Prelude Poem: All in the Golden Afternoon
Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour,
Beneath such dreamy weather,
To beg a tale of breath too weak
To stir the tiniest feather!
Yet what can one poor voice avail
Against three tongues together?
THREE FATAL SISTERS From the beginning, it was apparent that just beneath the fairy-tale surface of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, there was a strong element of autobiography and social satire. It was obvious that many of the characters and places clearly had real-life counterparts in mid-Victorian Oxford. Some Lewis Carroll was happy to identify; others he was at pains to keep secret.
As Carroll always acknowledged, the real Alice was Alice Liddell (1852–1934), daughter of Lorina Hanna Liddell (née Reeve) and Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church college, Oxford. Oxford in that era was at the very core of Victorian Britain’s academic, ecclesiastic and political life, and most of the characters in Wonderland are satirical caricatures of some of the most significant figures of Victorian society. This, Alice Liddell would have known. Indeed, as the daughter of the most influential educator of the age, she knew nearly all of these luminaries personally.
In his 1887 article “ ‘Alice’ on the Stage,” Carroll describes his “dream-Alice” as being loving and gentle and “courteous—courteous to all, high and low, grand or grotesque, King or Caterpillar, even though she were herself a King’s daughter.”
Alice Liddell may not have been “a King’s daughter,” but her family was certainly aristocracy. The Liddells were royal favourites, guests at Buckingham Palace and hosts of Queen Victoria and the Prince and Princess of Wales. Alice’s father was the nephew of the baron of Ravensworth and first cousin of the earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. And she certainly lived like a princess. Her home in Christ Church’s Deanery had served as King Charles’s palace during the English Civil War.
“The Dean, Chapter and Students of the Cathedral of Christ Church in Oxford of the Foundation of King Henry the Eighth,” as it was formally entitled, holds a special place in the royal history of Britain and is the only college that is also a cathedral—and under the authority of the dean. Christ Church was one of the grandest and wealthiest colleges in Britain and certainly the most influential, producing more British prime ministers than all forty-five other Oxford colleges combined. Henry Liddell had been approved as dean by Queen Victoria and the prime minister, Lord Palmerston. His qualifications were sound: not only was he the foremost classical Greek scholar of his day and co-author of the still-authoritative A Greek-English Lexicon, for a decade Liddell had been the highly praised headmaster of Britain’s most prestigious school at Westminster. He had been Prince Albert’s chaplain and was later to become mentor to his and Victoria’s sons, Prince Edward (the future King Edward VII) and Prince Leopold, while each was an Oxford undergraduate.
All in the golden afternoon
Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars, with little skill,
By little hands are plied,
While little hands make vain pretence
Our wanderings to guide.
Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour,
Beneath such dreamy weather,
To beg a tale of breath too weak
To stir the tiniest feather!
Yet what can one poor voice avail
Against three tongues together?
As dean, Liddell was the great architect of educational reform, working to overturn medieval statutes and rules that had been unchanged at Oxford for four hundred years. Medieval classics-based universities set up to educate a small upper-class elite could not keep up with the vast avalanche of new scientific and technological knowledge required for the running of Britain’s empire; nor could it keep up with the demands of a modern industrial-age economy. No one did more to usher in the modern secular university system in which, in theory at least, academic achievement counted more than social standing.
In the midst of this wave of liberal reform was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a junior mathematics instructor. Not yet the famous author Lewis Carroll, Dodgson’s highest post at the time of Liddell’s appointment was as the Christ Church sub-librarian; Alice’s father was his academic superior. His ecclesiastic superior was Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford. While Dean Liddell was a liberal and a prime mover in reforming the old system of privilege and favour, Bishop Wilberforce was a ferocious opponent of reform—and therefore of the dean.
Charles Dodgson, too, was a staunch conservative who persistently conspired against virtually every one of the liberal progressive acts initiated by Dean Liddell. As Lewis Carroll—and through Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—he has his heroine unwittingly engaged in a satire about most of the major social and political issues of his time: Christian socialism, theosophy, spiritualism, Darwinian evolution and liberal educational reform.
Wonderland begins “all in the golden afternoon” with a prelude poem about a real-life boating excursion that took place on July 4, 1862, on the Isis, a branch of the river Thames, near Oxford. Two young college dons in straw hats and white boating suits rowed the three pretty little daughters of the dean of Christ Church upriver on a three-mile expedition from Folly Bridge to Godstow village. They took tea on the embankment, then returned downriver to Oxford just after eight in the evening. The children were delivered home to the Deanery and were in bed before nine o’clock.
The poem chronicles this boating expedition. The three Liddell sisters, with their “little arms” and “little hands” (Liddell rhymes with “fiddle” and so sounds like “little”), are drifting lazily along in a boat when they “beg a tale” from an unnamed storyteller and are rowed along by an unnamed oarsman.
Imperious Prima flashes forth
Her edict “to begin it”:
In gentler tone Secunda hopes
“There will be nonsense in it!”
While Tertia interrupts the tale
Not more than once a minute.
Anon, to sudden silence won,
In fancy they pursue
The dream-child moving through a land
Of wonders wild and new,
In friendly chat with bird or beast—
And half believe it true.
The young college dons were the Reverend Charles Dodgson and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth. During the expedition, the girls—Lorina, Alice and Edith—begged the Reverend Dodgson to tell them a story. And so began the tale of a girl named Alice who fell down a rabbit-hole. When the party returned later that evening, Alice asked Dodgson to write down the tale so she might share it with others. “Thus grew the tale of Wonderland,” Lewis Carroll was later to write. However, this story of the writing of the fairy tale is itself something of a fable, as it seems it was nearly three years before, as Carroll wrote, all “its quaint events were hammered out.” For in this time it was written, rewritten, revised, restructured and illustrated before it was finally published in 1865.
Beyond providing the fairy tale’s source of inspiration, Lewis Carroll is also using this poem to provide a classical literary context. The many mythological allusions imply something deeper and more archetypal is at work behind these real-life events.
In the poem, the sisters are addressed as the “cruel Three” and ends with a description of pilgrims crowned with a “wreath of flowers.” These sisters are the three Fates of antiquity, often described as clad in white with wreaths on their heads. Writing two decades later, in his article “ ‘Alice’ on the Stage,” Lewis Carroll makes sure no one misses his point about the power the Liddell sisters had over his creative powers: “three eager faces, hungry for news of fairy-land, and who would not be said ‘nay’ to: from whose lips ‘Tell us a story, please,’ had all the stern immutability of Fate!”
Carroll frequently personified young girls in this way in his writing. There are many instances in his fiction, poetry and letters. To his cousin Lucy Wilcox, for example, he wrote: “I now regard you as a form of Destiny (let us say, as one of the Fates, or one of the Furies) as you are simply bringing on me a flood of strange young ladies.”
And ever, as the story drained
The wells of fancy dry,
And faintly strove that weary one
To put the subject by,
“The rest next time—” “It is next time!”
The happy voices cry.
Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:
Thus slowly, one by one,
Its quaint events were hammered out—
And now the tale is done,
And home we steer, a merry crew,
Beneath the setting sun.
In the prelude poem, he attributes the personalities and powers of each of the Fates to a Liddell sister. He gives each of his “cruel Three” a name. “Imperious” Prima was the oldest sister, the thirteen-year-old Lorina; “gentler” Secunda was Alice, then aged ten; and Tertia was the eight-year-old Edith. The poem states that Prima orders the story “to begin,” Secunda determines its contents, and the petulant Tertia “interrupts” as she pleases.
The girls thus mirror the acts of each of the Fates in classical literature. As Robert Graves states in The Greek Myths: “there are three conjoined Fates, robed in white.… Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Of these, Atropos is the smallest in stature, but the most terrible.” He also explains their roles: “the thread of life, spun on Clotho’s spindle, and measured by the rod of Lachesis, is … snipped by Atropos’ shears.” The Fates were portrayed sometimes as three young maidens (as Carroll suggests), other times as maiden, woman and crone. They oversee what is, what was and what will be—the birth, life and death of mortals, nations and gods.
Alice! A childish story take,
And, with a gentle hand
Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined
In Memory’s mystic band,
Like pilgrim’s wither’d wreath of flowers
Pluck’d in a far-off land.
As Carroll suggests in this poem, these three sisters are also his inspirational muses (you can see this in his photography as well as in his writing) at whose command his dry “wells of fancy” are constantly replenished. And also when Alice falls down her rabbit-hole, we are told she “found herself falling down a very deep well.”
In the Greek underworld, there were two wells. One was known as Lethe, or the Well of Forgetting; the second was Mnemosyne, or the Well of Memory. The goddess Mnemosyne was the mother of the Muses, and linked to the three little (Liddell) sisters as Carroll’s muses and the source of his inspiration. In the poem, with his usual verbal sleight of hand, Carroll specifically and collectively identifies the sisters with the punning phrase “Memory’s mystic band.”
VICTORIAN CLASSICAL TRADITION Classical Greek and Roman literature had enormous significance in the cultural and intellectual life of Victorian England. And nowhere was this truer than at Oxford. In 1855, when Charles Dodgson was appointed lecturer at Christ Church, all university business and financial transactions were still conducted in Latin. Every student learned Latin and Greek and the architecture of virtually every college building was based on classical models, as were cultural institutions and civic organizations far beyond the university.
At Oxford, scores of student societies carried the names of classical figures, and it was common for students to assign the names of Greek gods and heroes to their tutors and professors—both as epithets of praise and to mock. These names frequently appeared in anonymous satires and squibs filled with classical allusions that attacked figures of authority at the university. Dodgson himself was one of the most notorious authors of these rather scurrilous publications. So, in tandem with his satiric assignment of real-life Oxford identities to each of his Wonderland characters, it was natural for him to provide many of them with classical Greek identities as well.