tale in a magazine called The Monthly Packet. In the preface, Carroll was uncharacteristically revealing about the subtext: “The writer’s intention was to embody in each Knot (like medicine so dexterously, but ineffectually, concealed in the jam of our early childhood) one or more mathematical questions—in Arithmetic, Algebra, or Geometry, as the case might be—for the amusement, and possible edification, of the fair readers of that Magazine.”
Carroll’s belief in the mystical significance and subliminal power of symbols and language was not a personal quirk; rather, it was fundamental to his religion. The High Anglican Church (like the Catholic and Orthodox faiths) believed that the souls and spirits of its followers should be guided toward the truth of religion not by logical mental forces but by the symbolic and mystical forces of sacred language, ritual and images—ideas that Carl Jung would later confirm in his own psychological studies in Man and His Symbols.
He noted, too, that the beauty of choral music extended its healing influence on the faithful, even though its composition was based on a complex mathematical system of harmonics that was far beyond their understanding, and that church architecture lifted the spirits not just of the elite within the priesthood who understood the philosophical significance of the sacred geometry behind it. And by many it was also believed that when High Mass was delivered in Latin, the power behind the words reached the soul of even someone ignorant of the language.
A founding tenet of the Anglican Church was that its esoteric wisdom could only be entrusted to an enlightened priesthood. The average worshipper could not possibly be expected to understand. The best and the brightest of Churchmen took this stance, not because they believed that God’s creations were devoid of logical forces and reason—many, Charles Dodgson among them, believed absolutely that the logical constructs of sacred geometry, mathematics and harmonics were God’s plan built into every material thing. But they believed—with some justification—that all these theories would confuse the general population and result in a sea of bafflement and doubt.
It has been said of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, another famous underground adventure: “Well-nigh all the encyclopedic erudition of the Middle Ages was forged and welded, in the white heat of an indomitable will, into [its] steel-knit structure.” Although Lewis Carroll’s descent into his underworld makes for lighter reading than Dante’s, something similar might be said of his creation of Wonderland. Carroll compresses into his fairy tale the entire syllabus of a classical education of his time, and the book is a time capsule of the intellectual history of the Victorian Age.
The Wonderland years marked the turning point at which the ancient classical education system was gradually coming to an end and the university as we know it today was born. And as unfit as it was to survive intact in the modern world, it must be said there was much to admire in the ancient tradition of a classical education and its preservation of the deep roots of Western civilization through the Latin and Greek languages. It was a pan-European, Latin-speaking culture that attempted to reclaim the wisdom and ideals of ancients through the efforts of the medieval Scholastics, the Renaissance Neoplatonists and the Enlightenment philosophers. It was a belief in an enlightened classical system that preceded academia’s modern age that resulted in the specialization and fragmentation of the arts and sciences. It was a belief that all human knowledge could be encompassed in a single aesthetically beautiful system.
Matthew Arnold, the Oxford Professor of Poetry during the Wonderland years, was the first to deliver his lectures in English instead of Latin and was a major force on the side of liberal reform, but he also gave full expression to the almost sacred trust embodied in the conservative classical tradition of Oxford:
Beautiful city!—so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!…Steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection,—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?—nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
This was certainly the Oxford that the Reverend Charles Dodgson and his literary persona Lewis Carroll stubbornly embraced. Dodgson/Carroll wished to preserve the elite tradition of Oxford at all costs. But in the rapidly changing industrial world of the vastly expanding British Empire and the unprecedented expansion of science and all fields of human knowledge, this was clearly impossible.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland could only have been written by a multi-disciplined mind schooled in this ancient tradition, and one who believed education was the most important driving force in the creation of a great civilization. And, wrong-headed as history has proved Carroll to be, in his Wonderland we have a literary monument that allows us to see what has been lost and what has been gained.
There were many fine things to admire in a classical education, and there was great beauty to be found even in its obsolescence. Like some kind of bejewelled mechanical singing nightingale in an age of the invention of the gramophone, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a demonstration of the mastery of brilliant precision and intricate beauty without any real category or obvious purpose—something aesthetic theorists might argue was the true test of a civilization’s highest art forms.
Christ Church Meadow: An idyllic spot for picking flowers, drifting into a dream and falling down an infinitely deep rabbit-hole.
