the CHESHIRE in the CLASSROOM

When David Day was approached by a publisher in the mid-1990s to work on a book about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, he assumed the project would come together quickly, taking perhaps a couple of years at the most to complete. The goal was to have a book ready for publication by 1998, in time for the centennial of Alice author Lewis Carroll’s death.

“I’d done several books on [Lord of the Rings author J.R.R.] Tolkien,” says Day, “I thought, ‘ How difficult can Alice in Wonderland be? It’s a little book.’ I started looking at it, and I realized I wasn’t going to get it done in two years.”

Nearly two decades later, and Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Decoded is finally hitting bookstores, all 320 full-colour pages of analysis, context and other insights into Carroll’s 1865 children’s novel. Like Alice herself crawling into a seemingly innocuous rabbit hole and tumbling into a whole new topsy-turvy world, Day’s project took him deep into the recesses of Carroll’s singular thought process.

Casual fans of Carroll’s work may already be aware that his most iconic character was based on a real little girl. Alice Liddell was the daughter of Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church college, Oxford. Carroll (whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a resident Oxford don. He purports that his most famous novel was written after taking a boat ride one summer’s day with Alice and her sisters, in which he kept them entertained by telling them stories. The children begged him to write down the story, so he put pen to paper and Alice the book was born.

This version of events makes it seem as if the book was a spontaneous creation, but as Day points out, Carroll’s notes reveal that Alice was a work in progress long before the boat ride. Though a whimsical story on the surface, Carroll famously filled his book with allusions to philosophy, mathematics, history, logic, poetry, mythology and his own contemporary Victorian society.

“I sort of wrote five different books,” says Day. “I soon recognized that everybody in Alice in Wonderland is somebody from Oxford or Cambridge at that particular time, and of course that was really the centre of the whole British Empire. The whole thing, I take it on as a biography of his life and her life.”

Day also argues that the book was meant to give a classical education to someone like Alice, who, as a girl, wouldn’t be able to attend Oxford. Every character in Wonderland then becomes an allusion to a scholar or a figure in Greek mythology; a reference to mathematical concept or a famous work of art; or, quite frequently, a combination of all of the above.

Take the Cheshire Cat, a disappearing feline characterized by his toothy grin. Though Day believed this character to be based on Reverend Edward Pusey (see sidebar), something else clicked when he learned that Pusey was known as a “patristic catenary” (meaning, an expert on the fathers of the Church). A catenary is also a geometric term referring to the curve of a suspended chain — or the curve of a cat’s grin.

“I woke up in the middle of the night and I thought, ‘He couldn’t be that obscure,’” says Day. “I looked up ‘Catenary’ in the Oxford Dictionary, and I realized he was punning across different disciplines, making a pun from cat to patristic catenary to a catenary curve. Once I sorted out the Cheshire cat’s grin, it allowed me to go into stuff more obscure than that. It’s totally crazy, but that’s what he’s doing. The Cheshire Cat has five different identities on top of being the Cheshire Cat.”

For all his willingness to experiment with what a novel could be, Carroll remained a staunchly conservative thinker throughout his life. He was resistant to change, especially (and, it would now appear, ironically) with regards to education. During the time in which he was writing Alice, Oxford was reforming the curriculum. It was no longer required, for example, for a student of engineering to learn Greek.

“Carroll was fully against that,” says Day. “It was sort of the end of the classical education, which is a wonderful idea, that a human being contained all knowledge, but specialization was required at that stage. Science had gotten too big. That beginning of specialization that really allowed universities to grow the way they are now. It made a huge gap between the arts and sciences.”

As such, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland exists as a testament to a classical education, one that blurs the lines between disciplines, layering different branches of knowledge on top of each other until they created an entirely new fantastical world.

Carroll’s politics don’t necessarily stand the test of time (as Day points out, he was “totally on the wrong side of almost everything in history”), and his relationship with the Liddells fizzled out after the publication of Alice, for a number of reasons. He was a divisive figure even then, but he channelled his views into writing a story that, 150 years later, still feels simultaneously universal, and, well, “curiouser and curiouser.” Though Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland remains a source of study and fascination, it was ultimately a book meant to be read by, and to delight, young children. As Day says, “He wanted to bypass the intellect and go straight to the soul.”