Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Great Books Explained

Please remember to subscribe and click the  notification Bell below and please do check out my main Channel "Great art explained" with the  latest film about Dorothea Tanning, and if you want to support this Channel and get exclusive content  the link to my patreon is also below. As Internet users we all understand the expression  "going down a rabbit hole", which comes from the much loved book "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland " Alice: "Down down down - would the fall never come to an end? I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time",  said Alice.

The book famously begins when the main character, Alice follows a white rabbit underground,  and finds herself going deeper and deeper into a strange World - somewhere in which normal social  rules and even the laws of physics are suspended. The author of Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll,  was really called Charles Dodgson, a professor of mathematics, specialising in geometry and logic.  As Dodgson, he was a conservative mathematician who lived in a stable world of proof and logic. 

A world of rationality where parallel lines could never meet. As Lewis Carroll, he stepped across  those boundaries. At first glance it appears that with Alice in Wonderland, he created one  of the most illogical books ever written.

But this is not the case. Instead, Carroll used his  book to explore the limits of logic. Drwing on mathematical conundrums and strategy games,  to create a wonderful Topsy-Turvy world full of playful puzzles.

A world populated by some  of the most memorable characters in all of literature. Lewis Caroll was the pen name of Charles Dodgson.  Mathematician, poet, satirist, inventor, photographer, and writer.

A Victorian Renaissance man. His  pen name is his first two real names Charles Lutwidge translated into Latin as Carolus Ludovicus - reversed - and then translated back into English as Lewis Carroll. It is fitting that the name on  the front of Alice in Wonderland should conceal some kind of wordplay.

Dodgson was born In  1832, in Cheshire, one of 11 children born to parents who were religious conservatives and  first cousins. As a very young child he suffered a fever that made him deaf in one ear, and then  a severe attack of whooping cough left him with a chronically weak chest. He also spoke spoke with  a debilitating stutter his whole life, and writing and storytelling became a way to escape from  his physical ailments, and immerse himself in alternate worlds.

As a boy he showed an early  talent for maths, and would go on to study at Christ Church College, Oxford. Where he would work  for his entire professional career. Dodgson's work as a mathematician was, despite what you might  think, completely compatible with his work as a writer, and in fact it was integral to it.

As a  professor of maths he was a man who spent his days absorbed in logical puzzles, and it was this flare  for making and solving problems that would define this brilliant writer - and become the essence of Alice in Wonderland. The Alice books are filled with tricks of logic and playful paradoxes. Dodgson loved puzzles.

and he invented and published a  popular word puzzle in Vanity Fair magazine, in which he had a regular column. It is called the  word ladder where you have to get from one word to another, changing one letter at a time while  still making a word each time. He also created many mathematical puzzles, including this one: The answer can be calculated straight forwardly using  the unitary method, however Dodgson would be quick to point out that 10,000 men cannot fit around  a 10t wall.

The problem demonstrates how logic can lead us astray, and how the right thinking  might give us the wrong answers. The fallibility of human reasoning lies at the heart of Alice in  Wonderland, and in particular Carroll was reflecting humorously on the folly and limitations of his own discipline: Mathematics. There are several direct references to mathematics in the books, such as when the White Queen decides to test Alice's maths: And again when the mock Turtle tells Alice about his education: Carroll's characters, far from being Adept in maths are described as being rather afraid of it.

Like The Duchess who says: Or Humpty Dumpty, who gets nervous when subtracting  1 from 365, to find out how many "un-birthdays" he has. Even in the opening chapter, Alice thinks  about how she might calculate her rate of travel as she falls down the rabbit hole: And she also shows an aptitude for figures when she  speculates about how far she might have fallen: She is surprisingly accurate with the real figure being 3,981. 25 miles!

A character who may not quite have the right answers is the Knight. A daydreaming inventor who Carroll uses to produce  a playful satire of deductive reasoning. When he explains to Alice his new method v of getting over a gate: Alice when she hears this, understood immediately that logical reasoning is nothing without common sense.

Suffice to say, that one critic was absolutely right when they said: Among the many interests of Charles Dodgson, was  a passion for the relatively new invention of Photography. Dodson would go on to become a highly skilled amateur photographer, making technical advancements in lighting techniques,  and experimenting with double exposures, to create surreal and dreamlike images. He took pictures of  eminent artists of his age, including Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelites, Dante Gabrielle Rossetti with  his sister, the poet Christina.

The majority of his photographs however, were of children - often  inspired by famous paintings. In particular, he photographed one girl. This is the real life girl  who would Inspire one of the greatest stories in the English language, and catapult Dodgson to  unexpected Fame.

. . This is Alice Liddell.

Alice, was one of the children of Henry Liddell, dean  of Christ Church College in Oxford. Dodgson would often take Alice and her siblings on boat trips  down the river in Oxford, and on one of these trips, he began telling a story with imaginative  characters and lots of twists and turns which would later become Alice's Adventures in  Wonderland. It was Alice Liddell herself who encouraged Carroll to publish the stories.

The Alice we meet in the books, is brave, curious, sensitive and occasionally bossy. In the context of Victorian society, where children were  generally expected to be seen and not heard, Alice is a heroine, who is bracingly different. She is  a rule breaker, fiercely unique, and brilliantly rebellious.

It was in Carroll's books that we  first saw children as "individuals", with lives of their own. And they remain a tale of how we  view childhood. Alice the first female lead in children's literature, challenges the upright  morals and the stuffy atmosphere of Victorian England, and is a timeless heroine because of  that.

She is a girl who represents a bold and youthful alternative to the boring logical  and mundane world of adulthood. Real Alice: "I think now, my Adventures overseas will be almost as interesting as my Adventures underground were. Many think of the Alice books as essentially children's books, but they are also profound texts, which ask the kind of deep questions which occupied thinkers like Plato and Descartes.

Questions such as: "How do we know what is  real? and how can we prove what we think is true? " These are the sort of questions running through  Alice's mind, when she falls down the rabbit hole: Dodgson used Alice in Wonderland to think through essential philosophical questions in a light-hearted manner, while experimenting with the frontiers of language and probing the limits of logic: At the Mad-Hatter's tea party, Carroll encourages us to try our hand at imagining impossible things, Such as when the Dormouse is telling a story about three sisters, learning how to draw: W.

H. Auden, wrote of the two Wonderland books: Carroll was interested in when and why sentences make sense or don't make sense. And explored the systems that make meaning and underly  language.

"Reading and Writing" becomes "Reeling and Writhing". A teacherly turtle becomes a tortoise, because "he TAUGHT us". Misunderstandings abound.

Language rules are endlessly twisted, to suit the whims of anyone speaking. As when Humpty Dumpty declares: But it wasn't just language Carroll was interested in. He also cast aside the laws of physics.

In "Through the Looking Glass" written six years later, Alice  steps through a mirror into a world which is a reverse of her own. The book, which Carroll structured abstractly as a chess problem, plays with the  concept of a world running backwards. The Red Queen explains that in the world on the other side of the Looking Glass, people have to run very fast just to stay where they are, and she later explains that the sequence of cause and effect, is reversed in her kingdom.

A world in which criminals are punished before  their crimes are committed, would have echoes in Franz Kafka, and be explored later in darker  fiction by George Orwell and Philip K Dick. Indeed, despite its whimsical elements there are themes of Darkness or Melancholy in the Alice books: The Queen of Hearts for instance, constantly calls for executions, while the character of The Duchess is often suddenly rude and dismissive: As a result, there is an atmosphere of perilous unpredictability, with all around them on edge. Difficult topics are addressed by Carroll  such as mortality, rationality, and the certainties of regular life.

No other book before had told   children - quite so explicitly: Moreover, there is something  extremely disconcerting about the way Alice is encouraged so frequently to doubt who she is. As a result she struggles to maintain a stable sense of self: Caterpillar: "No I don't see". In an era when people with  mental illness and often the disabled, were locked away from society, Carroll takes a more enlightened  view, perhaps because of his own health issues?

In Alice in Wonderland, being "different" is seen as  positive and liberating, allowing characters to operate without the constraints of societal norms.  Carol's novel might even make us feel like WE are going mad ourselves, and encourages us to explore  unusual and possibly irrational ways of thinking, revealing a world of dreams and subconscious - yet to be fully explored in real life THIS is the anxiety that runs through Carroll's books: For a book that began Life as a story made up by a mathematics teacher on a boating trip in Oxford, Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures  in Wonderland", would go on to have an enormous global cultural impact, particularly in the Arts.  The Surrealists, drawing on Freud's theories of the unconscious, had a deep admiration for Carroll, and  how he combined reality and fantasy, the Uncanny and the illogical.

Salvador Dali, produced many works  around ideas and concepts in the book, as did Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning. Later, the artist Peter Blake featured Carroll in his artwork for the Beatles. And Yayoi Kusama, Illustrated an edition with her trademark polka dots.

Several generations of writers and philosophers, have  taken the Alice book's focus on language and perception extremely seriously. James Joyce cited  the book as an inspiration, as did Henry Miller and Philip Pullman. In 1903 the first Alice in Wonderland  film was released.

Only 9 minutes long, it featured Innovative trick shots, which caused a sensation.  Lewis Carroll, the innovator, would have loved this, but sadly had died 5 years before. Since then, the  book has been filmed over 40 times, in dozens of languages.

As live action, as cartoons, and in stop-  action. There have been at least three operas, a ballet or two, several plays, computer games, graphic  novels, and Broadway musicals. Lewis Carroll's books are timeless and relevant.

Among other things, they encourage us to relish imagination. They teach us the virtues of curiosity, laughter, and  of embracing adventures - and just plain weirdness.