May 2024
and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll is a wizard with words. A word wizard if you will. I've spent quite some time immersed in the wonderful world(s) of Alice that by the time Humpty Dumpty came around, things actually started making sense to me. In a nonsensical kind of way of course. I daresay, they might have even become logical.
The author, Lewis Carroll a.k.a. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics tutor originally from Cheshire (yes like the cat) came up with a pseudonym in quite a wonderland-esque manner. He translated his name to Latin. Charles Ludwidge became Carolus Ludovicus. Then proceeded to translate it back to English and switched it around, ending up with Lewis Carroll. If that's not upside down turned inside out I don't know what is.
He was a friend of the Liddell family and in particular quite fascinated with Alice Liddell. His involvement with the Liddell children feels reminsicent of the fondness J.M. Barrie had for the Llewellyn Davies family.
I suppose we all know Lewis Carroll having made up this story for Alice Liddell on a boat trip during the summer of 1862. Later, at the request of Alice penning it down under the name of Alice's Adventures Under Ground which would eventually be published in 1865 as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Interesting little fact, when Alice was forced to sell her original copy of Alice's Adventures Under Ground. It was displayed at Columbia University and she was invited to the presentation. There, Alice met Peter Llewellyn Davies. This meeting in turn inspired a play written by John Logan called Peter and Alice, starring Judi Dench and Ben Wishaw.
The edition that I have contains the books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass as well as the original printed version of Alice's Adventures Under Ground (with illustrations by Carroll himself) and many notes on all three titles.
What if I told you, for instance, that in the original draft there was no Cheshire cat? Or a Mad Hatter. Or a March Hare? Or even a tea party! How curious would that be. Very curious indeed. It simply wouldn't do. After all, it's always tea time. And how can it be tea time if there's no tea party?
Wonderland and Looking-Glass have a fair bit in common, they both take place in dreamscapes. They have riddles without answers, pushy royals and creatures reciting poetry. Yet, they're still quite different. I find Looking-Glass to be a little darker than Wonderland. There's this sense of sorrow about growing up in the second book. Alice wants to evolve from a pawn to a Queen, but it comes with hurdles and when she finally gets her wish it doesn't seem all it's cracked up to be. This of course reflecting Carroll's own ideas about youth no doubt. In Wonderland the struggle is more so about identity, even though there's literal growing and shrinking of Alice's form. She feels quite different all the time and is losing track of who she is. Which I think is a familiar feeling to those of us who have grown and shrunken in our lives as many times as Alice has.
"Who are you?" said the Caterpillar.
"I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then."
"What do you mean by that?" said the Caterpillar, sternly. "Explain yourself!"
"I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, Sir," said Alice, "because I'm not myself you see."
Identities can be lost, but they can also be found again. Or invented. As Dodgson himself did with his alter ego. He even went as far as to treat Carroll as a separate person to himself.
I think the search for one's "self" never truly ceases. As we grow, we change. Then a new self emerges. Sometimes this happens a little faster than we were prepared for and we have to get to know our new selves all over again. And once we have, we've changed once more already. Perhaps that is why we, at times, feel so behind. Not in comparison to others, but in comparison to ourselves.
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where-" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"- so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if only you walk long enough."
The great debate of both books is of course, is it all nonsense or does it contain meaning? The King of Hearts himself and Alice both frequently ponder this. There is no definitive answer if you ask me. Herein lies the beauty of stories after all. It can be both or either or neither. Depending on who you are. At this point in time. Which might be quite different from who you'll be tomorrow or who you were yesterday. Just ask your self.
Looking-Glass contains a great deal more poetry than Wonderland. Alice keeps encountering characters who will insist on reciting the longest of poems and songs to her, which she politely suffers of course. Most famously 'Jabberwocky', the only poem she reads in a book. My feelings about this poem (and indeed possibly the entire book) is immediately after, summed up quite nicely by Alice.
"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas- only I don't exactly know what they are!"
You get what you need out of them and leave the rest. That's what I believe to be true about all books, but these two in particular. They're so wonderfully weird and outrageously odd that you'll be no worse off for having read them either way.
Everything means something and nothing means everything.
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