Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Underground, later published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, fascinated Victorian audiences from the moment of its appearance. Ostensibly classified as children’s literature, focusing on the initiation/coming-of-age of its protagonist, seven-year-old Alice, the book also caught the attention of adults. It revolutionized children’s literature by moving beyond the usual didacticism of books for young readers popular during Carroll’s time. The book succeeded in entertaining its readers while sharing a bit of implied instruction, adhering to Horace’s doctrine to both teach and delight. It acts as satire, poking good-natured fun at various Victorian practices, including manners, rituals, and class structure, emphasizing that Alice may successfully enter adulthood only when she has learned to follow rules. She must apply logic, intuition, and grace to all circumstances, no matter how outrageous.

Although the Alice character is only seven, far too young to be on the verge of adulthood, the real-life Alice Liddell, for whom Carroll wrote the book and on whom he based his young heroine, was, at the time he wrote the book, 11 years old, an adolescent who would have begun questioning her self-identity. With its beautiful illustrations by Sir John Tenniel, Wonderland, and its 1871 sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, remain enduring favorites. Converted into a number of television, film, and stage presentations, Carroll’s books supplied some of the most well-recognized images and phrases in popular culture. Alice’s comment on the events that she observes, “curiouser and curiouser,” found its way into everyday speech, as did a phrase sung by the watch-toting white rabbit from the Walt Disney cartoon based on the classic, “I’m late! I’m late! For a very important date!” The phrase “grinning like a Cheshire cat,” based on the cat that so startles Alice by disappearing, leaving behind only its smiling teeth suspended in air, came to connote a person with a sly or mysterious idea. These examples are only a small indication of the work’s effect.

At its most basic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland may be seen as an initiation/coming-of-age story in which Alice must make decisions regarding her behavior that will help determine her success in an adult environment. It also qualifies as a quest, containing hallmark plot elements from a call to adventure to a triumphant return home. Alice’s adventures begin when she sees a white rabbit, symbolic of magic and transformations, then falls asleep, her head in her sister’s lap. She follows the rabbit into a hole, through which she falls for quite some time. As she falls, Alice recounts lessons she has learned in school, allowing Carroll to reflect on the questionable value of children’s schooling to the application of real life. Alice arrives in Wonderland when she finds herself in a house. She tries to enter a garden visible through a window, but she is the wrong size, beginning numerous conflicts with herself, other characters, and her new environment. The garden symbolizes childhood as well as reproduction, growth, and maturity. Alice alters her size in hopes of passing through a small door into the garden by ingesting the first of various magical foods and drink that she will encounter. Unfortunately, as she alternately grows and shrinks, she never reaches the proper size to fit through the door. Each of the several episodes in which she rapidly changes height emphasizes that mere physical size does not determine one’s level of maturity.

Not allowed into the garden, the land of childhood, Alice is forced to enter a much more adult world where all semblance of order seems to have disappeared. In the novel’s second chapter, she chides herself, in the absence of any adult to do the scolding, for errors in logic and wonders aloud, “Who in the world am I?,” concluding, “That’s the great puzzle.” Her confusion sets the scene for her ensuing self-identity struggle. Some of Alice’s adventures suggest traditional fairy/folktales containing figures that would have been familiar to young readers of Carroll’s time, such as a young person with something to learn, talking animals, and enchanted forests and dwellings. However, while those tales move in a predictable fashion, Carroll’s tale does not. Enchanted beasts that should act as guide figures simply confuse poor Alice, and normal symbols of order, such as a traditional English tea party, dissolve into chaos.

At the party, Alice engages in confusing conversation with what would become extremely popular fictional figures: the Dormouse, the March Hare, and the Mad Hatter. According to New Historicist critics, the Mad Hatter represents a working class that suffered terrible physical consequences from their labor, such as Victorian hatmakers who developed mental illness due to poisoning from the mercury used in fur processing, emphasizing the inequities of England’s class structure. After the tea party, Alice meets a puppy, one of the most common symbols of childhood delight, but his enormous size frustrates their interaction. Continued focus on physical size strongly carries through Carroll’s emphasis on characteristics of maturity not equal to emotional or mental aspects.

One of the novel’s most striking figures, a hookah-smoking caterpillar, epitomizes the idea of metamorphosis that all children must face during maturity. The hookah, an accepted symbol of wisdom in its relationship to Eastern religions, introduces the idea of consciousness-altering drugs, still legal in England during the 19th century, that appear in other of its popular literature, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. It is an adult pursuit that Alice must confront with grace and agility as she verbally spars with the caterpillar. Conversations that engage Alice reflect Carroll’s passion for mathematics, logic, linguistics, and riddles, as Alice is stymied in her attempts to carry on polite discussions in situations where the basic meaning of simple English terms, and their interrelationships, come into question.

Alice’s final confrontation of a queen in the garden she had hoped to visit when she entered Wonderland proves the success of her training. Important traditional symbols in this scene include its white and red roses. The white roses represent the process of aging and impending death, in this case, of the adult queen, while red roses represent youth, fertility, and passion, suggesting a juxtaposition of the Queen’s maturity to Alice’s youth. Playing-card men are dowsing the white roses with red paint in hopes of disguising the fact that they planted the wrong type of bush. With the red rose, Carroll again recalls fairy tales such as “Snow White and Rose Red.” He also recalls the traditional, often fatal, female struggle between age and fading beauty with youth and dawning beauty in tales such as “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty.”

As Alice attempts a polite conversation with the Queen, she finds herself “on trial” for supposedly rude and faulty behavior. Only when Alice realizes that a great part of that adult world is “Nonsense!” does she gain the ability to return to her own world. She awakens right back where she began, lying with her head in her sister’s lap. She tells her sister of her dream; then the reader is privy to her sister’s thoughts. As Alice’s sister pictures her at some point in the future, sharing her adventures in Wonderland with her children, Carroll seems to be hoping that part of Alice Liddell’s childhood memories will involve him. According to her later writings, she did recall Lewis Carroll, his stories and their many hours spent together with great fondness.

Carroll’s tales continue to affect readers, from philosophers who examine his characters’ statements about life, to mathematicians who study his chess moves and quadratic relationships, to authors like Joyce Carol Oates, who has stated that she views Alice’s journey into the imagination as the collective destiny of all humans on their way to self-realization.

Bibliography
Carroll, Lewis. The Annotated Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-glass. Notes by Martin Gardner. New York: Norton, 2000.
Jones, Jo Elwyn, and J. Francis Gladstone. The Alice Companion: A Guide to Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
Phelps, Gilbert. “Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-glass.” An Introduction to Fifty British Novels: 1600–1900. London: Pan Books, 1979, 407–419.
Reichertz, Ronald. The Making of the Alice Books: Lewis Carroll’s Uses of Earlier Children’s Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.