The Republic of Heaven

You could say that Lewis Carroll wasn't a proper grown-up; but a child in adult's clothing. He never lost his delight in games and puzzles. An extraordinarily intelligent philosopher and mathematician, he realised early on that a child-like wonder in and curiosity about the way the world works were the keys to his genius. These days we'd call him a geek or a nerd. He asked the right questions - the kind of questions which a child asks unafraid and an adult is too self-conscious to express. After all, adults know everything, don't they?

So - go ask Alice. Does she defer to adults? No - "You're nothing but a pack of cards!" she says at the end of Alice in Wonderland, taking control of the whole ridiculous situation which adult systems have constructed. "Off with her head!" the Queen cries, but Alice does not submit. In fact, she pays very little attention to the advice offered to her by any adult or adult figure during the course of the story. If a bottle says "Drink Me" then she drinks its contents because she wants to, not because she's been told to (or told not to).

This was something new. Children's stories of the time were mostly didactic - full of little morals and homilies for the instruction of their juvenile readers. Alice turns these lessons on their head. Here's an example. First, the original:

Isaac Watts - Idleness

'Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain,
You have wak'd me too soon, I must slumber again.

Oh yes - time to get up and get busy. There's a British Empire to build and run. Now for Carroll:

'Tis the voice of the lobster; I heard him declare,
You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.

There's something about the word "lobster" that makes Carroll's version irresistible. Here's the immensely tedious Isaac Watts again:

How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From ev'ry open flow'r?

And Carroll's riposte:

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!

An ounce of ridicule, as they say...

i can't believe you actually made an appreciation thread, aod

i can't believe you actually made an appreciation thread, aod

Thanks for that, Peter! I had read he was parodying didactic work of the time but I never knew which. From what little I've read of his life, I wonder if he didn't walk a fine line between child-like wonder and a state of crippling regression (still better than pedophilia!). J.M. Barrie was another but he had good reasons.

And, just to be controversial, I'm not fond of the Disney version at all. I think it's mainly responsible for people thinking the Alice books are girly.