Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

In part because of its popularity with children and in part because of the fascination it has for adults, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has become one of the most widely interpreted pieces of literature ever produced. Victorians praised Lewis Carroll's wordplay and brilliant use of language. Critics after his death found psychological clues to Carroll's own subconscious in the book's curious dream-structure and the strange and often hostile creatures of Wonderland. During the 1960s, many young people read the book as a commentary on the contemporary drug culture. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There still fascinate critics, who continue to find new readings and new meanings in Carroll's stories for children.

Early reviews of the novel on its original release in 1865 concentrated on Carroll's skills at invention and his ability as a molder of words. They mentioned his parodies, his use of language, and his literary style. According to Morton N. Cohen in his critical biography Lewis Carroll, the noted poets Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti both praised the book in private letters to the author. Novelist Henry Kingsley thanked Carroll for his copy, saying "I received it in bed in the morning, and in spite of threats and persuasions, in bed I stayed until I had read every word of it. I could pay you no higher compliment than confessing that I could not stop reading till I had finished it. The fancy of the whole thing is delicious. Your versification is a gift I envy you very much."

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was widely reviewed," notes Cohen, "and earned almost unconditional praise." Important newspapers and magazines, including the Reader and the Press commended the story's humor and its style. "The Publisher's Circular," asserts Cohen, " selected it as 'the most original and the most charming' of the two hundred books for children sent them that year; the Bookseller was 'delighted. A more original fairy tale it has not lately been our good fortune to read'; and the Guardian judged the 'nonsense so graceful and so full of humour that one can hardly help reading it through.'" An anonymous review in the " Children's Books" section of The Athenaeum magazine (reprinted in Robert Phillips's Aspects of Alice) was an exception to the general praise the work received. The reviewer declared that "Mr. Carroll has labored hard to heap together strange adventures and heterogeneous combinations, and we acknowledge the hard labor. We fancy that any real child might be more puzzled than enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story."

After Carroll's death in 1898, critics expanded the number and type of their readings of the Alice books. They analyzed the stories from many points of view — political, philosophical, metaphysical, and psychoanalytic — often evaluating the tales as products of Dodgson's neuroses and as reactions to Victorian culture. Because of the nightmarish qualities of Alice's adventures and their violent, even sadistic, elements, a few critics have suggested that the books are not really suitable for children. "We have also been bombarded by a horde of wild surmises," declares Cohen, "mostly from the psychological detectives determined to unlock deep motives in the man and to discover hidden meanings in the books. These analysts sometimes seem to be engaged in a contest to win a prize for the most outlandish reading of the texts. One such writer has proved to his satisfaction that Alice was written not by Lewis Carroll at all, but by Queen Victoria."

Some of the most well-known interpretations of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are those that try to understand the story in light of Carroll's well-documented preference for the company of young, preteen, girls. Critics who take this approach connect Carroll's apparent inability to form an adult relationship with a woman and his artistic photographs of little girls, and conclude that Carroll was a closet pedophile — although major critics agree that there is absolutely no biographical information to support this theory. Analysts who use the theories of noted psychologist Sigmund Freud, says Cohen, "suggest that the book is about a woman in labor, that falling down the rabbit hole is an expression of Carroll's wish for coitus, that the heroine is variously a father, a mother, a fetus, or that Alice is a phallus (a theory that, at least, provides us with a rhyme)." Other readings interpret the story as about toilet training or about fallen women. "Unfortunately," Cohen concludes, "these eccentric readings, while they may amuse, do not really bring us any closer to understanding Carroll or his work."

To the extent that critics are able to agree about the meaning of the Alice books, they conclude that the stories are primarily games, stories invented by a man who loved young children and who loved to invent his own word-games and mind-puzzles. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, they agree, is the work of a lonely and brilliant man who found consolation in the company of children and tried to repay some of the debt he felt.