Once upon a time: Alice in Wonderland (Part 1)
Read with me as I adventure through the original manuscript of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures Under Ground"
:Alice's Adventures Under Ground by Lewis Carroll, Part 1
Last year, I started taking interest in folklore (as I’ve been writing about it in some of my previous posts) and the origins of our favorite fairytale characters and stories. So, I thought I would devote some time this year to read the classics, for the first time, with you! And truthfully, a push for me to read more lol.
I received Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground for Christmas, Carroll’s original manuscript of the popular classic Alice in Wonderland. I thought it would be a perfect start to this new series. Tea parties, Mad Hatters, Red Queens—just in time for Valentine’s Day.
I’m not the fastest reader, but with 4 chapters, I don’t think this will be too difficult to get through. I’m sure it’ll inspire some new art and crafts along the way, too! Let’s begin.
Chapter 1
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, and where is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations?
The opening line of the book. I love a direct beginning.
So she was considering in her own mind, (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid,) whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain was worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when a white rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
Like the story we know so well, the rabbit exclaims he is late and Alice follows him into a hole, the “rabbit-hole”.
“Rabbit-hole” is introduced in this chapter, so I just had to know!
Some of my favorite lines from this chapter:
“then, she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there were maps and pictures hung on pegs.”
“it was labelled ‘Orange Marmalade’”
“Well!” thought Alice to herself, “after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs!”
“Down, down, down.”
“I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time!”
“For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things [Carroll uses this line quite often] had happened lately, that Alice began to think very few things indeed were really impossible.”
“for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people”
“I think I remember feeling rather different. But if I’m not the same, who in the world am I? That’s the great puzzle!”
So far, Alice jumps into a hole, finds herself in front of a tiny door with a garden on the other side, becomes tiny but forgets the key, then becomes very tall, weeps, becomes small again only to fall into the ocean of her own tears. I’m enjoying Carroll’s poetic rhythm, in the narration and in the dialogues. And, of course, ironically, Alice’s thoughts and worries feel very mature and adult-like.
A little context
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground was written and illustrated by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a young mathematics tutor at Christ Church, Oxford. The manuscript, a little book of ninety pages, was given to Alice Liddell as a Christmas present on November 26, 1864. It was later revised and published under Dodgson’s pen name Lewis Carroll in 1865, with illustrations by John Tenniel.
A Christmas gift to a dear child in memory of a summer day. It all begins when Dodgson accompanied Alice and her two sisters, Lorina and Edith, on a boating trip one ‘golden afternoon’ in 1862. Dodgson had begun a friendship some years prior with the Liddell family in 1856, as Alice’s father, Henry Liddell, had become the new Dean of the Cathedral college; 24-year-old Dodgson, with a borrowed camera, took up an interest in portrait photography and began photographing the Liddell sisters.
Alice dressed as a beggar girl, 1858. What a peculiar photograph. Alice must be around 6. Dodgson also had them pose in these clothes from China. This all sounds absurd, right? Well, the attention these photographs received, particularly from Queen Victoria’s son, the Prince of Wales, an undergraduate of Christ Church at the time, was very positive. The Prince of Wales praised these photographs. Poet Alfred Tennyson deemed the beggar girl photograph the “most beautiful portrait of a child he had ever seen.”
This has me wondering, is this a standard of the Victorian age? Are adults playing dress-up with children like a trend? What did people think of children back then? And why on earth are all these grown men commenting on these young girls??
Victorians and the fantasy of innocence
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