Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Events in History at the Time of the Novel

by Lewis Carroll

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Events in History at the Time of the Novel

Queen Victoria (1819-1901). Victoria ascended to the British throne in 1837, after her uncle, King William IV, died without leaving a direct heir. At the time of her coronation, the English people had little respect for the monarchy, as it had previously been riddled with irresponsible conduct. Both William IV and Victoria's father lived openly with their mistresses, Mrs. Jordan (an actress) and Madame St. Laurent, respectively. Victoria's concern for the welfare of her people, however, soon gained her the respect of the nation. She and her husband Albert were able to restore some of the lustre that had faded from the royal throne. Some argue that "Great Britain might have become a republic [rather than a monarchy] if Victoria and Albert had not regained that respect by the display of their domestic virtues and blameless private life" (Marshall, p. 94). Under the guidance of Victoria and her prime ministers, Britain developed its worldwide colonial empire. During Victoria's reign, the country increased its population by 50 percent and became, by some estimates, the richest nation in the world.

While Carroll's novel does not directly refer to England's reigning monarch, it does feature a prominent queen, the Queen of Hearts. She rules all of Wonderland, and her subjects bow to her wishes for fear of losing their heads. Like Queen Victoria, whose husband Prince Albert assisted her with royal duties, the king of Wonderland takes an active, if subservient, role with his queen. Carroll's Victorian audience would have been quite familiar and comfortable with this royal hierarchy.

Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell. Lewis Carroll is actually the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a professor of mathematics at Christ Church College in Oxford University. Early in his university life, Carroll began contributing pieces of writing to various humorous journals. As he wanted to keep his two professions separate, he devised a pen name for his creative writings. Translating his first two names into Latin, he came up with "Carolus Lodovicus." He then anglicized these names and reversed their order, becoming "Lewis Carroll."

An avid and accomplished photographer, Carroll met Alice Liddell on the afternoon of April 25, 1856, as he attempted to take pictures of the Christ Church Cathedral. Only four years old at the time, Alice was one of three daughters of Reverend Henry George Liddell, the Dean of Christ Church. This meeting initiated a friendship that was to last several years. Carroll delighted in taking pictures of the three girls, and these photographs garnered such acclaim that he was given the title of the most outstanding photographer of children in the nineteenth century. Although he often met with all of the children at once, Carroll's favorite clearly was Alice. The little girl was "adept at asking challenging and disconcerting questions, [and] enjoyed teasing and … logical argument" (Batey, p. 8). Carroll eventually developed this persona into the title character of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Science vs. religion in Victorian England. The mid-Victorian period (1848-1870) often falls under the title of "The Age of Improvement." London, by the 1830s, had grown into a polluted, overcrowded metropolis. During Victoria's reign (1837-1901), the population of this city alone grew from 2 million to 6.5 million inhabitants. Although social change progressed slowly, a series of organizations and acts of the mid-Victorian period worked to regulate industrial growth. For instance, during the late 1860s the Nine Hours League was formed in Newcastle for the purpose of lobbying for a fifty-four-hour work week. The work week had previously gone unregulated.

In 1851 Prince Albert's Great Exhibition in Hyde Park displayed achievements of modern industry and science. The flourish of science and technology soon ignited a heated debate between the religious camps and the scientific ones. On one side, evolutionists argued under the principles set forth in Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). Darwin suggested that every living creature produces offspring that in some way differs from itself. Certain of these differences give particular offspring a better chance for thriving in their environment, helping the species to survive the tests of "natural selection" imposed by climate, food, and predators. Darwin entitled this ancestral evolution the "survival of the fittest" (Darwin in Lindsay, p. 92). On the other side of the argument, members of the "Oxford movement" (so named for its birth at Oxford University) upheld the biblical concept that God had created the universe and that life did not evolve over time. This theory became known as "creationism." As a professor at Oxford, Lewis Carroll found himself caught in the middle of these sociological and theoretical debates. In 1860 the university played host to a famous British Association meeting at which the Darwinian scientist Thomas Henry Huxley argued with the creationist Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. Some scholars think that bits of these intellectual discussions surface in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Carroll, word play, and Victorian humor. A mathematician by trade, Lewis Carroll had mixed feelings about words. He believed that their ambiguous nature led to infinite problems. Throughout his life, the author kept an exact copy of every correspondence sent or received. In this manner, he hoped to avoid misunderstandings of what he may or may not have said. This habit reflects a preoccupation and infatuation with words and puns that surface in the novel.

Like the Victorian society for which Carroll wrote, the author found endless humor in punning. The trial scene at the end of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland provides one such instance. When asked if she had ever had any fits, the Queen of Hearts replies, "Never!" (Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, p. 100). Her husband, the King, retorts, "Then the words don't fit you. … It's a pun!" (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, p. 101). This type of humor was quite popular in Victorian literature. As critic Donald Gray noted, Victorian "nonsense is full of a delight in the sounds of words, a delight which is also abundantly evident in the countless puns" (Gray, p. 168).

The novel also abounds with humorous references to poems typically taught to Victorian school children. Since education in the nineteenth century centered around endless memorization and recitation, most of the songs and poems in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland would have rung familiar to child readers. Alice's recitation of "You are old, Father William" (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, p. 44), for instance, mocks a well-known poem by Robert Southey, England's poet laureate in 1813. Southey's poem, called "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them," begins with these two stanzas:

Compare these lines with the ones that Alice recalls:

Victorian education for girls. In Victorian England, the educational focus was on the manners a student acquired and the people with whom he or she associated. This emphasis was especially true for female students. A young girl's education often centered around "accomplishments" such as music, drawing, and other arts that would "make a man's home a bower of tasteful bliss" (McMurty, p. 189). Girls were usually educated at home by a governess and an assortment of masters on special subjects. Alice Liddell and her sisters, for instance, received drawing instruction under the guidance of John Ruskin. In the novel, Carroll's Alice remains continually concerned with the propriety of things. She sings and recites with the skill of any good Victorian child, and she even attempts to teach manners to the confused creatures of Wonderland. When affronted at the Mad Hatter's tea party, Alice remarks, "You shouldn't make personal remarks … it's very rude" (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, p. 59). Although the end of the century saw a trend toward educating women in those subjects taught to men (i.e., Latin, mathematics), this change affected only a small portion of the population, specifically the upper classes.