Did You Know?
Alice's Annotators:
Alice in Wonderland has attracted more "serious" adult
attention than nearly any other children's book in the world.
Besides the academics who study the book's psychological symbolism, or
its development of the dream-world of children, it has also long been a favorite
for adults who enjoy the logical, linguistic, and mathematical games which
Carroll built into his stories. In
1960, the mathematician and popular writer Martin Gardner released a footnoted
edition called The Annotated Alice, which contains long and often hilarious
footnotes on Carroll's references and contemporaries.
To illustrate his points, Gardner discusses topics ranging from English
history and symbolic logic to the theories of right- and left-handed molecules,
and quotes sources ranging from Jack Kerouac to Socrates.
It's an entertaining read, and for many people, Gardner's footnotes are
now as indispensable to the Alice experience as John Tenniel's classic 1865
illustrations. (Gardner himself
acknowledges in his introduction that "there is something preposterous
about an annotated Alice," but seems to enjoy exploring Carroll's nonsense
too much to want to stop.)
The Real 'Alice'?:
Alice is based on a real person -- Alice Liddell, who was one of Lewis Carroll's
many female "child-friends," and the daughter of one of the deans at
Oxford University where Carroll lived and taught.
The Alice in John Tenniel's pictures isn't based on the real Alice,
though. Descriptions and pictures of Alice Liddell, including
numerous photographs which Carroll took of her himself, show that she had short
dark hair with straight bangs instead of the Wonderland Alice's long blond hair.
Alice Liddell seems, however, to have had a mesmerizing face and
personality.
Carroll -- who Alice would have known by his real name, the Rev. Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson -- also put numerous in-jokes into Alice in Wonderland,
including references to Alice's real life that only the Liddell family would
understand. Many of the characters
are based on people Carroll and the Liddells knew: Alice Liddell's sisters
Lorina and Edith have cameos as the Lory and the Eaglet in the Pool of Tears.
And the Dodo is thought to represent Carroll himself, with his awkward
way of talking and his long words. (The
Dodo's name would be a pun on the first syllable of Carroll's real name, Dodgson
-- who, as Martin Gardner notes, sometimes stammered when he spoke.)
Alice's
Influence: Alice in Wonderland is one of the most often-quoted books in
English, up there with the big boys like the Bible and Hamlet.
It's also been inspiring creative artists for a hundred-plus years,
leaving its mark on books, TV, movies and pop music -- everywhere from science
fiction to rock 'n' roll. In
literature, Alice is a central inspiration for dozens of works; these range from
Douglas Hofstadter's "musico-logical" cult favorite Godel,
Escher, Bach (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979) to the bizarre Vurt
by English author Jeff Noon (1994) -- a sort of drug-cyberpunk dream set in a
future Manchester. As Vurt
's topic suggests, Alice also had a popular revival in the1960s and
1970s, when many young people experimented with altered mental states, and
Jefferson Airplane's 1967 song "White Rabbit" forever linked Alice's
dreamlike imagery to drug culture: "One pill will make you larger, and one
pill will make you small... Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you
the call... Go ask Alice when she's ten feet tall."
As for movies and TV, Alice has been everywhere. Aside from the many live-action and cartoon versions of Alice
in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, references keep popping
up in unexpected places -- from a gigantic white rabbit hopping through a 1966
episode of Star Trek, to the psychosexual imagery of a 1985 Tom Petty
music video, to the "rabbit hole" virtual-reality jargon of the smash
1999 action/sci-fi movie The Matrix.
Look for this month's reference to Alice on TV or in the movies.
It's all around you...
