The Wonderland and Looking Glass Appreciation Thread

[AncientOfDays]

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Through the Looking Glass.

Pure nonsensical genius. My most favourite books of all time. If you like them as well, post here!

[bee]

I love these books. They are wonderful. I brought only about 6 or 7 books with me from home when I moved--one is Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass (together) and one is the complete works of Lewis Carroll. They're delightful.

[Peter]

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...

[Philharmonic]

well, i think the storyline isnt too bad, but the way its written-or maybe its because im not into the old fashioned books at all.

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

[Mockingbird]

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

Yes, how dare you leave off agonizing endlessly over playing Will to post something else?

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.

Favorite Alice quote:

"It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying 'Come up again, dear!' I shall only look up and say 'Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else'..."

[AncientOfDays]

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

Well, you ought to believe it. I can't spend all of my life on the Will thread. Break free and live! You should start a Transformers thread, if you like that so much (that's not an insult, by the way; Transformers is a brilliant film).

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. Example: when a boy at school asked me what I was reading and I said, "Alice in Wonderland", he said, "That's a bit gay isn't it?" Mind you, the word "gay" is so overused these days that it's lost all meaning.

Jonathan Miller's obscure 1966 version is my favourite adaptation of them all, but I quite like the Hallmark one with the extravagant budget and ace soundtrack. I'm itching to see Tim Burton's version, though.

[Peter]

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.

I'm sure that if we saw someone today behaving towards a little girl as Lewis Carroll did with Alice Liddell we'd say he was grooming her.

Isaac Watts wasn't all bad, by the way. He wrote Oh God Our Help In Ages Past from which I once took the lines:

Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;

for a story title.

[aklebury]

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.

If you haven't already seen it, I highly recommend Jan Svankmajer's 1988 adaption 'Alice' - it takes on the novel from a completely new persepctive. Alice is from a lower-class family (presumably - it's never actually stated) and the inhabitants of wonderland are made up of old decaying or dead things like stuffed animals, skulls, bits of rotton meat. The caterpillar is an old sock with buttons for eyes - it's very imaginative.

I really like bizzare adaptions of Alice in Wonderland - looking foward to Burton's film

[AncientOfDays]

Ah, how could I have forgotten that version? I finally managed to watch it on youtube after waiting ages to see it. It's brilliant, pure genius.

[Peter]

Here's a Mervyn Peake Illustration for you:

[AncientOfDays]

That's quite an interesting illustration. Alice seems a little feral in it--probably the eyes.

[Mockingbird]

It is an interesting take on her, not quite the same as mine. The real Alice for you, photographed by Lewis Carroll: