Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded

by David Day

  Frederic Leighton’s The Return of Persephone (1891) is the Victorian era’s most famous and iconic painting of the myth. It shows her ascending from the underworld into the waiting arms of her sister-mother, Demeter—a scene that mirrors Alice’s awakening from the underground dream world of Wonderland and returning to the lap of her sister Lorina (who bears the same name as their mother).

  This portrayal is similar as well to that of the last tableau of the Eleusinian Mysteries of the great goddess. Like a pilgrim emerging from the Mysteries, Alice must learn to rescue herself before she can emerge from the underworld and back into the world of the living. She must do this by applying all she has learned, finally taking control in this last trial by claiming the power of the goddess within.

  “Never!” said the Queen furiously, throwing an inkstand at the Lizard as she spoke. (The unfortunate little Bill had left off writing on his slate with one finger, as he found it made no mark; but he now hastily began again, using the ink, that was trickling down his face, as long as it lasted.)

  “Then the words don’t fit you,” said the King, looking round the court with a smile. There was a dead silence.

  “It’s a pun!” the King added in an offended tone, and everybody laughed. “Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

  “No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”

  “Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”

  “Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.

  “I won’t!” said Alice.

  “Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.

  “Who cares for you?” said Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time). “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

  At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face.

  Victorian icon: The Return of Persephone.

  Donald Thomas observes this mythological motif of “the return of the dreamer” in Wonderland and compares it to Virgil’s Aeneid: “Alice, like Aeneas, emerges unscathed from the dream, he by the gate of horn and she to the Oxford river bank. The horrors and predictions which Virgil’s hero encountered were implacable and unalterable. But Alice triumphs. However cruel their humour or authoritarian their manner, the figures of tyranny are, at last, ‘nothing but a pack of cards.’ ”

  FORTY-TWO RULES Why does Alice’s dream of Wonderland end when the trial of the Knave of Hearts suddenly and dramatically collapses like a house of cards? The reason for the downfall of Wonderland is identical to the answer to the meaning of “life, the universe and everything” in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For both Adams and Carroll, the answer is the number 42.

  Many have observed that Lewis Carroll had an obsession with the number 42, but nobody seems to know why. In the early poem Phantasmagoria, a ghost haunts “a man of forty-two.” In The Hunting of the Snark—which Carroll wrote at age forty-two—we find that the Baker’s luggage consists of “forty-two boxes, all carefully packed” and that “Rule 42 of the Code” sealed the Snark’s fate. In Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, we have a gravity-operated train that passes through a long tunnel nearer the earth’s centre than either end. This rapid gravity driven train journey takes 42 minutes. According to Martin Gardner, 42 minutes is “exactly the same time that it would take an object to fall through the centre of the earth … regardless of the tunnel’s length.”

  In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the number 42 runs amok. It begins on the title page with “Forty-two illustrations by John Tenniel.” After descending into Wonderland, Alice encounters an angry Pigeon who protects her nest “night and day” and hasn’t “had a wink of sleep these three weeks.” This gives her egg a hatching period of 21 days + 21 nights = 42, or a unit value of (3 × 7 × 2) = 42.

  Similarly, we have the suppression of two guinea pigs in the trial scene. A guinea in English currency has a value of 21 shillings; consequently, the two guinea pigs (or piggy banks) would have a total value of 42 shillings.

  In the Queen’s rose garden, Alice encounters three gardeners who are animated numbered playing cards. If we add up the card numbers (2 + 5 + 7 = 14), then multiply that by the number of cards (14 × 3), once again we get 42.

  This episode is followed by the grand royal procession of cards. There are normally fifty-two cards in a deck; however, Carroll has been careful to leave the gardeners (the ten numbered spade cards) out of the procession, with the result that there are exactly 52 – 10 = 42 cards.

  This may have something to do with the King invoking “Rule Forty-two,” which, he claims, is the “oldest rule in the book.” Indeed, the King’s Rule Forty-two has wider and deeper implications relating to the mathematical structure of Wonderland.

  It could be argued that the Wonderland adventure begins and ends with 42. Under deep cover, the number can be found at the beginning of Alice’s adventures, where, in Wonderland’s great hall, she recites the multiplication table. As we have seen, it is a system that is suddenly foreign to her: “Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!”

  As Alice says, “the Multiplication Table doesn’t signify.” But as observed earlier, it signifies a great deal and reveals that this table essentially presents us with a problem based on scales of notation. The Wonderland multiplication table is sound up to the 12-times level in base 39, however, once we progress to the 13 times level, to maintain the rule of this system, we must employ base 42. This proves to be fatal and the entire system thereafter collapses. It is an object lesson in what may result from any mathematical system that does not submit to rigorous testing and toward absolute proof.

  As we have demonstrated in chapter 2, because of number 42 (as a base number in the Wonderland multiplication system), Alice is right to declare that she will “never get to twenty at that rate.” And neither will the King of Hearts: “ ‘Let the jury consider their verdict,’ the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.” But like Alice, the King never gets to twenty either. For here we find the fatal number 42 looms up once more, and brings all in Wonderland to a cataclysmic end.

  It is by the authority of Rule Forty-two that the King attempts to expel Alice from the court. Alice disputes this, however, objecting that if Rule Forty-two is the “oldest rule in the book” as the King claims, “then it ought to be Number One.” And with this peculiar logic, she suddenly finds herself capable of overruling the King and Queen of Hearts.

  How is this possible? And why, besides the King and Queen, is Alice the only one not ordered executed? Once again, Carroll is playing a word game, this time the word-within-the-word game that he often played in letters to his child friends. In one example, he suggests that although one may find ink in a drink, it is not possible to find a drink in ink. In another, he explains that one may find love in a glove, but none outside of it. Consequently, Alice is ultimately able to overrule the King and Queen of Hearts when she discovers her true rank in this game: hidden within the word Alice there is an Ace.

  From Snark: Baker has 42 pieces of luggage.

  According to the rules of Carroll’s card game Court Circular, in which hearts are trumps, “the Ace may be reckoned either with King, Queen, or with Two, Three.” We are told the numbered heart cards in Wonderland are “the royal children,” which would seem to explain why the King of Hearts initially informs the Queen that Alice “is only a child”—in fact, the youngest child. However, as an ace, she can choose to switch from the lowest-ranking heart to the highest. When she claims her power as the highest-ranked card in the deck—the Ace
of Hearts—her role in Wonderland suddenly shifts from the virtually powerless to the most powerful.

  Alice has finally discovered Wonderland’s “rule of processions.” In the ranking of Wonderland’s forty-two-card deck, Alice has become the highest-ranked heart. She has become the fatal number 42 that in the Wonderland multiplication table wrecks the mathematical structure upon which Wonderland is constructed. She overrules the rulers, and claims the power to end her dream. In waking, Alice brings the whole of Wonderland down like a house of cards.

  According to Pausanias (in his Description of Greece—c. AD 160) and others who had undergone the sacred rites of the Mysteries of the Great Goddess, after ascending from the underworld, the initiate returned to the world “clothed with the radiance of things seen and remembered.” So that each initiate’s experiences might be recorded while still fresh in the memory, each of the “newly born” was required “to dedicate a tablet on which is written all that each has heard or seen.”

  Lewis Carroll was very much concerned with the “mystic memory” of the ancients, and certainly alludes to it in the prelude to the fairy tale. Since ancient times these pilgrims wore wreaths and garlands of white flowers just like the ones Dodgson made Alice Liddell wear in one of his photographs.

  “Wake up, Alice dear!” said her sister; “Why, what a long sleep you’ve had!”

  “Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” said Alice, and she told her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers that you have just been reading about; and, when she had finished, her sister kissed her, and said, “It was a curious dream, dear, certainly; but now run in to your tea: it’s getting late.” So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.

  But her sister sat still just as she left her, leaning her head on her hand, watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and all her wonderful Adventures, till she too began dreaming after a fashion, and this was her dream:—

  First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands were clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers—she could hear the very tones of her voice, and see that queer little toss of her head to keep back the wandering hair that would always get into her eyes—and still as she listened, or seemed to listen, the whole place around her became alive with the strange creatures of her little sister’s dream.

  The long grass rustled at her feet as the White Rabbit hurried by—the frightened Mouse splashed his way through the neighbouring pool—she could hear the rattle of the teacups as the March Hare and his friends shared their never-ending meal, and the shrill voice of the Queen ordering off her unfortunate guests to execution—once more the pig-baby was sneezing on the Duchess’s knee, while plates and dishes crashed around it—once more the shriek of the Gryphon, the squeaking of the Lizard’s slate-pencil, and the choking of the suppressed guinea-pigs, filled the air, mixed up with the distant sobs of the miserable Mock Turtle.

  In the end, Alice returns to her dreaming body by her sister’s side under a tree on the riverbank, and to her everyday life. Now, though, Alice has a wise old soul and retains the memory of her dream world, and she recounts her experience to her sister.

  Then too, her sister Lorina “began dreaming after a fashion,” picturing herself passing on Alice’s dream to other children; while the author records them in a dedicated book in “which is written all that each has heard or seen,” so the story of the adventure and the revealed mystery of Wonderland might enter the minds and imaginations of children throughout the world.

  Of course this is all clearly foreshadowed in the last stanza of Carroll’s prelude poem:

  Alice! A childish story take,

  And with a gentle hand

  Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined

  In Memory’s mystic band,

  Like pilgrim’s wither’d wreath of flowers

  Pluck’d in a far-off land

  Curiously enough, Lewis Carroll was not alone in linking Alice Liddell to classical Greek goddesses. The great Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron dressed a twenty-year-old Alice in classical costumes so she might pose for no fewer than three versions of Persephone-Demeter. These variations on the theme of the Great Goddess were: Ceres the Roman goddess of the harvest, Aletheia the goddess of truth and justice and Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruitfulness.

  Alice as Ceres-Demeter, by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1872.

  So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality—the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds—the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen’s shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy—and the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard—while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle’s heavy sobs.

  Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.

  THE END.

  Alice as Aletheia, Greek goddess of truth.

  Alice as Pomona, Roman goddess of fruitfulness.

  “He was not required to teach if he chose not to.… If he wished, he might recline in his easy chair, his feet up by the fire, drink his claret, and smoke a pipe for the rest of his life.” Morton Cohen, in his biography of Lewis Carroll

  Part Two: After Wonderland

  I. SENTENCE FIRST—VERDICT AFTERWARDS! The most enduring and disputed mystery in the life of Lewis Carroll is the circumstances and reasons behind Mr. and Mrs. Liddell’s decision one weekend in June of 1863 to suddenly end his friendship with Alice, and virtually to ban him from visiting the Deanery, or making contact with any of the Liddell children. It is a mystery made rather more sinister by the fact that the only record of that weekend—Charles Dodgson’s diary—has had its pages covering the events of those crucial days cut out.

  Like the Knave of Hearts, Charles Dodgson had been summoned on the 28th of June 1863 to appear before Oxford’s King and Queen of Hearts—the dean and Mrs. Liddell. As Dodgson undoubtedly saw it, Mrs. Liddell had already decided on the matter. Like the Queen of Hearts, she insisted on “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.” We cannot know the precise charges brought against Dodgson by the dean and Mrs. Liddell, but the two most common speculations are inappropriate behaviour or a proposal of marriage.

  Today, Charles Dodgson’s fascination with prepubescent girls would seem highly suspect. In the Victorian era, though, it would not have been so unusual. As we have observed, the era was marked by a popular, sentimental cult of the child. Artists and writers unashamedly celebrated “divine beauty” in a child who came so recently from the hand of the Maker or, in William Wordsworth’s memorable phrase, “trailing clouds of glory.”

  Though any psychologist today would recognize that Dodgson had a sexual obsession with very young girls, any close reading of his diaries and letters lead one to believe that he had almost entirely suppressed his sexuality. Dodgson was either uninterested in or intimidated by a mature sexual relationship, and persuaded himself that he had found a healthy and legitimate outlet for his need to love and be loved in what he saw as innocent and pure friendships with children.

  He of course lived in a society that not only was unaware of the idea of the subconscious mind but would be shocked by the suggestion of its existence. It is unlikel
y that Dodgson would have allowed himself intentionally to foster overtly sexual fantasies of any sort. He would have disguised these emotions and would have thought of his love for children as a desire to see in them the beauty of a kind of divine natural innocence. He certainly would never have allowed himself to—as he would see it—debase this beauty.

  This is not to suggest that Dodgson’s perspective was healthy, or that his behaviour did not go without notice or criticism. But it seems unlikely that he would have committed any act of indecency toward Alice or any other child. Had his obsessions been overtly sexual, it would have been quite easy for him to procure children. In Victorian London, child prostitution was not uncommon. In the streets Dodgson frequented around the city’s theatre district, child prostitutes were readily available for a few shillings. Indeed, Dodgson wrote numerous letters to the editor and to influential politicians such as Lord Salisbury in his attempt to censor newspapers for what he considered the morally corrupting influence of their lurid exposé of child prostitution.

  Dodgson was, however, fond of affectionately hugging and kissing little girls. His letters to little girls were unashamedly sealed with kisses. But his behaviour, and the tenor of the hundreds of letters and notes he sent to the Liddell children, do not appear to have made the senior Liddells suspicious of the young man’s intentions.

  The suggestion that Charles Dodgson might have made a proposal of marriage to Alice is even more unlikely. It is true that in the Victorian era marriage arrangements were occasionally made for girls as young as twelve, but in this case it is most improbable.