Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (B&N) Read online

  Table of Contents

  From the Pages of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Lewis Carroll

  The World of Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

  Introduction

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  PREFACE

  CHRISTMAS-GREETINGS. [FROM A FAIRY TO A CHILD.]

  I - Down the Rabbit Hole

  II - The Pool of Tears

  III - A Caucus Race & a Long Tale

  IV - The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill

  V - Advice from a Caterpillar

  VI - Pig & Pepper

  VII - A Mad Tea Party

  VIII - The Queen’s Croquet Ground

  IX - The Mock Turtle’s Story

  X - The Lobster Quadrille

  XI - Who Stole the Tarts?

  XII - Alice’s Evidence

  Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

  PREFACE TO 1896 EDITION

  INTRODUCTION.

  CHAPTER I. - LOOKING-GLASS HOUSE.

  CHAPTER II. - THE GARDEN OF LIVE FLOWERS.

  CHAPTER III. - LOOKING-GLASS INSECTS.

  CHAPTER IV. - TWEEDLEDUM AND TWEEDLEDEE.

  CHAPTER V. - WOOL AND WATER.

  CHAPTER VI. - HUMPTY DUMPTY.

  CHAPTER VII. - THE LION AND THE UNICORN.

  CHAPTER VIII. - “IT’S MY OWN INVENTION.”

  CHAPTER IX. - QUEEN ALICE.

  CHAPTER X. - SHAKING.

  CHAPTER XI. - WAKING.

  CHAPTER XII. - WHICH DREAMED IT?

  Endnotes

  Inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

  Comments & Questions

  For Further Reading

  From the Pages of Alice’s

  Adventures in Wonderland and

  Through the Looking-Glass

  The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well.

  (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, page 13)

  Tied round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words “DRINK ME” beautifully printed on it in large letters.

  (Alice, page 17)

  “Shall I never get any older than I am now? That’ll be a comfort, one way—never to be an old woman—but then—always to have lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn’t like that !”

  (Alice, page 45)

  The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

  (Alice, page 55)

  “All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

  (Alice, page 76)

  The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, began screaming “Off with her head!” (Alice, page 93)

  “Every thing’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

  (Alice, page 103)

  The King and Queen of Hearts were seated on their throne when they arrived, with a great crowd assembled about them—all sorts of little birds and beasts, as well as the whole pack of cards. (Alice, page 125)

  ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

  All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe.

  “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

  Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

  The frumious Bandersnatch!”

  (Through the Looking-Glass, page 164)

  “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”

  (Looking-Glass, page 204)

  “They gave it me—for an un-birthday present.”

  (Looking-Glass, page 218)

  “You don’t know how to manage Looking-glass cakes,” the Unicorn remarked. “Hand it round first, and cut it afterwards.”

  (Looking-Glass, page 235)

  “Then fill up the glasses with treacle and ink,

  Or anything else that is pleasant to drink;

  Mix sand with the cider, and wool with the wine—

  And welcome Queen Alice with ninety-times-nine!”

  (Looking-Glass, page 261)

  Published by Barnes & Noble Books

  122 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10011

  www.barnesandnoble.com/classics

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first published in 1865.

  Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There was first published in 1871.

  Published in 2004 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction,

  Notes, Biography, Chronology, Inspired By, Comments & Questions,

  and For Further Reading.

  Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

  Copyright © 2004 by Tan Lin.

  Note on Lewis Carroll, The World of Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in

  Wonderland, and Through the Looking-Glass, Inspired by Alice’s Adventures in

  Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and Comments & Questions

  Copyright © 2004 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval

  system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Barnes & Noble Classics and the Barnes & Noble Classics

  colophon are trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc.

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-015-0 ISBN-10: 1-59308-015-8

  eISBN : 978-1-411-43173-7

  LC Control Number 2003109508

  Produced and published in conjunction with:

  Fine Creative Media, Inc.

  322 Eighth Avenue

  New York, NY 10001

  Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

  Printed in the United States of America

  MV

  12 14 16 18 20 19 17 15 13

  Lewis Carroll

  Lewis Carroll was born as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on January 27, 1832, in Daresbury, Cheshire, England, the eldest son of eleven children raised in a devout English household. He had an inquisitive mind, and his early poems, plays, and paintings display the genius that characterizes his mature works; he seems to have had a happy childhood. Charles was often in charge of the activities of his younger siblings, and he showed a great gift for entertaining and instructing children—one that would persist and deepen throughout his life. Young Charles had a sharp intellect and, tutored by his father, was well ahead of the other students when he enrolled in grade school. He became fluent in Latin and had a propensity for complex mathematics that would likewise distinguish him when in 1850 he entered university at Christ Church college of Oxford University. After graduation, he taught mathematics and logic at Christ Church. In 1856, he created the pseudonym “Lewis Carroll” (versions of his first and middle names in reverse order). He conducted his academic career and published mathematical works as Charles Dodgson but signed his literary wo
rks as Lewis Carroll.

  Carroll was known for his piety (he was ordained as a deacon in 1861), and he suffered from a stutter and deafness in one ear. A sensitive man with many interests, he was an amateur painter and inventor, and an avid theatergoer who moved in London’s artistic circles. A talented art photographer, he made portraits of various luminaries of the day, including Tennyson and the Rossettis. Most frequently, however, he turned his lens upon his favorite subjects and companions: young girls. Carroll’s love of purity and guilelessness and his early experience with his many siblings made him prefer the company of children to that of adults. Whatever other impulses may have led Dodgson to seek out the companionship of young girls, these relationships were by all accounts innocent and kindly. Indeed, Dodgson’s young friends were inspirational—the games and stories he invented to please them led to the creation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, among other works of fantasy and high nonsense.

  Carroll never married, maintained close relationships with his siblings, and led a charitable, productive life unshaken by the political and social upheavals of the day. His more than 300 published works comprise poetry, mathematics, logic, and his beloved children’s stories. Lewis Carroll died in Guildford, England, on January 14, 1898.

  The World of Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

  1832 The third of eleven children, Lewis Carroll is born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on January 27 in Daresbury, Cheshire, England, the eldest son of the Reverend Charles Dodgson and Frances Jane Lutwidge Dodgson.

  1843 The family moves to Croft, Yorkshire, where Charles se nior takes the position of rector. While looking after his siblings, young Charles shows signs of his creative gifts. He paints, puts on puppet shows, and writes plays and sophisticated poems.

  1844 Charles enrolls in the Richmond School, Yorkshire, where he also boards. Previous instruction by his father makes him an excellent student of Latin and mathematics.

  1846 He enters the Rugby public (in American terms, “pri vate”) school; he has a difficult time acclimating socially but performs admirably in his courses.

  1847 Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Emily Bronte’s Wuther ing Heights are published.

  1850 Charles enrolls at Christ Church college of Oxford Uni versity.

  1852 He is made a life fellow of Christ Church.

  1854 He graduates with honors. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is published.

  1855 Charles becomes a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford. He writes the first stanza of “Jabber wocky.”

  1856 He invents the nom de plume “Lewis Carroll,” versions of his first and middle names in reverse order. Through out his life, he will publish mathematical works as Charles Dodgson and literature as Lewis Carroll. (For the sake of simplicity, from here on we refer to him as Lewis Carroll.)

  1856 Carroll first meets the Liddell family when Alice Lid dell’s father takes a position at Oxford. He buys a camera and eventually becomes an excellent photographer.

  1857 He earns his MA degree.

  1859 Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is published. Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities is published.

  1861 Carroll is ordained as a deacon but never becomes a priest. Around this time, he begins to keep a log of his correspondence; by the end of his life, his meticulous accounting records nearly 100,000 letters.

  1862 Carroll and a friend take the Liddell sisters, including Alice, on a summertime river-boat ride. Carroll tells the girls the tale Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Alice asks him to write down the story for her.

  1863 By February he has written a first draft. In June he dis cusses publishing the book with the Clarendon Press.

  1864 Carroll has expanded the manuscript and engages Punch magazine cartoonist John Tenniel as illustrator.

  1865 Tenniel finishes the illustrations and the Clarendon Press prints 2,000 copies of the book as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Despite the book’s great success, Carroll prefers to stay out of the public eye.

  1869 Long fascinated by occultism, Carroll introduces ghosts into his work with the publication of Phantasmagoria and Other Poems.

  1871 As a sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll pub lishes Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is published.

  1876 Carroll’s long poem The Hunting of the Snark, An Agony in Eight Fits, a classic of nonsense literature, is published.

  1879 Euclid and His Modern Rivals is published; demonstrat ing the usefulness of Euclid’s Elements in the teaching of geometry, it is written as a play with the ghost of Euclid as one of the characters.

  1881 Carroll resigns his mathematical lectureship to focus on his writing.

  1882 He takes the demanding position of curator of the Senior Common Room at Christ Church, Oxford.

  1883 The poetry collection Rhyme? And Reason? is published.

  1885 Carroll publishes A Tangled Tale, ten stories for children featuring linguistic play and mathematical “knots” to undo.

  1886 The original manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground is published.

  1888 Curiosa Mathematica, Part I: A New Theory of Parallels is published.

  1889 Sylvie and Bruno, a story for children, is published.

  1890 The Nursery Alice, Carroll’s adaptation for younger chil dren, with twenty enlargements from Tenniel’s illustra tions, is published. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is published.

  1892 Carroll resigns as curator of the Senior Common Room.

  1893 Sylvie and Bruno Concluded and Curiosa Mathematica, Part II: Pillow Problems Thought Out during Sleepless Nights are published.

  1896 Symbolic Logic, which shows how to visually represent propositions in mathematical logic, is published.

  1898 Lewis Carroll dies of pneumonia at Guildford, England, on January 14.

  Introduction

  BOREDOM AND NONSENSE IN WONDERLAND

  “What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning?” (p. 253)

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There pursue what lies beyond and down rabbit holes and on reverse sides of mirrors. But mainly their subject is what comes after, and in this sense the books are allegories about what a child can know and come to know. This quest, as in many great works of literature, unwinds against a larger backdrop: what can and what cannot be known at a particular historical moment, a moment that in Lewis Carroll’s case preceded both Freud’s speculations on the unconscious and Heisenberg’s formulation of the uncertainty principle. Yet because the books were written by a teacher of mathematics who was also a reverend, they are also concerned with what can and cannot be taught to a child who has an infinite faith in the goodness and good sense of the world. But Alice’s quest for knowledge, her desire to become something (a grown-up) she is not, is inverted. The books are not conventional quest romances in which Alice matures, overcomes obstacles, and eventually gains wisdom. For when Alice arrives in Wonderland, she is already the most reasonable creature there. She is wiser than any lesson books are able to teach her to be. More important, she is eminently more reasonable than her own feelings will allow her to express. What comes after for Alice? Near the end of Through the Looking-Glass, the White Queen tells Alice, “Something’s going to happen!” (p. 265).

  Quests for mastery are continually frustrated in the Alice books. In comparison with the ever-sane Alice, it is the various Wonderland creatures who appear to be ridiculous, coiners of abstract word games. Yet Carroll also frustrates, with equal precision, Alice’s more reasonable human desires. Why, after all, cannot Alice know why the Mad Hatter is mad? Or why will Alice never get to 20 in her multiplication tables? In Carroll, the logic of mathematical proofs runs counter to the logic of reasonable human desire—and neither logic is easily mastered. To his radical epistemological doubt, Carroll added
a healthy dose of skepticism for the conventional children’s story—a story that in his day came packaged with a moral aim and treated the child as an innocent or tabula rasa upon which the morals and knowledge of the adult could be tidily imprinted.

  Alice embodies an idea Freud would later develop at length: What Alice the child already knows, the adult has yet to learn. Or to be more precise, what Alice has not yet forgotten, the adult has yet to remember as something that is by nature unforgettable. In other words, in Alice childhood fantasy meets the reality of adulthood, which to the child looks as unreal and unreasonable as a Cheshire Cat’s grin or a Queen who yells “Off with her head!” But even as she calls adult reality unreal, Alice, as the most reasonable creature in her unreasonable dreams, doesn’t quite yet realize that the adult’s sense of reality has already taken up residence in her. The principal dream of most children—the dream within the dream, as it were—is the dream of not dreaming any longer, the dream of growing up. For the adult, the outlook is reversed. The adult’s quest is an inverted one: to find those desires again, in more reasonable forms—and this involves forgetting the original childhood desires (to become an adult) in order to remember them as an adult. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips notes: “Freud is not really saying that we are really children, but that the sensual intensities of childhood cannot be abolished, that our ideals are transformed versions of childhood pleasures. Looking forward . . . is a paradoxical form of looking back. The future is where one retrieves the pleasures, the bodily pleasures of the past.”1 The Alice books manage to show both these quests—that of the child to look forward, and of the adult to look back—simultaneously, as mirror logics of each other.