Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Decoded: The Full Text of Lewis Carroll’s Novel with its Many Hidden Meanings Revealed

436 Pages·2015·14.05 MB·English

by  David Day

COPYRIGHT © 2015 DAVID DAY
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385-68226-8
ISBN: 978-0-38568227-5 (epub) Editor:
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v3.1
TO RÓISÍN, MY IRISH ROSE,
AND
TERRY JONES, MENTOR AND FRIEND
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
INTRODUCTION
i. What’s in a Name?
ii. A Portmanteau Mind
iii. Wonder Words and Riddles
iv. The Reason Why
PART ONE:
ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
Prelude Poem: All in the Golden Afternoon
Three Fatal Sisters
Chapter 1: Down the Rabbit-Hole
The White Rabbit
Chapter 2: The Pool of Tears
Curious and Curiouser
Chapter 3: A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale
The Dodo and the Dodgson
Chapter 4: The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill
A Temple to Science
Chapter 5: Advice from a Caterpillar
De Quincey’s Caterpillar
Chapter 6: Pig and Pepper
The Kitchen Oracle
Chapter 7: A Mad Tea-Party
A Socialist Tea Party
Chapter 8: The Queen’s Croquet-Ground
Games in the Garden
Chapter 9: The Mock Turtle’s Story
Ruskin and the Gryphon
Chapter 10: The Lobster Quadrille
Stalking Tennyson
Chapter 11: Who Stole the Tarts?
Trial of the Heart
Chapter 12: Alice’s Evidence
A House of Cards
PART TWO:
AFTER WONDERLAND
i. Sentence First—Verdict Afterwards!
ii. From Alice to Malice
iii. Through the Looking-Glass and Beyond
iv. Last Years
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Image Credits
About the Author
“… who will deny that Oxford,
by her ineffable ƈharm, keeps
ever calling us nearer to the
true goal of all of us, to the
ideal, to perfection,—to beauty,
in a word, which is only truth
seen from another side?…”
Matthew
Arnold, Essays in Criticism, 1889.
Tom Gate, the main entrance to Christ Church, Oxford: The college was Dodgson’s home for most
of his life.
Introduction
I. WHAT’S IN A NAME? “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas only I
don’t know what they are!” Alice might very well have been describing
any reader’s first encounter with her adventures. Something peculiar and
quite magical is happening in the word spell that is Wonderland.
No one had written anything quite like Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland before, and—save for its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass—
no one has written anything like it since. It is a child’s adventure set in a
fantastic imaginary world that is explored by a brave little girl armed
only with her own common sense and an all-consuming curiosity. It is a
book that can and should be read for pleasure by the young, but looking
at the author’s unique use of language, it is remarkable that children can
comprehend it at all. And yet somehow they do, and we do.
Furthermore, it evokes in all its readers a tantalizing sense that there is
something else to be revealed just under the surface of this compelling
tale.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a British mathematician, logician,
clergyman and photographer. A resident Oxford don for almost half a
century, he was famously known as Lewis Carroll, the author of two
great children’s classics.
Alice’s adventures have become part of popular culture worldwide,
and have been translated into virtually every language. If these
adventures were just flights of fancy, or simply “nonsense” as
Dodgson/Carroll liked to call them, why, you might ask, are they so
often quoted by physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, political
scientists, historians, psychiatrists, logicians, poets, filmmakers, novelists
and computer geeks?
Wonderland has an undeniably strange atmosphere, in part because it is
largely inhabited by literary tropes—that is, imaginary beings with no
existence except as figures of speech or as characters from children’s