When I think about “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, I think about a timeless story that has existed for years beyond my own, my parent’s own, and even my grandparent’s own time. I think of an imaginative classic that harnesses the impossibilities privilege to fantasy fiction, and creates a realm where anything is possible (so long as you follow the rabbit down his rabbit-hole). In “Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass”, Zoe Jaques, Dr. Eugene Giddens, Professor Hawkins, and Professor Ann R. create a history of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and trace its lifeline from its beginnings to its current depictions.

When asked about the origins of his Alice, Lewis states, “I distinctly remember…how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards” (Giddens Hawkins Jaques R. 7) suggesting a risky but playful degree of spontaneity that characterizes this fairytale. When Alice Liddell, the girl whom the fairytale is presumably based upon, recounts the story first being told to her she states:

“I believe the beginning of ‘Alice’ was told one summer afternoon when the sun was so burning that we had landed in the meadows down the river, deserting the boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found, which was under a new-made hayrick… Sometimes to tease us — and perhaps being really tired — Mr. Dodgeson [Lewis Carroll] would stop suddenly and say, ‘And that’s all till net time.’ ‘Ah, but it is next time,’ would be the exclamation from all three; and after some persuasion the story would start afresh. Another day, perhaps, the story would begin in the boat, and Mr. Dodgson, in the middle of telling a thrilling adventure, would pretend to go fast asleep, to our great dismay” (7-8).

Alice’s anecdote reminisces the organic and pastoral roots of Lewis’s famous fairytale as simply an oral story that entertained the children that he spent time with. According to this publication “It is a common misconception that Carroll completed his tale in a one-off boat journey and then subsequently recorded it for print. Warren Weaver asserts that ‘everyone interested in books presumably now knows that the fairy tale was improvised” (8) therefore reinforcing the spontaneity that characterizes the charm of this famously random, surprising, and seemingly undirected fairytale.

The publication continues to describe Carroll’s journey with the tale as “shortly after Carroll told his initial version of the story, Alice Liddell requested that he write it down, as he later mentions in an annotation…of his original 4th July 1862 diary entry: ‘On which occasion I told them the fairy-tale of ‘Alice’s Adventures Under Ground’…Carroll almost immediately began to outline the story on paper” (9). Carroll therefore illustrates his deeply personal relationship with the story as something inspired by and motivated by his audience.

Works Cited

Jaques, Zoe, Eugene Giddens, Dr., Hawkins, Professor, and Ann R., Professor. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. N.p.: Ashgate, 2014. ProQuest EBrary. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.