The Modern Library Children's Classics

by Kenneth Grahame

  Anon, to sudden silence won,

  In fancy they pursue

  The dream-child moving through a land

  Of wonders wild and new,

  In friendly chat with bird or beast—

  And half believe it true.

  Worse still is the tone of the final verse of dedication:

  Alice! a childish story take,

  And with a gentle hand

  Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined

  In Memory’s mystic band,…

  Alice is not a dream-child. It is her solidity that is magical. The wonders are not wild or strange but odd and curious. The chat with the birds and beasts is far from friendly. The tale is not childish though its heroine is a child. And so on. Any good child reader can recognize the forced note of grown-up whimsy twining mystic bands. Worse in a way is Carroll’s later description of his heroine in his article “Alice on the Stage”:

  What wert thou, dream-Alice, in thy foster-father’s eyes? How shall he picture thee? Loving first, loving and gentle: loving as a dog (forgive the prosaic simile, but I know no earthly love so pure and perfect) and gentle as a fawn: then courteous—courteous to all, high or low, grand or grotesque, King or Caterpillar, even as though she were herself a King’s daughter, and her clothing of wrought gold: then trustful, ready to accept the wildest impossibilities with all that utter trust that only dreamers know; and lastly, curious—wildly curious, and with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but names—empty words signifying nothing!

  This is very odd indeed when it is analyzed. For one thing the Alice we read is not loving, although she is shown as having an affection for her cat Dinah and her kittens—one of the reasons for the successful creation of the Alice-world, I have come to think, is the almost complete absence of any object of love, attachment, or fear from Alice’s connections. Her sister appears in a sentimental postscript but she has no friends and no ghost of parents or relatives—she exists in self-sufficient isolation, and therefore the kings and queens are not transmuted parental figures, nor even governesses and servants. There is nothing at all fawning or doglike about Alice—the idea is absurd. She is already considerably less innocent than either dog or fawn. She thinks. She is well brought-up and well mannered—I used as a child to admire the way she (on the whole and until provoked beyond endurance) kept her temper. But she cannot be described with that medieval chivalric word “courteous” in the context of also being described as a “King’s daughter” in “clothing of wrought gold,” without the reader feeling that something is very wrong. And Carroll, who has triumphantly written a whole children’s story for Victorian children without any mention of Sin or Sorrow then feels compelled to bring them to the fore in his tribute to his imaginary foster-daughter. Perhaps the best explanation of the difficult disjuncture between the saccharine Dodgson of the child-friends and the poetic stock responses, and Alice, is his description of how the story was written almost involuntarily—he speaks of himself in the third person as “the narrator,” and says “fancies unsought came crowding thick upon him”:

  In writing it out I added many ideas which seemed to grow of themselves upon the original stock; and many more added themselves when, years afterwards, I wrote it all over again for publication: but (this may interest some readers of “Alice” to know) every such idea and nearly every word of the dialogue, came of itself.

  Hugh Haughton remarks that this insistence on the automatism is “a founding state of dissociation comparable to psychoanalytic or Surrealistic ‘free association.’ ” Alice has been a heroine to the Surrealists as well as to the psychoanalytic movement. The description reminds me of Coleridge describing the composition of “Kubla Khan” as a series of vivid spectra rising involuntarily in his mind’s eye. But Coleridge thought mythically and metaphorically. Dodgson was a logician, a man whose dreams as well as his waking dreams were of problem solving, inventing new, useful devices to find the day of any calendar date in any year, new board games, new word games. What Dodgson found was not a primeval fairyland, nor any ancient gods or princess in gold, but the workings of the brain, the nature of language, as lived by both young girls and grown men.

  What can I really manage to remember of my early readings and rereadings of the Alice books? Three things I am fairly certain of. The first is the reading child’s pleasure at being alone in a world not subject to daily laws, either physical or conventional. I don’t think I ever “identified with” Alice, but I watched her, puzzling over the irrational and obstructive behavior of the creatures, having problems with time and space and speed and distance, making, so to speak, local and provisional attempts to make sense of things. The world was problematic, from instructions on bottles and impossibly tiny doors to the hurt feelings of mice and the rules of walking and cutting cakes in a mirror world. I felt, I think, both that she was doing better than I would have done—she was braver and more forthright—and that I was in a position to judge her.

  The second thing I remember is linguistic delight. It was Alice that made me conscious of thinking about words, from delight in the nonsense words and mad definitions in “Jabberwocky” to the ludicrous misinterpretations of the two Queens.

  Here the Red Queen began again. “Can you answer useful questions?” she said. “How is bread made?”

  “I know that!” Alice cried eagerly. “You take some flour——”

  “Where do you pick the flower?” the White Queen asked. “In a garden, or in the hedges?”

  “Well, it isn’t picked at all,” Alice explained: “it’s ground——”

  “How many acres of ground?” said the White Queen. “You mustn’t leave out so many things.”

  The third thing I remember—though how I should have put it into words as a child I do not know—is that this was a book about working out who you were. About identity, constant and threatened. I was pleasantly frightened by Alice’s changes of size, by her chin hitting her feet, which I thought was dreadfully funny, by her growing as large as the house she was in, by her long-necked peering into the nest of the pigeon who disconcertingly categorized her as a serpent. I am now fairly sure that this sense of fluid size and identity feels very different to children from how it appears to adults. Children are in fact always changing size, and many of them seem to believe, as my own son did, that adults get smaller and younger as children get larger and older. It is not really to do with puberty or sexual maturity, as many interpretations of Alice have argued. It is about something earlier, more primitive than that. You have only to think of the pleasures of fairy tales—the anticipation of Love, the fulfillment of wishes, the punishment of evil—to realize how very different the world of Alice is. It is a world in which odd lessons are learned and odd rules are perceived, by trial and error, to exist—quite safely, because this is a world of nonsense.

  The worlds of both the Alice books are in fact constructed the way children, and also adults, construct the worlds they play in. The world of Alice in Wonderland is constructed as children construct imaginary places, by giving speech to animals, and animating inanimate toys like playing cards. It is serious play—Freud observed in his essay on creative writers and daydreaming how important to children were the identities they gave to imaginary and inanimate objects like toys and counters, how they used these imaginary games to explore themselves and their identities. It is significant in this context that Alice has no dolls and meets no imaginary children—except the howling baby in the Duchess’s kitchen whose transformation into a pig is one of the really disturbing moments in the story. Alice’s inability to hold or cradle that creature, as opposed to her considerable ability to converse with most others, indicates the kind of play that that child found useful and pleasant. It wasn’t imaginary babies.

  It is worth observing that the human beings in Alice in Wonderland—the episodes containing the Duchess and the Mad Hatter, and the particular kinds of
domestic disorder to do with cooking and eating and serving food that go with them—were later additions to a tale that was originally much more simply about talking beasts and animated playing cards, a cardboard society a clever child can set up, or as Alice does, blow away when they get out of hand.

  The first book begins with a real rabbit hole and an agitated talking rabbit with a watch. The second begins with real kittens who become chessboard queens, and talking flowers who are passionate and contradictory. The frisson of pleasure the reader, adult and child, gets from the argumentative nature of the creatures is partly due to the sense we have that the imagination has animated them successfully and fully enough for them really to be able to answer back. They are small things, play things, which grow into power and energy. They arouse various emotions—Alice can hurt their feelings and kick them out of chimneys into breaking glass. Some critics have found the large real puppy Alice meets—which doesn’t talk and doesn’t play—to be an incongruity. It is—but it is a kind of paradoxical guarantee that Alice has entered the world of the small, the tiny, through the keyhole, and partakes in that reality, not that of the real, rough puppy.

  Serious play needs rules, as anyone knows who has tried to play cards with a child who makes up rules as you go along. Perhaps one reason for Carroll’s greatness is that he knew perfectly how to combine the anarchy of the playful but purposeful imagination with the sense of order/disorder that underlies both logic and nonsense. The best book I know on Carroll is by Elizabeth Sewell, published in 1952, and is called The Field of Nonsense. In it she examines the nonsense writings of both Carroll and Edward Lear, discussing their word play, their attitude to numbers and rules, their incongruities and inventions. She argues that Nonsense is a highly conscious business and is concerned with sense and logic, not with the vagueness and emotion of dream. Nonsense indeed closes off the logical world from the world of the vague and the passionate, and the disorder created by its disruptions and non sequiturs is different from the gothic or the magical. Both Carroll and Lear, she says, were obsessively orderly men, makers of categories and lists and timetables. Carroll invented word games such as Doublets and Syzygies with rules for transforming one word into another (or introducing WALRUS to CARPENTER) and was said to be trying to invent a chess game with words instead of armies. Sewell makes a splendid case for the affinity of nursery rhymes (as opposed to fairy tales) with Nonsense. Nursery rhymes, like Nonsense, depend on the regular accidents of the nature of language itself—the rhyming of pig and wig, the reduction of violence to slapstick, the closed, finished worlds. In Through the Looking-Glass Alice’s journey across the squared landscape of the chessboard is punctuated by encounters with nursery-rhyme creatures who mangle language and are doomed to repeat their fall from the wall or battle for the Crown however they wriggle, like Humpty Dumpty, to control language and set it to work differently.

  It took me a long time to be able to stand back far enough to see how important it is to the emotional atmosphere of both books that the Kings and Queens who inhabit them are cardboard and counters. They have real character. Carroll’s description of the three Queens in “Alice on the Stage” is as illuminating as his rhapsodies about Alice are irritating.

  Each of course had to preserve, through all her eccentricities, a certain queenly dignity. That was essential. And as for distinguishing traits, I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm; she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the tenth degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses! Lastly the White Queen seemed to my dreaming fancy, gentle, stupid, fat and pale; helpless as an infant; and with a slow, maundering bewildered air about her just suggesting imbecility, but never quite passing into it; that would be, I think, fatal to any comic effect she might otherwise produce.

  It is the precise relation of Fury to life as a game of croquet played with flamingos and hedgehogs, of pedantry and near-imbecility with the movement from pawn to crowning, that is the genius of the form of Alice, elaborately structured and yet human. So that when Alice meets real philosophical problems of great depth—is she dreaming the Red King or is he dreaming her? Or whether “glory” can be made to mean “a nice knock-down argument,” and if not, how not and why not?—they are contained in a pattern of the forms of thought and the possibilities of language. It is this that makes the wood “where things have no names” so moving, though it only lasts a page and a half. It begins with Alice considering herself—after she lost her name—like a lost dog—“ ‘answers to the name of “Dash:” had on a brass collar’ ”—and ends with Alice walking in amity through the wood with a fawn who, like Alice the pawn, has forgotten its name, only to bound away in alarm when it recognizes her again as “a human child.” (As distinguished from dog and fawn to which Carroll later compared her in his essay, quoted above.)

  The mystery of the Red King’s dream gripped me as a child, whereas it was not until I was an adult that I started to puzzle about the world of things without names, without language, without the forms of thought that went with language. The clue to the enduring fascination and greatness of the Alice books lies in language, and the way in which we are made of language quite as much as of flesh and blood and passions. The Freud who analyzed the linguistic mechanisms of jokes is a better guide to the essence of Alice than the Freud of the dreamed sexual metaphor, key and keyhole, tears and amniotic fluid, of The Interpretation of Dreams. Alice was loved by Joyce and by Nabokov, who translated the books into Russian. It is play, and word-play, and its endless intriguing puzzles continue to reveal themselves long after we have ceased to be children. But it seems important to be able to remember the first innocent reading, the first flexing of the muscles of the mind. I thought for years that I myself had made the link in my own mind between the lost rose-garden full of children and laughter in T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” and the inaccessible garden in Alice in Wonderland. Then I discovered that the connection was in Eliot’s mind also.

  A. S. Byatt is a novelist and short-story writer who has also published essays and reviews. She also works in radio and television. Until 1983 she taught English and American literature at University College, London. Her novels include the Booker Prize–winning Possession, which is available in a Modern Library clothbound edition, and the quartet The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman. Her short-story collections include Elementals, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, and The Matisse Stories.

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first published in 1865, with an initial print run of two thousand copies. When John Tenniel objected to the inferior reproduction of his accompanying illustrations, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) deferred to the renowned artist’s judgment and recalled the printing at his own expense. The book was reprinted later that year, to the satisfaction of both the author and the artist.

  Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There was published in 1871. In 1896, two years before his death, Dodgson made detailed corrections to both Alice books, primarily altering punctuation and hyphenation. The resulting texts were published by Macmillan in 1897. This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the 1908 Miniature Editions published by Macmillan.

  Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

  All in the golden afternoon1

  Full leisurely we glide;

  For both our oars, with little2 skill,

  By little arms are plied,

  While little hands make vain pretence

  Our wanderings to guide.

  Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour,

  Beneath such dreamy weather,

  To beg a tale of breath too weak

  To stir the tiniest feather!

  Yet what can one poor voice avail

  Against three tongues together?

&nbs
p; Imperious Prima flashes forth

  Her edict “to begin it”—

  In gentler tone Secunda hopes

  “There will be nonsense in it!”—

  While Tertia3 interrupts the tale

  Not more than once a minute.

  Anon, to sudden silence won,

  In fancy they pursue

  The dream-child moving through a land

  Of wonders wild and new,

  In friendly chat with bird or beast—

  And half believe it true.

  And ever, as the story drained

  The wells of fancy dry,

  And faintly strove that weary one

  To put the subject by,

  “The rest next time—” “It is next time!”

  The happy voices cry.

  Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:

  Thus slowly, one by one,

  Its quaint events were hammered out—

  And now the tale is done,