SLOB Alice in Wonderland edit 2

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a book that changed the course of literature. It is loved by children and philosophers alike. The author, Lewis Carroll, had a childhood that greatly influenced his imaginative writing. He attended a brutal boarding school, which may have influenced the dark elements in his stories. He later attended Oxford, where he was surrounded by rowdy and privileged students. Despite his quiet nature and stutter, Carroll was able to create a world that captured the imagination of both children and adults. You're listening to the Secret Life of Books, with Sophie G and Chauncey Claypole. Today's episode, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in an hour. The cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought. Still, it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect. Cheshire Puss, she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name. However, it only grinned a little wider. Come, it's pleased so far, thought Alice. And she went on. Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? It 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 you only walk long enough. Alice felt this could not be denied, so she tried another question. What sort of people live about here? In that direction, the cat said, waving its paw round, lives a Hatter, and in that direction, waving the other paw, lives a March Hare. Visit either, if you like. They're both mad. But I don't want to go among mad people, Alice remarked. Oh, you can't help that, said the cat. We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad. How do you know I'm mad, said Alice? You must be, said the cat, or you wouldn't have come here. This is from Alice in Wonderland, published in 1865 by Lewis Carroll, which is the pen name of Charles Bodgson. It's a story in which Alice falls down a rabbit hole, has a bunch of bizarre encounters with characters who have entered popular imagination, Mad Hatter, White Rabbit, Cheshire Cat, Queen of Hearts, and at the end, she wakes up because it's all been a dream. It doesn't sound like much when described, and yet this little book is, according to biographers, the most widely translated and quoted book in the Western world, along with the Bible and Shakespeare. Sophie, what's going on? What is the significance of Alice? Yes, it's really fascinating, Jonty, and just before we do go on, I thought you did the cat really, really well. Thank you, yeah. It's not easy to be a cat. Alice in Wonderland's one of those books which is so original, it actually does change the course of literature. So children's books after Alice become less didactic and moralistic, much more playful. It wasn't really a register of writing that had happened before. It's probably unique in being much loved by children and Marxist philosophers in equal measure, and we'll find out why. So over the course of the hour, we're going to unpack many of the ideas in it, and it's going to include Darwin, Marx, Victorian ideas of childhood, photography, I'm sorry to say it's even going to include pornography, Jonty. I know. Shocking. I'm shocked. Yeah. I'm not sure I can go on. Well, we must. We must. So to begin to understand Alice, we really need to understand the man who wrote the book. Right. And I want to start with a quote by Virginia Woolf, oddly enough. She was very interested in Carroll, and she said of him that his childhood lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it, and therefore as he grew older, this impediment in the centre of his being, this hard block of pure childhood, starved the mature man of nourishment. But since childhood remained in him entire, he could do what no one else has ever been able to do. He could return to that world. He could recreate it so that we too become children again. Interesting hearing Woolf so much a writer of adulthood thinking about childhood in that way. John, do you tell us about Dodgson's childhood? Yeah. And I think that's why Woolf is fascinated by him, because he is a man-child or appears like a man-child. That's the way he's come down to us through history. He's born in 1832. He's the third of 11 children, a large family. His father was a priest, so he was born and grew up in a small hamlet called Bearsbury near Liverpool. And then when he's a bit older, his father is promoted and takes over the parish of a small town called Croft-on-Tees in Yorkshire. His father, the Reverend Dodgson, he's rather stern, as you might imagine, from a Victorian priest. Yes, very much so. But he does have flashes of playfulness and indulgence. Charles is also very much a mother's boy. He has a stutter. Oh, interesting. Yeah, we'll talk about later the stutter, because I think it's very important. Daily life is very strictly regulated. There's family prayers, morning and evening, church twice on Sundays, but this is a household dominated by children. And so inevitably, there's a momentum about childhood experience and childhood energy. Of course, that's fascinating, absolutely fascinating, yeah. Charles is the third oldest. He's partly responsible for entertaining his siblings, and he has an amazing imagination. He's always inventing games and creating magazines. And the first magazine, and this is just a family magazine, he creates when he's only 13 years old, and it's called Useful and Instructive Poetry. And it's worth just lingering on for a moment, because so much of his vision is fully formed at this age of 13. He writes most of the poems and stories in them, and they have a satirical tone. What are they called? What are some useful and instructive poems? There's one called My Fairy. Sophie, have you got a bit from My Fairy? I think that's a nice one, too. I do, actually. As I hear your synopsis, it's suddenly occurring to me, Jonty, we didn't even talk about this. Would this all have been happening in a Yorkshire accent? Well, his father's Oxford educated, so they may have been a bubble. They may have been a Queen's English bubble in the north of England. So I think you can channel the Queen. It's your choice. I'm going Anglo-Australian on this one. I have a fairy by my side which says I must not sleep. When once in pain I loudly cried, it said, you must not weep. What may I do? At length I cried, tired of the painful task. The fairy quietly replied and said, you must not ask. The moral is, you must not. Yeah, the fun thing about the stories and poems and useful and instructive poetry is that Charles puts a joke moral at the end of each one. Children's stories always have a moral to them. Yes, it's wonderful. And Charles gives these impossible morals. So the 13-year-old Charles, at the end of one poem, it says, don't dream, and at another it says, never stew your sister. So already there's this fully formed satirical, playful, nonsensical element coming through. That's wonderful, isn't it? Tell us more about Dodgson. Well, I think he has a fairly idyllic childhood until the age of 14, and at 14, like so many middle-class boys in the 19th century, he is sent to boarding school. And Sophie, there are few places you less want to be throughout history than a boy's boarding school in the 19th century. He's sent to rugby, and rugby is an appalling place to be by our standards. It's a brutal environment. Are there fags? There are fags. There's fagging, so the younger boys have to play servants to the older boys. There's appalling ritualized bullying and caning. Massive amounts of corporal punishment. Yeah, and a lot of it is really dangerous. So there was one prank at rugby that was called tossing in a blanket, where you would wrap up a small boy in a blanket, and two older boys would suspend the blanket in front of a fire and roast the boy until the boy would pass out quite often. Really horrifying. And we don't know much about Charles' experience at rugby, except very wonderfully, there is a school exercise book in which he's, and I love this because it feels very modern and reminds me of my childhood. And Charles has written his name, Charles Dodgson, and then in another hand by another boy says, is a muff, and muff is a word for malco or, so I love that, Charles Dodgson is a muff. He spends several joyless years at rugby. He also says later in life, he goes on a visit at one point to a boarding school, and he writes in his diary, nothing would ever induce me to go through that experience of boarding school again. Fascinating. That's about the only thing he says about it. Hard not to speculate, given sort of the way Alice in Wonderland plays out, do you think what was happening sort of on the sodomite front at boarding school, do you think they were... Rife, rife. Yeah. There would have been sodomy left, right and centre. Yeah. There's sodomy in the lavatories, sodomy, sodomy, sodomy. Crumpets and sodomy. Yeah. Yeah. At 19, Charles goes to Oxford and he goes to a college called Christchurch. Harry Potter lovers will recognise parts of Christchurch because in the films, it's filmed at Christchurch, or at least parts of it are, so it is a familiar architectural landscape. I've done a Harry Potter tour of Christchurch with my children. Did they enjoy it? Not as much as I'd hoped, actually, yeah. Christchurch in the 1850s, it's a massive toffs college. It's where very wealthy, young aristocratic men go who have no intention of doing an ounce of work. And there are endless accounts of what Christchurch was like at the time, you know, drunken young men cavorting around, firing off fireworks in the main quad, frequent rioting. On one occasion, some undergraduates used dynamite to blow an enormous hole in the central quad. And there's a wonderful story of another student hearing about an uprising in Balliol College. Yes. And a friend remarks, it was like prisoners breaking out of jail. And this writer says, it was worse than that. It reminds me of Christchurch. So Christchurch was a battleground. Hell on earth, yeah. Of graying, roaring, cavorting toffs. Hoorays, yeah. And it wasn't great to be Charles Dodgson, who's a total nerd and very quiet. And later in life, one fellow student remembered Charles Dodgson and said, oh, yes, I used to see him in hall. He seldom spoke. And the slight impediment in his speech, that's his stutter, was not conducive to conversation. Oh, dear, how unfortunate. So he was a misfit. He is, however, an excellent student. And after graduating, he stays on. And at 24, which is very young, becomes a mathematical lecturer. So he's a mathematician? He's a mathematician, yes. So was he good at maths? Was he passionate about it? Yes, he was. And he publishes, he goes on to publish a number of not insignificant books about mathematics alongside the Alice books. He has another career as Charles Dodgson, rather than Lewis Carroll, in which he's publishing very dry mathematical tomes about algebra. Yes. Well, kids today definitely wouldn't enjoy those. Yeah, no, they wouldn't. And people and students at the time didn't. And we know this because one of his pupils said his lectures were dull as ditch water. What a shame. Imagine, Sophie, if somebody, one of your students, if your students were quietly standing around saying Sophie T. So upsetting. On ratemyprofessor.com. Yes. And there's another lovely story of Charles Dodgson teaching some students and hearing some sniggering and saying, what are you laughing at? And the answer came back, I'm afraid we're laughing at you, sir. Oh, dear, that's terrible. Yes, it is. Poor fellow. Poor fellow. All right. So somewhere along the line, Alice herself must enter into the picture. It's Alice Liddell, isn't it? Yes. A massive transformation moment in Charles's life comes in 1855, where a new dean starts at Christchurch. The dean is the head of the college. And a man called Henry Liddell becomes new dean, and he comes with his young family. So he has some sons and daughters. Charles at this point has developed an interest in photography. He's discovered photography through his uncle, the wonderfully named Skeffington Lutwidge. Oh, it's splendid. Who is also a commissioner in lunacy in London, so is in charge of some of the management of lunatic asylums. Oh, amazing. Mad people. So we're coming back to our mad quote at the start. Yeah, I love it. Skeffington is a photography enthusiast. Photography is a very new art form, and Charles becomes very interested. It's a very cumbersome business, photography. You're not snapping away on a mobile phone. It's full of smelly chemicals and plates of glass and a very convoluted process, and things can go wrong the whole time. Have you confided to me that you actually spent some time in the Christchurch darkroom? Yes, I too was a student of Christchurch. I studied English literature there in the 1990s, and I too was an amateur photographer, and I spent a lot of time in what was then the Christchurch darkroom. Oh, jaunty. Curiouser and curiouser. It was a very nice place to go with a hangover and disappear for eight hours into the smell of chemicals and dim lights of enlarging. Sure, that's what Dodgson enjoyed about it. So there's a famous day in early 1855, Charles is mid-twenties. He has asked the dean's permission to take some photographs from the deanery of the cathedral. While trying to take this photograph, he notices some young girls playing in the garden, and one of whom is Alice Little. Alice is four years old. She has two sisters, the elder Lauren and a younger sister called Edith, and Charles becomes very close with the girls. He's very comfortable with children, which I think is part of his experience of growing up in a household of children, and seeks out their company. And he uses his photography as a way of getting close to the children, because everyone's very curious in photography, and Charles is saying to Alice's mother, oh, I'd like to take some photographs of the girls, wouldn't that be interesting? And so this relationship starts to build, in which Charles will have the girls around for tea with their governess, he'll take photographs. The governess has a comedy name, I think, doesn't she? Miss Prickett. Brilliant. Perfect. Yeah. Okay, so they come for tea, and he takes, well, he doesn't snap them, he photographs them, and does he put them in sort of strange poses, or what do you mean? Yeah, yeah, how does that work? It's the trend of the time, is you put photographic subjects into managed poses, so he'll photograph Alice as a beggar girl, or the Queen of May. Of all the children, Alice is the one who enjoys the experience of being with Charles in photography most of all. Yes, and she reflected on it afterwards, didn't she? She remembered it, and what she said was, we used to go to his rooms, escorted by our nurse, Miss Prickett. When we got there, we used to sit on the big sofa on each side of him, while he told us stories, illustrating them by pencil or ink drawings as he went along. When we were thoroughly happy and amused at his stories, he used to pose us, and expose the plates before the right mood had passed. In this way, the stories, slowly enunciated in his quiet voice with its curious stutter, were perfected. And Alice says, being photographed was a joy to us, and not a penance as it is to most children. We looked forward to the happy hours in the mathematical tutor's rooms. Yes, she's writing that later in life, so she's probably playing to the audience. Knowing that the book had become a huge success. But it is a very evocative scene, isn't it? It's a charming account. It's charming, and I suppose just a little bit creepy, given what we will subsequently learn. Indeed. Yes. We should just touch on some of his other, on Charles's other developing passions at this time. He's like a whimsical renaissance man. He's very good at lots of things, but they're mostly inessential things. He started making a name for himself as a mathematician, so his first book he publishes is an Alice in Wonderland. It is called A Syllabus of Plain Algebraical Geometry Systematically Arranged with Formal Definitions Postulates and Axioms. That sounds fantastic. He publishes many other pamphlets in this vein. Okay. So let's leave his mathematical career behind and think about the sort of circumstances that bring him to Alice. So he's thinking a lot about children's literature, and he's thinking a lot about what it means to be a child. He's actually inspired by Blake and Wordsworth, the romantic poets of childhood, in very different ways, both of whom have idealized childhood and positioned it at a time of great innocence. He's also actually inspired by a book from 1839 called Holiday House, which sounds very Enid Blyton, actually, by a woman named Catherine Sinclair, which Carol gave to the little girls, actually. The subtitle of Holiday House was A Book for the Young, which is about some noisy frolics and children, and although the ending pushes them toward Christian duty, there's a lot of mischief before then. So that's interesting. That's a shift in the way that childhood is supposed to be understood, moving away from being educated in sort of religious precepts. Yeah, and we should just say that children's literature, up until this time, is deeply moralistic, deeply cautionary, deeply Christian. Yes, there's almost a fear of childhood, isn't there, and sort of needing to be contained and sort of managed by Christianity and morality. Anyway, so he's also very inspired by George MacDonald, a very close friend, and George MacDonald has written a book called Fantasties, and it features a large white rabbit, a down-at-heel knight, talking mice, and a magic mirror. So we obviously, they were very much in conversation with one another, and then MacDonald also wrote a story called Cross Purposes, which came out before Alice, and that follows the adventures of a girl called Alice, and she lives on the borders of fairyland and is shrunk into a fairy and she goes into a magic pool, and in that book, MacDonald writes, down and down she went. So he's, Alice is a very purposeful project, it doesn't come out of nowhere. Yeah, there's a few precedents bubbling away, but none of them are going the full leap that Alice does. I just want to say something else about his photography, which is it very quickly develops from a amateur hobby, he becomes very good at it, and he uses photography in the way that lots of people still use photography as a way of managing social anxiety, so he can hide behind his camera. Yes, I see, it's a sort of prop to manage anxiety. Right, and he used it to get access to the great and good, so this very shy young man starts writing to the great and good saying, I would love to take your photograph, because photography is a new art form, people are curious and say yes, so he collects very quickly portraits of minor royals, there's bishops, there's politicians, he gets access to leading poets and artists like Tennyson, John Ruskin, and the Rosettis, so photography is starting to open up the world for him. That's really interesting, so he's actually moving in pretty elevated circles, and he's moving in artistic and literary circles, again, sort of not working, he's not a sort of lone mathematician. And then what's happening with his speech impediment, because there's a lot of play with language in Ellis, is that in the mix? Yes, it is, towards the end of the 1850s, part of the deal as being a mathematical lecturer at Christchurch is you also need to take holy orders, that's a condition of the lectureship, and he actually goes and gets ordained, so while being an emerging mathematician and photographer and writer, he's also getting ordained and starting to preach, he hates preaching, because he blocks on words, which is when you stutter, certain words you can't get out, and you're left gaping like a goldfish. And he's begun seeing a very prestigious speech therapist called James Hunt, to try and treat his stutter, and it doesn't really work all that well, and so although he gets ordained, he doesn't follow through to become a practicing priest. Anyway, into Ellis in Wonderland. So one day, it's a summer's day, imagine Sophie, if you will, it's a summer's day, July 1862, and Charles has arranged to take the little girls on a river trip. He does this quite often, he takes them off on a boat and they'll go upriver away from Oxford to some of the meadows nearby. They're punting, aren't they? I was wondering that, because that's a long way to punt, having punted. Yes, you don't want to go far, do you? No, you don't want to go too far, so I would imagine it's rowing, but that is a very good question. Great question, I'll ask the research team. Ellis is 10 by this point, so he's known her for six years, so there must be a real intimacy of friendship and relationship, and Lewis Carroll later himself describes what happens that day. Yes, and he recalls it in this way. Many a day had we rowed together on that quiet stream, the three little maidens and I, and many a fairy tale had been extemporised for their benefit. Yet none of these many tales got written down. They lived and died like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon, until there came a day when, as it chanced, one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her. I distinctly remember now, as I write, how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was going to happen afterwards. Full many a year had slipped away since that golden afternoon that gave the birth, but I can call up, almost as clearly as if it were yesterday, the tinkle of the drops that fell from the oars as they waved so sleepily to and fro, and the three eager faces hungry for news of fairyland. But this is sort of a bit of a make-up, isn't it? Is that true? Yes, it's him looking back and telling the story. By the way, I'm very glad you cleared up the punting. I was really suffering. Yes, that is Lewis Carroll, as he was by that point, many years later, romanticising this day. Interestingly, in his diary, the entry for that day is very, very short. It's a nothing day. It just says, you know, took the girls rowing, that was it. So, yes, it wasn't a particularly significant day. Probably not even a golden afternoon. I mean, let's face it, for those of us who've summoned in Oxford, it's not likely. No, it was probably drizzling and a bit wet and everyone was a bit miserable. Kind of bad mood. Yes, English summer. Anyway, so he publishes the book in 1865 and the illustrations that are so famous of the caterpillar with the hooker and the mad hatter and so on, by John Tenniel, they come out with the book at the same time, don't they? Yes, they're very iconic, those images, and they're very much part of how we imagine and think about Alice today. And what happens? Do people go for it straight away? Well, they do. It's not one of those genre-changing books which dies a death and then 50 years later people start remarking how wonderful it is. So it's not like Moby Dick. It's immediately... It sells pretty well. The reviews are almost unanimously positive. The word original is used a lot. So people recognise this is something new and the sales just begin to escalate and escalate. And there's a wonderful story that a copy makes its way to Queen Victoria and she likes it so much she asks her courtiers, she says, you know, I must have a copy of this man's next book. And a few months later she's duly sent a copy of an elementary treatise on determinants with the application to simultaneous linear equations and algebraic geometry. I love that. That's brilliant. OK, so it's a huge hit. Why? Yes, it's original and it's striking and obviously its reputation has gathered an enormous amount of legend around it in the intervening decades and centuries. But why does it have so much impact at the time, do you think? There's a number of reasons. I think the first, and this is so significant, is that Alice in Wonderland has no moral. It is a children's book that is not trying to propagate a Christian ethical moral code and children's books, as we've said, were up to that point very dry and moralistic and adult talking down to a child. And Alice is pure anarchy. Yes, it is, isn't it? In fact, Alice spends... So imagine you're a Victorian child, seven or eight years old, and you are being read or you are reading a book in which the heroine, Alice, spends the entire time doing all those things children are told not to. It begins with her running off on her own. A child should never do that. She dives down a rabbit hole, you should not do that. She spends the entire book talking to complete strangers and as we know, you should not speak to strangers. And worst of all, she eats anything and everything she gets her eyes on. She drinks little potions, she could be drinking poison. She even at one point tears chunks off a very colourful mushroom which would probably kill you in real life. And munches great chunks. It's incredibly exciting for children. Yes, it's wonderful, isn't it? And when you think about it, so much of Western literature and genre in Western literature is structured around morality. So tragedies take the shape they do, a character shows hubris, they have to have their comeuppance and they have to die. Or in comedy, like Shakespeare's comedies, social order is thrown into a kind of glorious chaos and then everything has to be knitted back again at the end so social decorum and cohesion can continue. If you take the moral out of literature, you basically become plotless. You can do whatever you want. And the wonderful thing about Alice in Wonderland is that it really does have very little in the way of plot. It's a series of encounters and adventures that don't quite add up. It's literally incidental, isn't it? And, you know, I love what you're saying about the absence of morality and that also kind of including the absence of plot because Carroll or Dodgson really writes to the child audience as though the child were an adult. He sort of assumes the same level of, you know, quite knowing, almost ironic comprehension. There's a moment when Alice, this question of morality sort of enters the book itself and he writes that Alice had quite forgotten the Duchess by this time, who's a rather monstrous character and was a little startled when she heard her voice close to her ear. You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can't tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember in a bit. Perhaps it hasn't got one, Alice ventured to remark. Tuck, tuck, child, said the Duchess. Everything's got a moral. If only you can find it. And she squeezed herself up closer to Alice's side. As she spoke. I love that squeezing because it's rather menacing. Very. So it's an adult saying everything's got a moral and then squeezes up to her side. So unpleasant. And so was Dodgson sort of conscious of his shift to, you know, to refuse a moral, to kind of... Yes, yes. And of course, many grown-ups and adults can't really cope with the idea that there's no moral. They think there has to be one. And so he's constantly asked afterwards when he encounters people, you know, what's it really about? What's it saying to our children? And there's one point later where he writes in an essay with an air of exasperation, the why of this book cannot and need not be put into words. So he's saying there is no why, there is no reason. And it's why in telling the story later about the genesis of the book, he uses the word extemporise. He's insisting that I just sent her down a rabbit hole. I see. I had no idea. It was improv. Yes. And as you say, he's not talking down at children. The whole book is at child's level. And it's the first time in literature you feel that a narrator is down on their knees... Yes, literally, they go down the rabbit hole sort of together. And, you know, I love what you're saying here because it sort of makes me think about other contemporary writers who we strongly associate with childhood. Charles Dickens, for example, writes a great deal about children around about the same time. Childhood Copperfield comes out in 1850, Hard Times, which, you know, very much a morality tale about the sort of the need to protect children is 1854. Great Expectations, another amazing meditation on childhood in its way, is actually just immediately before Alice. It's 1860 to 1861. But the thing about Dickens is he's always looking at childhood obviously through the lens of an adult perspective and the goal of being a child is to become an adult. And Carroll or Dodgson is really not doing that. I was struck, reading it this time, by how incredibly rude everybody is and how much like the way children speak that is. Children are always, especially young children, very rude to one another. They don't bother with social niceties. And there's that moment where Alice goes to the Madhouse's tea party and she's offered wine by the March Hare. He says, have some wine, in an encouraging tone. And Alice looks around. I don't see any wine, she remarks. There isn't any, said the March Hare. Then it wasn't very civil of you to offer it, said Alice, angrily. It wasn't very civil of you to sit down without being invited, said the March Hare. I didn't know it was your table, said Alice. It's laid for a great many more than three. Your hair wants cutting, said the Hatter. Your hair wants cutting. Yes, I mean, we should say Alice isn't particularly likeable. She's just as irascible as the characters she encounters. And I think, to your point about Dickens, Dickens sentimentalises childhood. Whereas Lewis Carroll, he sees children as being three-dimensional human beings. Yes. They're not necessarily dudes. Exactly. Although he does think they are. He does think they are. But he allows them to be irascible and grumpy and accepts them on those terms. And he doesn't have an adult voice coming in and correcting them. No. You were starting to get into there when you were talking about the rudeness. I think we should talk about the brutality of the book. Yes, it's a very violent book. And I think many of us, we were speaking about this when we started planning this episode, many of us recall being quite disturbed by Alice in Wonderland. And in fact, it may be one of the reasons that children often don't particularly like it. There are many very distressing moments, the sort of climactic one being when the Duchess, who we've already met, is nursing a baby, which in fact turns out to be a pig. And she's so horrible and violent towards it. But, you know, many moments of this kind, the famous croquet game where they play croquet with flamingos who they hold upside down and use their necks to hit the ball with and hedgehogs as balls. I think it's the poor mock turtle who's sobbing and sobbing and sobbing, just endlessly caught in this sort of stupor of melancholia about not being a real turtle. Or in fact, the white rabbit constantly looking at his watch. He's got a sort of OCD anxiety. None of this is forgiven or particularly acknowledged in the book. It all just sort of happens in this very brutal way. Yes, he's rather like Lady Macbeth of the OCD. Yes, yes, that's amazing. Which we've done in another episode. Yeah, the episode about Lady Macbeth. We should do an episode on OCD and literature at some point. Very rich. Yes. So, you know, for example, the Duchess, we learn that she begins nursing her child again, singing a sort of lullaby to it as she did so and giving it a violent shake at the end of every line. And she says this nursery rhyme, which is speak roughly to your little boy and beat him when he sneezes. He only does it to annoy because he knows it teases. It's very, it's actually a very provocative and rebellious view of childhood. I found those scenes with the Duchess as a child terrifying. And when I was rereading the book last week, there's still something very unsettling about it. Yes. Why is the world of Wonderland? Because it's called Wonderland, so you'd expect it, you'd expect Wonderland just to be lovely and wonderful. Yes, and like the garden that she sees at the beginning, which looks so green and lovely and she wants to get into it, but it's not. And it's a rather brutal, aggressive, competitive world. And one of the themes of this podcast is that every book has a secret history behind it. It also has a series of secret figures or secret players. And I think that the secret players in Alice, in addition, of course, to Alice herself, Alice Liddle, and the circle that surrounded Dodgson at Oxford, I think the other key figures include Charles Darwin, the great evolutionary biologist who entirely changed the human conception of how life evolved. And so The Origin of Species, his great work on this subject, is published in 1859. So it's just before. Just before. And I think there's a string of books after Origin of Species comes out, all of which are reflecting on this, you know, major disturbance in the account of how human life and life more generally evolves. So there's a famous literary critic named William Empson who wrote about Dodgson being influenced by Darwin's thought. And he pointed to things like rapid changes in size and obsession with eating, this idea that humans in Alice in Wonderland are in a sort of violent, predatory, competitive relationship with other members of the animal kingdom. Empson and other critics, another very well-known English critic named Gillian Beer has written about this at length. And there's this suggestion perhaps that the Pool of Tears, which Alice cries at the beginning of the novel, is a kind of parody or riff on a primordial sea. You know, there are lots of little traces, little hits all over the place. I mean, for example, the appearance of the dodo early on. You know, famous at the time as this extinct bird even then that invited everybody to reassess how the evolution of species occurred, how change happened over time. So I think Dodgson is sort of playing with Darwin. He's teasing at Darwin. He's also actually sort of claiming back some of this glamour and credit that Darwin's getting for what literary texts can do. More of a stretch, but I want to make the stretch, is to say that I think Karl Marx is in the book too, or at least his kind of absolutely pivotal importance in the European world of the mid-19th century is kicking around. I mean, you've pointed out that there's class struggle. Definitely. So Wonderland is not a classless society as you might expect Wonderland to be. Yes. All of the characters have an accent. There's Cockney accents, there's working class accents, there's also very posh accents because we have royalty and the Queen of Hearts. So in Wonderland, we have all the different classes thrown together in a constant struggle. Yes. So Karol is very aware of class struggle and is again having fun with it in the way that he's having fun with evolution. Yes, and the means of production and the base and the superstructure. All these concepts would have been, you know, very much in the water at the time. The other thing I'd sort of want to mention just because of my academic disposition is the moment kind of early on in Alice where she's trying to remember the words to what she says is a poem or a rhyme, but actually would have been a hymn probably. How Doth the Little Busy Bee is what she's trying to remember and Dodgson parodies it and writes a rhyme How Doth the Little Crocodile. So the figure being referred to here would have been Isaac Watts who's an 18th century writer. He's known as the father of English hymnody. So he has written many of the most famous hymns that are sung in the Protestant tradition including Joy to the World, for example. And Watts depicts in his hymns a hyper-rationalist 18th century view of an orderly world organized by orderly poetry. And Dodgson in doing How Doth the Little Crocodile sort of grabs this artefact of 18th century reason and he writes instead a kind of Darwinian fable of disorder. So Dodgson writes How cheerfully he seems to grin how neatly spread his claws and welcome little fishes in with gently smiling jaws. I think that's also part of the removing immorality from children's stories. So you can imagine how dry How Doth the Little Busy Bee would be. I mean, you don't even know more than the title to know that it's going to be we all need to be good Christian worker bees in society. That's right. And to replace busy bee with aggressive crocodile. Yes, it's delightful. And then, you know, the other thing that had just happened was an interest in the world under the ground. So Jules Verne published Journey to the Centre of the Earth in 1864. People were becoming fascinated by fossils, paleontology, the idea of geologic time. Darwin, of course, also wrote about geology and the sort of layers or strata of time actually by travelling to Australia. And it's also actually the moment where the first underground railway is built in London. The underground started running probably about two months before the famous rowing expedition. I always forget that the underground has been going since the 1860s. Yes, it's very old. The first Indian restaurant opened in London at the same time. And so young men, as early as the 1860s could get the tube into town, have a curry. Have a curry. Yeah, so... It's all coming together. But wearing their top hats rather than their polo shirts. Yes. And lots of facial hair, I think. A lot of facial hair and unusual facial hair. Handlebars rather than... Whiskers. On Journey to the Centre of the Earth, we should say that the original version of Alice that Lewis Carroll, Charles Bodgson, gives to Alice Liddell isn't called Alice in Wonderland. It's called Alice's Adventures Underground. You're right. You're right. Good change of title, but very revealing that that was what he was initially thinking. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So one of the things I think that we're really struck by when we actually read Alice in Wonderland is the extraordinary playfulness of the language. And it's sometimes... I mean, he does nonsense just absolutely brilliantly, doesn't he? Yes. Lewis Carroll is obsessed by the slipperiness and unreliability of language. And a lot of the fun of the book comes from punning. He is the master of the dad joke. Lewis Carroll loves a pun. But it's more than just humour. He uses puns as a substitute for plot. So, for instance, when Alice has cried and created a large pool of tears and all these other little animals, mice and things, are caught floating around, they all swim together to dry land and there's a conversation about how to get dry Oh, I see. And so the mouse gives a lecture about William the Conqueror and it's very dry, so it's a pun. And then, having done that, the mouse decides to tell its tale and its tale is... You have to see it on the page. It's a piece of concrete poetry of a little tail but in the shape of a mouse's tail. Oh, tail, tail. And this is several times in the book that the mouse tells its tale and it's very dry. So it's a pun. And then, having done that, the mouse decides to tell its tale and its tale is... You have to see it on the page. It's a piece of concrete poetry of a little tail And this is several pages of the book are just being led by puns. So, Lewis Carroll doesn't just make a pun. He lets the pun steal a narrative off in an entirely entirely different direction. I see. I see. So a sort of piece of misfired language changes narrative. Yeah, because the Mock Turtle is always punning, isn't he? I mean, the Mock Turtle sort of is... He's not a pun but he's certainly a play on language. Mock Turtle soup being soup that had not, in fact, been made with a turtle. And again, there's a lot And again, there's several pages of the Mock Turtle punning about his marine education. So, rather than geography, he studied theography. There's a classics master who's an old crab. Oh, lovely. It's very, very Octonauts. Very Octonauts. It is very Octonauts. Sound the... All right, so what's... I mean, you've mentioned that Dodgson had a stuff out. Yeah. Do you think there's something there's a connection? I do. I thought a lot about this. I had a very acute stutter as a child through to my adult years. And so, I have a lot of interest in the way stuttering has impacted writers and creative individuals. You've written a book about it. I've written it. It's a fantastic book. And one thing that's very rarely written about in any depth by biographers or scholars is Charles Dodgson's commitment to speech therapy. In 1859, he goes and spends a number of weeks at a speech therapy boot camp in Haiti with this eminent speech therapist called James Hunt. Now, I know from personal experience that to make to put that degree of time aside to go and deal with one's speech is not a minor concern in his life. It's a real source of anxiety and stress and he's willing to make that commitment. Yeah. Is it sort of exposure therapy? Is that in the mix? Yeah. So, what they did at this boot camp it was group therapy which we think of as a very 20th century phenomenon but this is the 1860s. That's amazing actually because it's pre-Freud. It is pre-Freud and James Hunt would have his clients who they would all stay in a house together and he would have them spend a day doing activities together reading aloud, giving little speeches. Fascinatingly, at James Hunt's residency, Charles Kingsley who writes The Water Babies was also treated by James Hunt and friends in Hastings is George McDonald who you talked about Sophie as probably Lewis Carroll's greatest influence as a children's writer and Charles meets George McDonald in Hastings through James Hunt and they become very, very firm friends. So, it's almost like a sort of happy redoing of boarding school. Yeah. I like to think that modern fantasy literature as we know it which emerges through George McDonald Charles Kingsley emerges through James Hunt's drawing room in Hastings. I love that and organized by this the problem of language basically. Yeah. And one of the things that James Hunt does as a therapist is he tries to make his clients feel more relaxed about language to feel less tyrannized by language. In the Victorian era, if you're middle class, the professional routes open to you. You want to become a lawyer, a barrister, they're pretty limited and they all depend on very fluent use of speech. So, if you're like Charles Dodgson and you have a very pronounced stutter, these career paths are closing down in front of you and I think that's part of the reason why he loves the Don's life so much. I see. And part of the reason why he loves his camera and photography because he can hide behind it. He quotes John Locke, the philosopher, in his book called Stuttering and Stammering. That's James Hump's book in which John Locke writing in the 1690s points out that if you think about the confusions that language leads us to through the ambiguities, the uncertainties, you have to question whether language has not been as much a hindrance to human civilization as it has been a positive and I think if you're Lewis Carroll and hearing that you take great comfort from it and for me one of the things he's doing in Alice in Wonderland is following that through is by taking the ambiguities of language and the puns of it and just pushing them so far that everything unravels. Alice struggles to get anywhere because she's always stuck in these punning conversations that don't really allow her But it's wonderfully creative as well isn't it? I think of Carroll as being someone who invents language and gives us words we didn't have before. He's a great master of what's called the portmanteau word and a portmanteau word is when two words are crushed together to create a new word. So motor, car, and hotel becomes motel for instance. Lewis Carroll invents several which are now inventing Lewis Carroll words. Portmanteau words are also a side product of stuttering. So if you have a stutter as I know from experience you often try to manage your stutter by galloping along your speech and when you gallop your speech words start to collapse together and you end up saying rather strange and unusual words. So various scholars have looked at how Charles Dodgson's portmanteau creations are a result of his stuttering as well. Yes. So I suppose what's dawning on me as you're taking us through this history of Alice in Wonderland and we're hearing the language and we're also putting it into the context of what was going on at the time. A book that seems to be without history. A book that actually seems to literally leave time behind and leave its historical moment behind. A book that seems to leave a person's unconscious not to be about a life lived in the sort of realm of reason and ordinary life. What you're sort of helping me see anyway is that it's deeply in contact with the most important intellectual debates of the time historical patterns of the time and of course Dodgson's own really quite well. We've got a few more minutes and I think that we need to talk about the elephant in the room which was Carol's fascination with young girls. Are you willing to go there? Yes. It does need to be talked about in the way that we need to talk about any artist who has a difficult path and possibly immoral path to their life and it gathers momentum over the course of his life. In the 1990s there was an emerging scholarship that really began to put a light on what they called Lewis Carroll's pedophiliac tendencies that his obsession with young children isn't just a fascination with innocence and childhood it's also sexualized. There has also been a backlash against that over the last 15 years. Well that's just because after he died Lewis Carroll's family did a lot of destroying of diary entries and evidence and the bits that they were destroying would have been what the family at the time might have called the red-blooded heterosexual activity, the affairs with adult women although there's no evidence that ever happened. I see. So the scholars have been talking about heterosexuality having relationships with adult women but there's a lot of evidence to the contrary isn't there? There's a lot of it and we should say as well that by the time Lewis Carroll publishes Alice in Wonderland he's no longer close with Alice or the Liddell's family. While he's still alive we do know that he and the Liddell's don't speak for half a year afterwards. Now every biographer fills this void with their own personal theory so one theory is that he in some way proposed to Alice who was only 11 by that point. That is an astonishing and shocking possibility I was just thinking that putting it in context in some ways makes it worse. Just to do the incriminating evidence for a moment there are very unsettling things about Lewis Carroll which emerge through his diaries. In 1863 for instance which is when he's writing Alice he creates a list of all the little girls he would like to take photographs of little girls and these photographs are not entirely innocent because after he becomes famous he uses his celebrity status to start photographing little girls naked and he will write to the mothers of girls he likes and say oh it would be fascinating to photograph and it does seem very disturbing photographs of young girls often in quite provocative poses and it's not seen entirely as normal for the time there are a number of occasions where mothers balk at the suggestion and then what he does is that thing of feigning outrage factoid I'll give he starts holidaying in Eastbourne during the summer and he loves it because there's a lot of families and children in Eastbourne and in his diaries he keeps a running telly of the child friends or the little girlfriends as he sometimes calls them that's really incriminating and it's all about befriending the parents it's the completely unknown element is whether anything happens and certainly like he's clearly wrestling with it because often in his diaries says you know the idea that there might be anything untoward is outrageous yes but then I'm reminded you told me that when the falling out river outing in 1863 before the incident which results in the page as being ripped out of the diary his last river outing he says in his diary it was a very pleasant expedition with a very pleasant ending so what was the very pleasant ending to this river river outing it's such a big question because it affects it's often talked about as the Victorian era was different there was quote cult of little girls you know young men at Oxford would take Don's daughters out for tea parties but as a literary historian and Sophie what's your I mean what's your take on this yes you know we've been told that this was a language was introduced to make socially acceptable something that was is profoundly unacceptable and would have been understood as unacceptable at the time I mean we've sort of said this is pre-Freud and yes it is it's certainly pre-Winnicott the good enough the good normality isn't named in the book and yet one comes away with a feeling of things having gone radically awry but that's my take so I think that there's violence even a sort of colonizing impulse I almost want to say what do you think yeah it's really hard I mean it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's