Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland

Read the passage below and answer the questions on loose-leaf:
Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson at Daresbury in Chesire. His father, the Reverend Charles Dodgson, was at that time Curate of the parish. During one picnic – on July 4, 1862, on a blazing summer afternoon – Charles Lutwidge Dodgson began to tell a long story to Alice Liddell (died in 1934), who was the daughter of Henry George Liddell, the head of his Oxford college, where Dodgson was a professor of mathematics. The Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was born from these tales.


Originally the book appeared under the title Alice's Adventures Under Ground. The story centers on the seven-year-old Alice, who falls asleep in a meadow, and dreams that she plunges down a rabbit hole, where finds herself first too large and then too small. She meets such strange characters as Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the King and Queen of Hearts, and experiences wondrous, often bizarre adventures, trying to reason in numerous discussions that do not follow the usual paths of logic. Finally she totally rejects the dream world and wakes up.

1. What is Lewis Carroll's real name?
   
2. What was his profession?
   
3. What was the original title for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? Which title do you prefer? Why?
   
4. What is the basic plot of Alice in Wonderland?
   

The author's life and work has become a constant area for speculation and his exploring of the boundaries of sense and nonsense has inspired a number of psychological studies and novels – and perhaps also the famous English philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The humor of Joseph Heller's famous war novel Catch-22 (1961) is much in debt to Dodgson. In Catch-22 the story centers on the USAF regulation, which suggests that willingness to fly dangerous combat missions must be considered insane, but if the airmen seek to be relieved on grounds of mental reasons, the request proves their sanity. The same laws dominate the Wonderland: "'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.'"

5. Re-read the paragraph above. In your own words, explain the impossible logic of Wonderland using the conversation Alice has with the Cheshire Cat.
   
   

According to Carl Jung, "a typical infantile motif is the dream of growing infinitely small or infinitely big, or being transformed from one to the other – as you find, for instance, in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland." (in Man and His Symbols, 1964) Modern physicist have often compared the world of Lewis Carroll with the incredible phenomena of quantum reality – such as cats that are both alive and dead at the same time ('Schrödinger's cat') or with particles that change their identities for no apparent reason. They are against Alice's common sense: 'I can't believe that!' said Alice. '... one can't believe impossible things. But the White Queen has her own principles: "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.' (from Through the Looking Glass)

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax -
Of cabbages - and kings -
And why the sea is boiling hot -
And whether pigs have wings."
(from 'The Walrus and the Carpenter')

6. What does Jung say about Alice in Wonderland?
   
7. What is the Alice connection to modern physics? Do you think those ideas are “against common sense?
   

At the time of their publication, Alice's adventures were considered children's literature, but now Dodgson's stories are generally viewed in a different light. His work has fascinated such critics as Edmund Wilson and W.H. Auden, and logicians and scientist such as Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. Virginia Woolf remarked, "the two Alices are not books for children; they are the only books in which we become children". In the 1960s rock musicians and hippies were attracted to the surrealistic world of Wonderland, which inspired such songs as Jefferson Airplane's 'White Rabbit' and The Beatles's 'I am the Walrus'.

Dodgson also wrote mathematical works, of which Condensation of Determinants (1866) and An Elementary Treatise On Determinants (1867) established his fame as a significant mathematical theorist. Moreover, Dodgson was a rather exceptional student of Aristotelian logic, and he delighted his friends with games, puzzles and riddles. Dodgson's mock-heroic poem, The Hunting of the Snark (1876), ending with the line "For the Snark was a Bojuum, you see", received mixed reviews when it appeared. The meaning of the poem, which tells of the journey to capture the mythical Snark, has puzzled generations of readers. "I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense!" Dodgson later said.

8. What are some examples of the influence of the Alice books in popular culture?

9. What do you think Virginia Woolf meant by "the two Alices are not books for children; they are the only books in which we become children." What's the difference between a book for children, and a book where we become children?