The Making of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, by Peter Hunt
The Making of Lewis Carroll’s Alice By Peter Hunt Bodleian Library £15
This book promises us ‘a fresh look’ at Lewis Carroll’s Alice books – a prospect that always makes the teacups rattle.
Since its publication more than 150 years ago, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has become one of the most debated texts in the English language, generating an inexhaustible torrent of intellectual theories. It has been read as an allegory on drug culture, a parable of British colonialism and a satire on the War of the Roses.
It’s been argued that Alice has an eating disorder, and that her extending neck is symbolic of an erection. Or, if we are to believe the late William Empson, Alice is ‘a father in getting down the hole, a foetus at the bottom, and can only be born by becoming a mother and producing her own amniotic fluid’.
Oh, help. Do we simple souls really need a ‘fresh look’ at Wonderland?
But Peter Hunt does not set out to shatter the china. It is a sign of Wonderland’s durability that successive generations have read their own preoccupations into the text. Hunt’s approach, however, is more archival.
Carroll’s mind, he writes, was essentially that of a ‘contradictory mid-victorian’, who loaded every sentence of his fiction with ‘multiple meanings, multiple jokes [and] coded references to matters intellectual, political and personal’.
This highly entertaining book is an attempt to unravel those references – showing Carroll as a pugnacious satirist, whose stories became a boxing ring for the author’s unsettled scores.
Among Carroll’s most famous targets was Alfred Tennyson, whom he had known and photographed since 1857. Evidence of their subsequent fall-out can be found in Through the Looking-glass, where Carroll ridicules Tennyson’s poem Maud, in which a lover waits in a flower garden (‘She is coming, my own, my sweet;/ Were it ever so airy a tread’). In Carroll’s version, Alice and the flowers are listening for the Red Queen: ‘ “She’s coming!” cried the Larkspur. “I hear her footstep, thump, thump, along the gravel walk.” ’
Dozy readers among us might also have missed the swipe at Wordsworth’s poem Resolution and Independence, in which the narrator meets a leechgatherer ‘on the lonely moor’. (‘ “How is it that you live, and what is it you do?”/he with a smile did then his words repeat…’) In Carroll’s version, the tone is notably less lyrical: ‘ “Who are you, aged man?” I said./“and how is it you live?”/his answer trickled through my head,/like water through a sieve.’
But while such examples are well documented, in other areas Hunt is more speculative. He refers to his subject as Charles Dodgson, rather than by his pen name, Carroll – preferring the name of ‘the man, rather than the name of the mask’. But it is the mask that scholars are stuck with – and, like any book about Wonderland, this one asks more questions than it answers.
Does the face of the boisterous puppy Alice encounters in the White Rabbit’s garden represent the young Charles Darwin? And is the rest of the dog Thomas Huxley, known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ – or could it be Charles Kingsley, whom Thomas Hughes (the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays) described as being like a Newfoundland puppy?
Some of the ‘what if’s sound worthy of the Mad Hatter. We know, for example, that Thomas John Prout (the Rector of Binsey, known for dozing off in college meetings) might have been the model for the Dormouse. But ‘whether Alice knew’ that the rector ‘might have been the model for the Dormouse’ is not certain.
Where Hunt stands firm is in his view that there is no nonsense in Wonderland, but rather ‘almost every sentence, every action … has a perfectly sensible root’. Take, for example, Alice’s struggle with her times tables: ‘Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is – oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!’ The logic, apparently, is perfectly clear, writes Hunt: ‘If Alice continues in the progression to ‘twelve times twelve’, the usual end of the times table, the final number is 19.’
I’m glad no one tried to explain this to me when I was nine. But thanks to such stimulating observations, I shall never read Wonderland in quite the same way again.