In 1906, Grahame and his family moved from London to the country, back to the scenes of his happiest early days, Cookham Dene and the Thames River. There he finished the animal fantasy The Wind in the Willows. Through its inimitable characters, Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad, and its idyllic riverbank setting, The Wind in the Willows celebrates rural society, fraternity, and traditionalism. Although the book puzzled some reviewers at first—many years had passed since the publication of his last book, and Grahame had turned from sketching portraits of childhood to creating a children’s book—its popularity grew year by year. Just before its publication, Grahame resigned from the Bank of England. In 1909, wanderlust again infected Grahame and he and Elspeth traveled to Switzerland and Italy. Upon returning to England, they began to look for a house in a less densely populated area, and settled in the village of Blewbury, in Berkshire, where Grahame would take long, solitary walks through the countryside. While he and Elspeth were becoming virtually reclusive, Alistair was sent to public school. The boy was unable to thrive at either Rugby or Eton and he was removed from both schools and educated by a private tutor until he entered Oxford in 1918.
The second decade of the twentieth century would prove tragic for Britain and for the Grahames. The Grahames supported the war effort by making crutches and splints for use in hospitals, and Grahame became the Commanding Officer of the Volunteer Defence Corps. During this time Grahame also finished an editing project, the two-volume Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children (1916). The solitary Alistair, whose sight continued to fail, fared little better at Oxford than he had at other educational institutions, and in 1920 he died in a train accident. Although the death was ruled accidental, it is clear from his injuries that Alistair had committed suicide by lying down across the track. The grieving Grahames spent most of 1921 in Rome and did not return to England until the spring of 1924.
Although he would write very little after this date, Grahame’s reputation continued to grow through the enduring popularity of The Wind in the Willows. After returning to England, Grahame and Elspeth moved from Blewbury and the home where Alistair had lived for ten years, to a Thames-side home in the town of Pangbourne. Although many publishers asked him for new material, Grahame published only a few pieces. In 1930, A. A. Milne adapted The Wind in the Willows for the stage as a children’s play entitled Toad of Toad Hall. By 1932, Grahame’s health began to decline in earnest: He suffered from high blood pressure and advanced arteriosclerosis. On July 6, 1932, Grahame suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died. He was buried in Holywell Churchyard in Oxford.
LYNNE VALLONE,
Texas A&M University
2002 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Introduction copyright © 2002 by A. S. Byatt
Notes, biographical note, and reading group guide copyright © 2002
by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of
the Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada
by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Carcanet Press Limited for permission
to reprint eight lines from “Alice” from Complete Poems by Robert Graves.
Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press Limited.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Carroll, Lewis, 1832–1898.
Alice’s adventures in wonderland; and, Through the looking-glass and what
Alice found there / Lewis Carroll; with ninety-three illustrations by
John Tenniel; introduction by A. S. Byatt; notes by Lynne Vallone.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90280-8
1. Fantasy fiction, English. 2. Alice (Fictitious character: Carroll)—Fiction.
I. Title: Alice’s adventures in wonderland and, Through the
looking-glass and what Alice found there. II. Carroll, Lewis, 1832–1898. Through the
looking-glass. III. Title: Through the looking-glass and what Alice
found there. IV. Title.
PR4611.A7 2002
821′.8—dc21
2002029506
Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1
LEWIS CARROLL
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, known universally by his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, was born on January 27, 1832, in the small parish of Daresbury in Cheshire. His father, a curate with little wealth, was the epitome of earnest faith and sober responsibility. Carroll’s mother, who died when he was nineteen, was, by all accounts, loving and indulgent. As the eldest son in a family of eleven children, Carroll played the roles of schoolteacher, nurse, and, most importantly, storyteller, to his younger siblings. When he began writing at an early age it was mostly for the entertainment of his family, but he occasionally contributed poems and stories to magazines. He continued this pastime after leaving home at the age of twelve to attend school, first at Richmond and later at Rugby.
In 1851, Carroll went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and soon thereafter received a fellowship as mathematical lecturer. During the early years of his career at Oxford, he balanced his teaching duties with writing and his recently adopted pastime of photography, a hobby he was to pursue until his retirement from teaching at the age of forty-eight. Publishing under his real name, he produced several works on mathematical topics, including A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry (1860), The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry (1861), and A Guide to the Mathematical Student (1864). At the same time he produced stories, essays, and poetry for various magazines throughout England, usually anonymously. In 1856, at the behest of one of his editors, he chose the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, the name he used thereafter to sign his fiction and poetry. In 1861, Carroll was ordained a deacon of the Church of England. For various personal reasons, including the stammer that he suffered since childhood, he never aspired to advancement to the priesthood.
In 1855, the dean of Christ Church died and his replacement, Henry Liddell, took over shortly thereafter. Liddell brought with him to Christ Church his wife, his eldest child, Harry, and his daughters, Lorina, Alice, and Edith. Perhaps as a result of his childhood surrounded by younger sisters, Carroll had always counted a large number of young girls among his closest friends. He immediately befriended the three Liddell sisters, especially Alice, who was three years old when her father assumed his position at Christ Church. Carroll talked and corresponded with the sisters frequently, and they were often subjects for his portrait photography. One of the many outings taken by Carroll and the girls was a boat trip in July of 1862, during which he first told the story that was to become Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The story delighted the girls, and immediately upon their return to Oxford Carroll began to sketch out and expand the tale. After several major revisions, title changes, and a recalled first edition, it was finally published in 1865, with illustrations by John Tenniel, the political cartoonist from Punch. Despite Carroll’s early misgivings, Alice was an immediate success and, from the time of its first appearance, has never gone out of print.
For a brief time, Carroll turned from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and devoted himself to writing several mathematical works and a collection entitled Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1869). He soon returned to Alice, publishing the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, And What Alice Found There, in 1871. Built on the mood, themes, and narrative of its predecessor, Through the Looking-Glass contains many of Carroll’s most treasured personalities, including Tweedledum and Tweedledee and Humpty Dumpty. It also includes the poem “Jabberwocky,” certainly the greatest example of nonsense verse in English. Though Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and
Through the Looking-Glass were largely regarded in their own time as charming and fantastical children’s books, through the years they have earned solid standing among the greatest works of English literature, both for their delightfulness and their literary depth.
Like the Alice stories, Carroll’s other great literary work, the poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876), was also dedicated to a little girl of Carroll’s acquaintance, Gertrude Chataway. Subtitled An Agony in Eight Fits, The Hunting of the Snark details the voyage of a ship and the crew members’ difficult hunt for the snark, a particularly dangerous prey. The poem merges a fantastical narrative with Carroll’s flawless talent for nonsense rhymes. Despite the work’s considerable strengths, it was met with a disappointing reception, probably because it was somewhat over the heads of the author’s largely juvenile audience.
In 1881, Carroll resigned his teaching position at Christ Church. He was appointed Curator of the Senior Common Room, a position he held for the next decade. Doubtless this change came as a relief to Carroll, who never particularly enjoyed teaching. Despite the demands of his new job (he was now responsible for overseeing the servants and purchasing provisions for the college), he continued to adhere to a regular writing schedule, publishing a wide range of mathematical works and poetry.
Carroll’s last two major literary undertakings were the children’s novels Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893). Much more serious in tone and purpose than either of the Alice books or The Hunting of the Snark, they are complicated stories, composed of two intertwined plotlines, one based in reality and one in fantasy. From the time of their publication, these later works were considered far too complicated for Carroll’s intended audience of children. Overtly philosophical and theological, dealing with problems of identity, linguistics, and perception, which existed under the surface of his previous works, they stand in sharp contrast to his earlier writing.
Lewis Carroll, remembered as a great novelist, mathematician, children’s photographer, and poet, died in 1898 at the age of sixty-five from a severe bronchial infection he contracted during a Christmas visit to his sisters’ house in Surrey. He is buried at the Mount Cemetery in Guildford.
CONTENTS
Master - Table of Contents
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Title Page
Copyright
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
INTRODUCTION by A. S. Byatt
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
I. DOWN THE RABBIT-HOLE
II. THE POOL OF TEARS
III. A CAUCUS-RACE AND A LONG TALE
IV. THE RABBIT SENDS IN A LITTLE BILL
V. ADVICE FROM A CATERPILLAR
VI. PIG AND PEPPER
VII. A MAD TEA-PARTY
VIII. THE QUEEN’S CROQUET-GROUND
IX. THE MOCK TURTLE’S STORY
X. THE LOBSTER QUADRILLE
XI. WHO STOLE THE TARTS?
XII. ALICE’S EVIDENCE
THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
I. LOOKING-GLASS HOUSE
II. THE GARDEN OF LIVE FLOWERS
III. LOOKING-GLASS INSECTS
IV. TWEEDLEDUM AND TWEEDLEDEE
V WOOL AND WATER
VI. HUMPTY DUMPTY
VII. THE LION AND THE UNICORN
VIII. “IT’S MY OWN INVENTION”
IX. QUEEN ALICE
X. SHAKING
XI. WAKING
XII. WHICH DREAMED IT?
AN EASTER GREETING
CHRISTMAS GREETINGS
NOTES
READING GROUP GUIDE
About the Illustrator
INTRODUCTION
A. S. Byatt
The first line of Robert Graves’s poem “Alice” defines her as “that prime heroine of our nation, Alice.” It is indeed curious that a (largely) imaginary little girl and her fantastic adventures underground and behind the mirror should have captured both the British and the world’s imagination in something of the same obsessive way as Shakespeare. Her story has been read by generations of children on both sides of the Atlantic, and translated into many languages. It has been dramatized and filmed over and over, and illustrated by many distinguished illustrators, who have never been able to displace the great original, John Tenniel. It has attracted logicians, literary critics, psychoanalytic critics, theorists of childhood, experts on children’s literature, biographical interpreters, imitators, and a whole host of what in Shakespeare criticism are known as Baconians and Disintegrators. For me, as for many others, my first reading of the Alice books was one of the defining experiences of my life. Much of what has been written about Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll, and his relations with the original Alice, has made it harder, not easier, to remember the nature and significance of that original experience. Robert Graves’s poem praises the fictive Alice for her “uncommon sense,” being “of a speculative bent,” in accepting her adventures in her chance-discovered land as being
… queer but true—not only in the main
True, but as true as anything you’d swear to,
The usual three dimensions you are heir to.
But Alice, he observes finally, did not equate the truths of
… that lubberland of dream and laughter,
The red-and-white-flower-spangled hedge, the grass
Where Apuleius pastured his Gold Ass
with the ordinary real world. She did not assume “that queens and kittens are identical.”
Alice is an English heroine both because she is pragmatic and curious, and simply because she is a child. Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, through Rousseau and others, introduced the idea of the child as a new and growing mind in a strange world, different from a miniature adult. High Victorian fiction introduced the practice of defining the central consciousness of hero or heroine in the proving time of early childhood. Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, and Pip in Great Expectations explore the dangerous worlds they find themselves in, and judge them. They are different creatures from that suffering innocent, Little Nell. Franco Moretti in The Way of the World, his brilliant discussion of the European bildungsroman, or novel of growing-up, distinguishes the British novel from the continental European one for its greater emphasis on the child as hero or heroine. This goes, he says, with a plot that turns on the dangers posed by fairy-tale villains and schemers, trying to dispossess the child of its rightful place and inheritance—as opposed to the novel of growing-up, becoming adult, making moral errors (Stendhal, Goethe, and in Britain, Middlemarch, which Virginia Woolf called the only novel written for grown-ups). It is true that Alice belongs with Jane and David, as a reasoning being in a world where adults are full of irrational rage, greed, and vengefulness. The Murdstones and Mr. Brocklehurst, Miss Havisham and Pip’s furious sister, are possessed of the same violence as the Duchess, the Queen of Hearts, and the Red Queen. Franco Moretti claims that the English novel is childish because what is desired is not maturity and wisdom but a return to the safety and innocence of childhood—this is a half-truth, since there is never any illusion of happy innocence in the childhoods of Pip or Maggie or Jane. But he is right that they live in fairy-tale plots of fear, villainy, danger, retribution, and restoration. What is most striking about the Alice books in this context is that they are not fairy tales. The wood is not the dark wood where the enchanter and the witch lurk. The creatures are not magical helpers or disguised princes. They are garrulous and argumentative philosophers and grammarians, and the world they inhabit is the world of nonsense, which exists only in contradistinction to the world of sense, common or uncommon, which Alice has in abundance.
Lewis Carroll invented the least sentimental, most real, child character in children’s literature, but his own extratextual comments, and even more the intense biographical interest in his relations with his little-girl “child-friends,” make it more difficult to resp
ond to Alice as she is in her own worlds. The tale originated in one told to three of the daughters of Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church College in Oxford, where Carroll/Dodgson was a young don, aged thirty. The three girls, aged thirteen (Lorina), ten (Alice), and eight (Edith), were accompanied on a boat trip on a “golden” summer afternoon by Carroll and his friend the reverend Robinson Duckworth. Carroll wrote up the tale he told them for Alice, who asked for it. He published it much later—to immediate success—in an elaborated and extended version. Dodgson loved and collected little girls, sending letters, codes and conundrums, enormous tallies of imaginary kisses and jokes to successive child-friends, throughout his life. He was also a success as a photographer in the early days of the art, posing his child-friends as waifs and beggar maidens, in the sentimental poses then fashionable, and also taking naked photographs of some of them. His interest was flirtatious—a typical tone is one in a letter to Edith Jebb, in 1870, where he recalls saying good-bye to her out of a train window:
just when I was leaning out to whisper “good-bye” into your ear (only I forgot where your ear was exactly, and somehow fancied it was above your chin)
—a convoluted reference to a kiss on the mouth, followed by a series of jokes about the letter s and word games such as “Your head is MT.” Much has understandably been made of the obscure psychology of a man who went to the seaside to meet little girls, with a pocket full of safety pins in case they needed them to pin up their dresses to paddle. It has been argued that Alice Liddell was the love of his life, that he wished to marry her, that a breach between him and her family was caused by his attempt to propose, which coincides with several pages removed from his journals. His relationship to her has been compared—without any hard evidence—to Ruskin’s with Rose La Touche. There have been many analyses of these preoccupations, some attempting to defend the innocence of the Victorian passion for naked innocents, some darkly analyzing Carroll’s hypothetical sexual preferences, some concentrating on Carroll as that not uncommon figure, the Victorian adult who would have preferred to remain a child. J. M. Barrie, too, preferred the company of children and the creation of imaginary worlds and games to the difficulties of grown-up life. Peter Pan, Tinkerbell, and Wendy have sexual (and sentimental) overtones and ambivalences which I think are wholly absent from the world of Alice, though not from the nostalgic poetic musings with which its author later surrounded it. I remember as a child feeling irritated by the tone of the prefatory poem about the “golden” afternoon and the children listening to Alice.
The Modern Library Children's Classics Page 20