Alice In Wonderland Analysis

Picturing Nonsense: Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland

Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes:

He only does it to annoy, Because he knows it teases.

(Alice in Wonderland, “Pig and Pepper”)

At the time of his death, Charles L. Dodgson (1832-1898)(Fig. 1), known better to the public by his famous nom de plume Lewis Carroll, was by all measures an interesting if famous, eccentric personality. Most of his contemporaries saw in him a deeply religious man who was generally reticent and shy among the adult public but could be wonderfully silly, almost child-like and creative among his favored audience, little pre-pubescent girls. It was for these very special children that Carroll wrote his two famous nonsense

Alice Liddell would recall this event as “that golden afternoon,” for during the trip Carroll began the outlines of the story that would become Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.5 Alice encouraged Carroll to write the story down, which he eventually did, giving Alice a handcrafted copy. Carroll also showed the story to friends and was encouraged to seek publication, which he finally accomplished with the now familiar illustrations by Sir John Tiennel (Figs. 2, 3, and 21). The book was published in 1865, three years after its initiation during an afternoon of boating .

Reactions to the inside jokes and nonsense humor of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland would have been very different for the Victorian reader in contrast to the 20th or 21st century reader. For instance the poems that are parodied in the story were very familiar to Carroll’s contemporaries, but much less so in the later 20th and 21st centuries. As an example, the first nonsense poem in Alice’s Adventures, “How doth the little Crocodile,” is a parody of Isaac Watt’s moralistic poem “Against Idleness and Mischief.” Using the bee as an example of productive labor, Watt’s poem includes this

For instance, the first person to psychoanalyze Carroll and his work, Anthony Goldschmidt, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, suggested that the fall down the rabbit hole was a metaphor for sexual penetration, and that the doors surrounding the hallway represent female genitalia.8 Goldschmidt concludes, however, that Carroll was a paedophile, a conclusion that has since also been put forward by some other writers, although usually claiming a benign