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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The concept of “childhood” was only invented in the 18th century when the middle classes began
to see the value of a child’s innocence and play. Children were rarely mentioned for most of the
literary history, occasionally appearing in such works as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile and
William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. In the 19th century, Charles Dickens sometimes placed
children in the foreground of his stories, but only in books for adults.

Most tales written for, rather than about, children were adaptations of adult stories or moral
didactics. In the early 19th century, The Brothers Grimm’s illustrated folktales, collected initially
for adults, were criticized as unsuitable for young people because of their sexual and violent
content—later editions were adapted to be more child-friendly. Hans Christian Andersen, who
wrote his Fairy Tales (1835-37) specifically for children, caused an outcry by failing to include a
moral.

In Wonderland, the laws of nature and society are turned on their heads: time and space behave
unpredictably; animals talk; and anything might happen at tea parties and games. Fantasy evokes
the child’s sense of threat in an adult world.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, writing for children enjoyed a golden age founded on
increasing literacy, the growth of commercial publishing, and recognition of the creative potential
of a child’s world. Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), by English author Thomas Hughes, started
the school story tradition; another new genre was the coming-of-age-tale, such as Louisa May
Alcott’s Little Women (1868-69) in the USA. Other classics include Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1880-
81), from Switzerland, and Scotsman JM Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911).

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of the most influential books of this flowering. Regarded
as the first masterpiece for children in English, its fantastical story is a marked departure from the
prevailing realism of literature at the time. On a July day in 1862, Charles Dodgson, a young
mathematics don, went rowing with a male friend and three young sisters on the Thames near
Oxford and told a story of a girl named Alice – which was also the name of one of his passengers,
Alice Liddell, aged ten. So Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland took shape, appearing as a
handwritten book and then as a publication under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.

In the story, seven-year-old Alice falls down a rabbit hole and finds herself in a surreal universe.
She negotiates alone a world of strange creatures, strange attitudes, strange happenings, and
strange linguistics logic. This is the focus of the book and its principal theme.

The book’s coherence partly comes from Alice's entertaining, unorthodox logic. As she falls down
the rabbit hole, she wonders if she is going to the land in the “Antipathies” (Antipodes) and
imagines herself appearing ignorant when she has to ask whether she is in Australia or New
Zealand. Her observation shows Carroll brilliantly inhabiting a child’s frankness: “No, it’ll never
do to ask; perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.”

Alice always wonders about who she is, the rules of this peculiar world, and how she can regain
normality, a common childhood issue. Her bewilderment initially focuses on her being the wrong

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size, too big or too small to do as she wants. After she meets the Caterpillar, new anxiety arises,
and the challenge of repetition, often rudely, is contradicted. Towards the end, with the Queen’s
repeated plea for a beheading, the possibility of violence adds to the tension.

The characters that Alice meets are primarily animals. Apart from Alice and her sister, who
features before and after the adventure, the only human characters are the Mad Hatter and the
Duchess since the King and Queen of Hearts are playing cards. Parents do not make an appearance,
nor is there any reference to them.

Yet Victorian adults accustomed to the convention might also see the inversions of everyday life
that imprison Alice as liberating. One of the attractions of nonsense is that it offers a playground
for the imagination and arguably for the satisfaction of subliminal needs, including occasional
escape from social rules.

Alice does not refer at the end to having learned any lessons from her adventures. However, she
does, in the course of the book, become more forthright, and by the time of the trial scene near the
end, she is capable of saying to the Queen that her perverse sense of justice is “Stuff and nonsense!”
When she is child-sized again, her final act is to insist that the playing cards are just that –
inanimate things – after which they fly into the air. By force of character, she has punctured the
illusion.

The coda, featuring Alice’s older sister, is beautifully judged. It starts with her dreaming “after a
fashion” since a fully-fledged dream would be less subtle than this elusive mind-state. First, she
affectionately imagines Alice herself; then, the weird characters Alice describes pass in front of
her. Finally, she imagines Alice becoming a “grown woman” but keeping the “simple and loving
heart” of her childhood and passing on the story of Wonderland to a new generation.

Lewis Carroll
Born in 1832 in Cheshire, England, Charles Dodgson (best known later by his pen name, Lewis
Carroll) was the son of a clergyman. He earned a first-class degree in mathematics from Christ
Church, Oxford, and from 1855 he held a lectureship there until his death. He was also ordained
as a deacon. His first published work, in 1856, was a poem on solitude. Dodgson was well
connected, his friends including the critic and writer John Ruskin, and the painter and poet Dante
Gabriel Rossetti. He was a notable photographer, taking portraits of the poet Alfred
Tennyson, the actress Ellen Terry, and many children. He died in 1898, at 65, as a result of
pneumonia after a severe case of influenza. By this time Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was
the most popular children’s book in Britain. Queen Victoria was one of its admirers.

Reference:
Canton, James. (2016). The Literature Book. London: Dorling Kindersley Limited.

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

With little history to speak of and few literary traditions to anchor them, US writers in the 19 th
century were engaged in holding up a mirror to the varied, complex populations of their rapidly
evolving nation. One author blazed a trail, setting his story specifically in the Mississippi Valley
in the Midwest with a poor white boy narrator like no other. Mark Twain’s Huck Finn relates his
adventures in regional dialect, salted with philosophical musings and homespun wisdom, and
along the way, becomes one of the first authentic voices in American literature.

What is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that led Ernest Hemingway to declare it the starting
point for all American literature? For a start, it empowered generations of American writers to
shift literature from its center in the New England colonies and site their works on home soil with
local color and vernacular speech. But what is also remarkable is the radical heart of this free-
flowing “boy’s own” story. Twain’s novel was published after the American Civil War (1861-65)
but is set 40-50 years earlier when slaveholding persisted in the South and settlers scrabbled for
land in the West. Huck’s original thoughts reflect the numerous contradictions at the heart of
American society.

Before
The Pioneers, the first of James Fenimore Cooper’s saga, the
1823 “Leatherstocking Tales,” offers conflicting views of life on the frontier
in one of the first original US novels.
Harriet Beecher Stowe creates multiple vernacular voices in Uncle
1852
Tom’s Cabin, a sentimental story that inflames the anti-slavery debate.

After
In The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett vividly describes
1896
life in an isolated fishing village on the Maine coast.
John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath
1939 mixes local color with social injustice in an epic story about a family’s
journey west during the Great Depression.

Early in the narrative, Huck introduces himself to the reader as an established character from a
previous novel by Twain. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer gives his account credibility in social
history. He feigns death to escape the civilizing folk of Missouri and the brutality of his father and
begins his journey down the Mississippi on a raft in the company of Jim, a runaway slave. As they
drift south, backwoods society's brutal reality encroaches whenever they contact the shore. In these
one-horse towns, lynch mobs and gangs administer justice; tricksters play to the weakness of the
crowd; loud-mouthed drunks are summarily shot, and a young gentleman who befriends Huck is
murdered in a family feud.

In a text that is peppered with the offensive word “nigger”, subversion is played out through the
talks between Huck and Jim. Newly escaped from being sold down the river by his mistress, Jim
concludes: “Yes – en I’s rich now … I own myself, en I’s worth eight hundred dollars. I wished I
had the money.”

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Living on the raft in idyllic self-sufficiency, Huck and Jim are cast adrift from their social order,
and a friendship develops. Later, as Huck wrestles with the southern ideology that demands that
he should turn Jim in, he can remember the man only as a friend” “we a floating along, talking,
and singing, and laughing … somehow couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against
him…” by the time Tom Sawyer, the eponymous hero of Twain’s earlier novel, steps on to the
page, Huck’s emotional development is almost complete.

Although it was condemned as “coarse” when first published in 1884, Huckleberry Finn injected
American writing with new energy, style, and color. Its focus on the speech of real Americans
stretched from the voices of John Steinbeck’s dispossessed farmers in The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
to recent first-person narratives such as Drown (1996) and Junot Diaz’s stories of Dominica-
Americans in New Jersey.

Mark Twain

Born on 30 November 1835, Samuel Langhorne Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which
served as the model for “St Petersburg” in Huckleberry Finn.
After his father's death, Clemens left school at the age of 12. He worked as a typesetter and
occasional writer and, in 1857, became a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. During the Civil War,
he prospected for silver in Nevada, then started writing for newspapers, adopting the pen name
Mark Twain.

In 1870, Clemens married Olivia Langdon, settled in Connecticut, and had four children. Despite
the success of this novel, a series of poor investments bankrupted him. Still, from 1891, he lectured
widely, enjoyed international celebrity, and restored his finances as Mark Twain wrote 28 books
and many short stories, letters, and sketches. He died in 1910.

Reference:
Canton, James. (2016). The Literature Book. London: Dorling Kindersley Limited.

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