Imagine for a second that you are tumbling. Right,
just completely in free fall. Exactly. You've
just slipped down this dark, narrow tunnel, the
earth completely giving way beneath you, and
suddenly you're falling down a very, very deep
well. But you're falling slowly. Yeah, so slowly,
in fact, that you have plenty of time to just
look around as you drift downward. And what do
you actually see? Probably not what you'd expect
in a dirt well. No, not at all. The walls aren't
made of dirt or stone. They're lined with cupboards
and bookshelves. There are maps and pictures
hanging on little wooden pegs. It's basically
a subterranean living room. Pretty much. And
you reach out, your hand brushing past this strange
underground wallpaper, and you grab a jar from
a shelf as you flow past. The label, written
in neat little letters, says orange marmalade.
But of course you look inside and it's completely
empty. Empty. So, politely, because you don't
want to drop it on whoever might be standing
far below you, you carefully place it back into
another cupboard as you continue to fall. Down,
down, down. Tumbling into a world where everything
you thought you knew about logic, about rules,
and about polite society is just about to be
turned entirely aggressively on its head. It
is the ultimate disorientation. Oh, absolutely.
I mean, you are stripped of your geographical
coordinates, your physical stability, and very
soon, your fundamental sense of identity. You
aren't just falling through space. No, you are
falling through the cracks of reality itself.
And that feeling of absolute free fall is the
entire premise of today's deep dive. We are looking
at a story that practically invented the modern
portal fantasy. It really did set the blueprint
for all of them. It did, and we have a massive
stack of sources today. We're looking at the
original 1865 text of Lewis Carroll's Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland, along with just extensive
historical, literary, and cultural data surrounding
it. It's a lot of material to cover. It is, but
our mission... is to discover how a simple, entirely
made -up story told to three little girls on
a rowboat completely revolutionized children's
literature and became one of the most culturally
pervasive texts in human history. So let's unpack
this. Our approach today, though, requires stepping
away from the superficial stuff. Right, we're
not just doing a plot summary. Exactly. We aren't
going to recount the basic plot of a girl chasing
a white rabbit with a pocket watch. We are going
to dissect the why. The why is the best part.
It is. We are going to uncover the hidden mathematical
satires, the biting critiques of Victorian upper
class society, and the genuine visceral existential
dread that is woven right into the fabric of
all this famous nonsense. So if you are listening
to this, I need you to do me a favor. Forget
the sanitized pop culture versions of Alice you
might have seen over the years. Yeah, leave the
Disney movies at the door for a minute. Exactly.
Forget the colorful theme park rides, the catchy
songs, or the Halloween costumes for a second.
I want you to prepare to look at the raw original
text. with totally fresh eyes. Because before
we can understand the sheer unadulterated madness
of Wonderland, we actually have to establish
the highly grounded, very real -world moment
where it was born. And it started on a boat.
Specifically, a heavy wooden rowboat on the River
Isis. Which is in Oxford, right? Yes, a stretch
of the Thames that runs through Oxford. And this
was on July 4th, 1862. Okay, so midsummer. Right.
And this date is deeply embedded in the lore
of the book to the point of achieving a sort
of mythical status. It's famously referred to
as the Golden Afternoon. Oh, yeah. The book itself
even opens with a prefatory poem that leans hard
into that myth. Yeah. It starts off all in the
Golden Afternoon. Full leisurely we glide. It
paints this picture of a sun -drenched idyllic
English summer day. Yeah, with a gentle breeze
and perfectly behaved children listening in rapt
attention. Well, the historical reality paints
a notably different picture. Really, it wasn't
sunny. Not even close. So Lewis Carroll, whose
real name was actually Charles Lutwidge Dodgson,
was a mathematics don at Christchurch Oxford.
And on this particular day, he and his friend,
the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, took the three
young daughters of Henry Liddell out for a row.
And Henry Liddell was Dodgson's boss, essentially.
Exactly. He was the Dean of Christ Church. The
girls were Lorena, who was 13, Alice, who was
10, and Edith, who was eight. So three young
kids on a boat. Yes. And they rode upstream from
Folly Bridge in Oxford to a village called Godstow.
This is a distance of about five miles. Five
miles. Wait, rowing a heavy Victorian pleasure
boat upstream for five miles? That is serious
physical labor. It is a serious workout. And
regarding that... supposedly golden afternoon,
meteorological records from Oxford for July 4th,
1862, show that the weather was actually cool,
cloudy, and rather wet. So it was just a damp,
miserable English summer day. Pretty much. It
was not a sun -drenched idle. It was overcast
and rainy. That detail completely changes the
context of the story's creation for me. How so?
I mean, it's like a modern creative pitching
a script to a tough crowd of kids on a boring
rainy car ride. Oh, that's a perfect analogy.
Right. You're trapped in a confined space. The
weather outside is dreary. You have three restless
children in stiff, uncomfortable Victorian clothing
getting thoroughly bored. And you just have to
do something to stop them from complaining. Exactly.
You just start making up the wildest things possible
purely as a survival tactic to keep them entertained.
You're just throwing ideas at the wall, not realizing
you are verbally drafting a literary masterpiece.
Well, Dodson was incredibly adept at entertaining
children, and Alice Liddell in particular was
a real favorite of his. Which makes sense, given
the title. Right. The literary biographer Robert
Douglas Fairhurst actually suggests Dodgson favored
Alice because her very name was ripe for literary
allusion. Her middle name, Pleasance, literally
means pleasure. Oh, wow. I didn't know that.
Yeah. And the name Alice was popping up in contemporary
romantic works of the time. But on this specific
damp boat trip, the story he spun to keep them
occupied was something he initially called Alice's
Adventures Underground. Underground, not Wonderland.
Correct. He sent the protagonist named after
the 10 -year -old sitting right across from him
down a rabbit hole and simply improvised what
happened next. The source notes point out that
he told these girls stories all the time, but
this one hit different. It really did. It was
Alice herself who demanded he write it down.
She specifically asked him to preserve this particular
improvised ramble. She wanted a physical copy
of it. And you have to understand, Dodgson was
a man obsessed with preservation. In what way?
Well, he was a pioneering amateur photographer.
He actually took 20 surviving portraits of Alice
alone. 20? In the 1860s? Yes, and photography
back then was a laborious, chemical -heavy process.
It required intense patience. Subjects had to
sit perfectly still for a long time. So it wasn't
just snapping a quick picture on a phone? Not
at all. This background informed his almost obsessive
focus on capturing fleeting moments of childhood
before they inevitably disappeared into adulthood.
That's actually kind of beautiful, but also a
bit melancholic. It is. So when Alice asked him
to write the story down, he treated it with the
same meticulous dedication he applied to his
photography. He didn't just jot down some notes.
No. He spent the next two years painstakingly
writing and illustrating a manuscript entirely
by hand. Two entire years hand drawing a book
just because a 10 -year -old asked you to. Talk
about committing to the bit. He was incredibly
dedicated. He finally presented it to Alice on
November 26, 1864, as an early Christmas gift.
That is quite the present. The dedication read,
a Christmas gift to a dear child in memory of
a summer's day. But the version he gave her,
that original underground manuscript, is vastly
different from the book we all know today, right?
Oh, completely. It's essentially a prototype.
It is roughly half the length. Only half? Yeah.
When he eventually decided to publish it for
a wider audience, which he did on the advice
of friends like the fantasy author George McDonald,
who tested the manuscript on his own children
to great success, Dodgson expanded it significantly.
So he beefed it up for publication. Exactly.
The transition from Alice's Adventures Underground
in 1864 to the published Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland in 1865 is where the text fundamentally
shifts. How so? It evolves from a private sentimental
gift for a specific child into a broader, much
sharper public satire. He added the really famous
stuff. He did. He added entire iconic chapters
like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party and the Pig and
Pepper chapter. Those simply do not exist in
the original handwritten manuscript. That is
wild to me. The Mad Hatter wasn't even in the
original story. But even with all those massive
additions for the public release, the DNA of
that original damp boat ride is literally written
into the fabric of Wonderland. He didn't just
invent these characters out of nowhere. He dressed
up his reality in fantastical clothing. It's
a Victorian Roman aclef. Yes, exactly. And for
those listening who might be unfamiliar with
the literary term, a Roman aclef, which is French
for novel with a key, is basically a story about
real life, overlaid with a facade of fiction.
Like an inside joke disguised as a novel. Precisely.
The real people, places, and events are disguised
as fictional characters and settings. Carol essentially
took the occupants of the robo and dropped them
straight into the narrative. Let's actually map
those characters out because the specific correlations
are just wild. Let's do it. Okay, so in chapter
three, Alice finds herself swimming in a giant
pool of her own tears. Which she cried when she
was nine feet tall. Right. And she washes up
on the bank with a bunch of strange, dripping
wet birds and animals. And they end up having
a completely nonsensical caucus race to get dry.
Running in circles. Exactly. And the animals
standing on that bank are the exact people from
the boat. They are. The duck is Reverend Duckworth.
Which is, frankly, a bit of lazy naming, but
it works. It gets the point across. Then you
have the lorry, which is a type of brightly colored
Australian parrot. That represents Lorena, the
eldest Liddell sister. Okay, lorry for Lorena.
And the eaglet is Edith, the youngest. Okay,
so the duck is Duckworth, the lorry is Lorena,
the eaglet is Edith. But why make himself a dodo?
That's a great question. I mean, it's an extinct,
clumsy, rather tragic bird. Was Dodgson notoriously
uncoordinated? No, the choice of the dodo is
actually a deeply personal piece of self -deprecation.
Dodgson had a pronounced stammer. Oh, really?
Yes, and it was particularly noticeable when
he was nervous or speaking to other adults. He
would sometimes get stuck on his own surname,
introducing himself as Doodoo Dodgson. Oh, wow.
Doodoo Dodgson. Hence, he became the dodo. Exactly.
It was an inside joke that the girls would have
immediately recognized and found hilarious. That
is surprisingly vulnerable for a Victorian academic.
It really shows the level of comfort he had with
the children compared to adults. But the inside
jokes go way deeper than just the five people
in the boat, right? Oh, much deeper. Later on
in the book, at the manned tea party, the Dormouse
tells a story about three little sisters living
at the bottom of a treacle well. A very strange
story. Very. And their names are Elsie, Lacey,
and Tilly. These are the Liddell sisters all
over again, hidden in a layer of war play. Let's
break those down. Yeah. So Elsie sounds out the
letters Elsie, which stands for Lorena Charlotte.
Right. Lacey is a direct, perfect anagram of
Alice. Just shuffling the letters around. Exactly.
And Tilly is short for Matilda, which was Edith's
family nickname. It's remarkably clever. And
the references extend to the broader Oxford academic
circle they all inhabited, too. Who else gets
roasted in this book? Well, the Mad Hatter himself
is widely believed to be a reference to a local,
highly eccentric Oxford furniture dealer named
Theophilus Carter. A furniture dealer. Yeah,
he was known to stand in the door of his shop
wearing a top hat perched on the back of his
head. He was a very recognizable local character.
That is so funny, just walking past a guy and
deciding, yep, you're going into the fantasy
novel. And then there is the mock turtle. Oh,
the mock turtle scene is amazing. He talks nostalgically
about his education at the bottom of the sea,
right? And he mentions a drawing master. A drawing
master. Yes. Described as an old conger eel who
came once a week to teach. drawing, stretching,
and fainting in coils. Which sounds like an absolute
nightmare of a curriculum. Yeah. I'm just picturing
a giant eel forcing children to stretch and faint.
It's actually a direct, rather savage parody
of the famous Victorian art critic, John Ruskin.
John Ruskin, the huge art guy. The very same.
Ruskin was a towering figure in the 19th century
art world. He was a man of immense influence
and serious demeanor. So why is he an eel? Because
he actually came to the Liddell House once a
week to teach the girls drawing, sketching, and
painting in oils. Oh my goodness, so drawing,
sketching, and painting in oils becomes - Drawing,
stretching, and fainting in coils. That is brutal.
To reduce the preeminent art critic of the age
to a drawing conger eel is just a spectacular
piece of academic mockery. It's incredibly witty
and there are even potential political illusions
tucked in there as well. Okay, maintaining strict
neutrality here as to the politics of the time,
obviously. But who is getting mocked in government?
Take Bill the Lizard. Oh, the guy who gets kicked
up the chimney earlier in the book. Yes, but
later during the chaotic trial scene near the
end of the book, Bill the Lizard is one of the
jurors. Right. His pencil squeaks too loudly,
so Alice just reaches over and takes it away
from him. Which forces him to write on his slate
with his finger, which obviously leaves no mark.
Exactly. Well, there's a prominent theory that
Bill the Lizard is a play on the name of the
British Prime Minister at the time, Benjamin
Disraeli. That's fascinating. Carol might be
taking the highest, most powerful levels of British
government and weaving them into a story about
a little girl shrinking in a hallway, rendering
them as ineffective lizards who can't even hold
a pencil. That's the theory. And if we connect
this specific character mapping to the bigger
picture, we have to ask why Dodgson built the
story this way. I hide all these real people
in a children's book. The biographer Morton N.
Cohen argues that this structure served as a
sophisticated coping mechanism for the plight
of the child in Victorian upper -class society.
A coping mechanism? Yes. The mistreatment Alice
constantly faces from the chaotic, aggressive,
and entirely unreasonable creatures of Wonderland,
it mirrors Dodgson's own childhood experiences
with the arbitrary authority of older people.
So he's punching up? Exactly. He's building a
world where the adults... The authority figures,
the teachers, the politicians are stripped of
their real world power and exposed as utterly
ridiculous pompous animals. That sounds like
great therapy for Dodgson and honestly a fun
afternoon for the Liddell girls. But let me push
back on this a little bit. Sure. If this entire
book is just a dense thicket of hyper specific
inside jokes for an Oxford academic, his boss's
kids and a local furniture dealer. How on earth
did it translate? What do you mean? I mean, why
do we care about a parody of John Ruskin today?
Most people reading Alice have no idea who Henry
Liddell or Robinson Duckworth are, yet the book
is universally beloved. How does an inside joke
become a global phenomenon? That paradox is the
true genius of the work. The specific real world
inside jokes, they are merely the architecture,
they are the scaffolding. What those jokes actually
do is tap into universal timeless truths about
authority, logic, and the sheer absurdity of
the adult world. So the specifics don't matter
as much as the feeling. Right. A modern 10 -year
-old child reading the book today doesn't need
to know who John Ruskin is to find the phrase,
fainting in coils, inherently hilarious. True.
It's just a funny phrase. And they instantly
recognize the archetype of a pompous, unhelpful
teacher who talks down to them. The Romana clef
elements gave the story its foundation, keeping
it grounded in real human observation. But Carroll's
absolute brilliance with linguistics gave it
wings. Which brings us perfectly to how Carroll
basically weaponized the English. He didn't just
mock his boss's appearance by making him a bird.
He attacked the very foundation of how Victorian
children were taught to speak, read, and think.
Absolutely. Victorian education for children,
particularly in the affluent upper classes, was
an incredibly rigid system. It was very strict.
It was heavily based on rote memorization. Children
were treated as empty vessels to be filled with
facts. No room for creativity? None. They spent
hours memorizing Latin declensions, historical
dates, and deeply moralistic poetry. The goal
of this education wasn't necessarily to foster
critical thinking. It was to instill didactic
lessons. It was about obedience. Exactly. It
was designed to teach children how to be seen
and not heard, how to suppress their natural
impulses, and how to become morally upright,
compliant citizens. The pressure was immense.
I can't even imagine. It's like if a modern kid
was forced to memorize the entire Apple Terms
of Service and under pressure, their brain just
completely That's a great way to think about
it. And Wonderland systematically dismantles
that entire educational framework. Let's look
at the Pool of Tears scene again. Right, when
she's swimming with the mouse. Alice is swimming
for her life alongside a giant mouse. And despite
the panic of drowning, her primary concern is
trying to figure out how to address the mouse
politely. Because that's what a good Victorian
girl is trained to do, manners above survival.
Exactly. So she remembers her brother's Latin
grammar book. and she recites the noun declensions
for mouse while literally treading water. She
says a mouse of a mouse to a mouse, a mouse o
mouse. Which is an incredibly clever multi -layered
joke in itself. It is. Those words correspond
perfectly to the first five cases of Latin nouns.
Nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and
vocative. But the scholar, Don L .F. Nelson,
points out a brilliant hidden punchline here.
He does. Hold on. Before we get to the hidden
punchline, for those of us who, you know, didn't
attend an elite 19th century boarding school,
what actually is the grammatical setup here?
Like, what is she missing? Ah, right. So in Latin
grammar, there is a sixth case. OK. It's called
the ablative case. And what did that do? The
ablative is generally used to express concepts
like movement away from something or the instrument
used to do something. It's often translated using
by, with, or from. OK, got it. But Alice completely
omits the ablative case in her recitation. She
stops evocative. Yes. Why? Because her father,
Henry Liddell, the man who employed Lewis Carroll,
was the co -author of the massive definitive
Greek -English lexicon. A dictionary everyone
used. A book that was a staple of classical education
for decades, and crucially, the ancient Greek
language does not have an ablative case. Wait,
really? That is just astounding. It's a spectacular
linguistic pun that operates on two entirely
different frequencies. On the surface, it's just
a joke about a child blindly relying on rote
schoolwork in a life or death situation. Yes,
but underneath, it's an Oxford Dawn giving a
highly technical grammatical wink to the author
of the Greek lexicon. That is so nerdy and I
absolutely love it. And the linguistic subversion
in this book is just relentless. It doesn't stop.
Later, when the White Rabbit mistakes Alice for
his housemaid. Oh, when she magically grows too
large and gets stuck in his house. Right. The
Rabbit sends his servant, Pat, to get her out.
And Pat makes an excuse. He says he is digging
for apples. Which just sounds like random nonsense.
Why would you dig for apples? Exactly. But it's
a cross -language pun. In French, the word for
potato is pomme de terre. Which translates literally
to apple of the earth. Yes. So he's not speaking
nonsense. He's digging for potatoes, translated
literally from French. Mind blown again. But
the most profound and frankly the most destructive
linguistic subversions happen with the poetry.
Oh, the parodies are legendary. As you mentioned,
children of Alice's era were constantly forced
to memorize poems. meant to frighten them into
good behavior. They were constantly surrounded
by the threat of hellfire or moral ruin. Yeah,
like, for instance, the theologian Isaac Watts
wrote a famously strict nursery rhyme called
Against Idleness and Mischief. It begins, How
doth the little busy bee improve each shining
hour? The message of Watts' poem is explicitly
clear. work hard, be busy, do not be lazy, or
the devil will find work for your idle hands.
Right. It is a terrifying mandate for constant
industry. Very Victorian. But when Alice tries
to recite it in Wonderland, and she's just doing
this to fold her hands and be perfectly polite,
trying to prove to herself that she hasn't lost
her mind, her brain completely betrays her, the
rote memorization fails. It breaks down. Instead
of a hard -working, morally upright B. She recites
a poem about a deeply deceptive, predatory reptile.
She says, How doth the little crocodile improve
his shining tail and pour the waters of the Nile
on every golden scale? How cheerfully he seems
to grin, how neatly spread his claws, and welcome
little fishes in with gently smiling jaws. It
is a total calculated usurpation of the moral
lesson. That's so creepy. It is. Instead of industry
and piety, the poem is now about deceptive predation.
The crocodile isn't working hard, it's luring
the innocent to their deaths with a smile. And
she performs this same act of literary vandalism
again, with Robert Southey's poem, The Old Man's
Comforts, and how he gained them. Another deeply
didactic poem. Yeah, Southeast Palm was a tedious
dialogue meant to teach children absolute unquestioning
respect for their elders' wisdom. And in Alice's
mouth, it becomes the famous, you are old, Father
William. Where the youth asks the old man questions.
But instead of sharing pious wisdom, the old
man spends his time incessantly standing on his
head, turning back somersaults in at the door
and balancing live eels on the end of his nose.
It completely disrespects the elder profoundly.
And when the youth asks Father William how he
manages to be so strong at his advanced age,
the old man says it's because he spent his youth
arguing legal cases with his wife, which gave
him muscular jaw strength that lasted the rest
of his life. It's totally absurd. It's brilliant.
The scholar, F .J. Harvey Darten, actually argued
that the publication of Alice single -handedly
ended the era of didacticism in children's literature.
That's a huge claim. It is, but before Carroll,
books written for children were essentially thinly
veiled lectures. They were medicinal. Like taking
your literary cod liver oil. Exactly. Carroll
replaced that stiff, suffocating Victorian didacticism
with a looser, sillier, nonsense style that aimed
purely to delight and entertain. He took the
heavy moralizing tools of the adult world and
smashed them, liberating the children's book
in the process. I want everyone listening to
think about their own childhood for a second.
Think about the sheer panic of being called on
in class. Oh, the worst feeling. Right. Remember
reciting multiplication tables until your brain
went completely numb, just chanting, four times
five is 20, four times six is 24, over and over.
Just drilling it into your head. Alice does exactly
that. When she is sitting alone, terrified that
she has been magically swapped with her less
intelligent classmate named Mabel, she tries
to test her own knowledge to prove her identity.
She tries math. She says, let me see, four times
five is 12, and four times six is 13, and four
times seven is, oh dear, I shall never get to
20 at that rate. And if you follow her progression,
12, 13, 14, she will hit 19 at four times 12.
which means she will indeed never reach 20. The
math is broken, but it has a strange internal
consistency. She realizes that the rigid rules
of the adult world, the absolute certainty she
was taught, simply do not hold up under the chaotic
pressure of Wonderland. They fall apart. Which
naturally leads us to a massive realization.
It wasn't just spoken language, Latin grammar,
and poetry that Carroll was playing with. His
actual day job as an Oxford mathematician heavily
fundamentally influenced the mechanics of the
nonsense Alice encounters. That is a fascinating
area of study. Let's get into the math. The literary
scholar Melanie Bailey has done brilliant work
pointing out that Carroll wrote Alice during
a period of intense, highly controversial upheaval
in the mathematical world. What was going on
in math in the 1860s? The mid -19th century saw
the rapid development of non -Euclidean geometry
and symbolic algebra. For centuries, math was
based on Euclidean geometry, things like flat
planes, reliable angles, math that described
the physical, observable world. Math he could
draw on a piece of paper and measure. Exactly.
But Dodgson was a deeply conservative mathematician.
He believed math should reflect reality. But
suddenly, his contemporaries were moving math
into highly abstract theoretical realms that
had no basis in the physical world. He was not
a fan of the new abstract math. He hated it.
And Bailey theorizes that Alice is, in part,
a biting, complex satire on these new mathematical
concepts that Dodgson despised. I absolutely
love the idea of a stuffy Oxford Don getting
so mad at a new kind of outro that instead of
writing an angry letter to an academic journal...
He writes a globally beloved fantasy novel just
to roast his colleagues. That is peak petty academic
behavior. It really is. But how does that actually
work in the text? How do you satirize abstract
math in a story about a talking rabbit? Let's
look at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. Okay. It
is widely considered a masterpiece of mathematical
and existential paradox. Bailey suggests the
Tea Party is specifically targeting the work
of William Rowan Hamilton. Who was Hamilton?
Hamilton was a mathematician who created a number
system called quaternions. In this system, there
were four terms, and Hamilton crucially identified
the fourth term as time. Time became an independent
variable in the math. OK, so Hamilton makes a
math system where time is a separate detached
thing. How does Carol mock that at a Tea Party?
Well, when Alice arrives at the Tea Party, The
Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse are
crammed into one corner of a massive table set
for many people. Right. The Hatter explains to
Alice that he had a terrible quarrel with time,
who he personifies as a hymn. He fought with
time. Yes. And because of this fight, time won't
do a single thing, the Hatter asks. Time has
abandoned them, and the clock is permanently,
irrevocably fixed at 6 p .m. Which is, of course,
tea time. Precisely. Carol is showing what happens
when you mathematically decouple time from space,
as Hamilton did. If time leaves the equation,
you are stuck. And because it is permanently
tea time, they never have time to wash the dishes.
They must constantly rotate around the table,
shifting to the next clean setting, leaving their
dirty cups behind them. Wow. It is a closed system
loop. It's a literal circle of madness that can
never be resolved because time has ceased to
be a functioning variable. So Carol is basically
telling his colleagues, if you continue with
this abstract math, this eternal, static, messy
tea party is the universe you are creating. That's
the argument, yes. That is just brilliant. It's
the ultimate paradox. And right in the middle
of this broken mathematical equation, the Hatter
drops the most famous riddle in literary history.
He does. He looks at Alice out of nowhere and
asks, why is a raven like a writing desk? And
Alice is thrilled. She thinks they're finally
playing a civilized parlor game. Right. She loves
rules. She sits there trying to logic it out,
listening to the Hatter in the hair. argue about
semantic logic, like whether I see what I eat
is exactly the same thing as I eat what I see.
Which it isn't, obviously. No. But she tries
to apply traditional reasoning to the puzzle.
Finally exhausted, she gives up and asks for
the answer. And the hatter says, I haven't the
slightest idea. Nor does the march hair. And
this is where it gets really interesting, because
the lack of an answer isn't just a dodge. It
is the actual punchline. The nonsense is the
logic. There is no hidden meaning. None at all.
Humphrey Carpenter, a preeminent biographer of
children's literature, notes that Carol's brand
of nonsense is highly specific. It isn't just
chaotic gibberish. It embraces the nihilistic
and the existential. It's dark nonsense. It is
rule bound. Carol is exploring what happens when
you take a logical premise and follow it to its
absolute, absurd, terrifying extreme. The characters
pose paradoxes that are structurally perfect
as sentences, but entirely void of meaning. They
trap Alice in logical cages. And when mathematical
and linguistic logic breaks down, it leads directly
to a breakdown of physical reality. Which is
where things get genuinely scary for Alice. Right.
Alice is constantly losing control of her own
physical body, and it's almost always because
of what she consumes. Yes. Which leads us into
one of the most persistent, unsettling, and frankly
terrifying themes of the book. Existential consumption.
The scholar Karina Garland notes how the landscape
of Wonderland is continually expressed via representations
of food and appetite. Food is everywhere. Alice
is driven by what Garland calls curious appetites.
From the very moment she lands at the bottom
of the rabbit hole, her physical dimensions,
her actual existence in space are dictated by
what she ingests. It starts right away in that
long hallway with the glass table. She finds
the little bottle with the paper label beautifully
printed with the words, drink me. What she notes
has a mixed flavor of, what was it? Cherry tart,
custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffee, and
hot buttered toast. An interesting combination.
Very. And she drinks it and shrinks down to a
mere 10 inches high. Then she finds the little
glass box under the table with the cake marked
Eat Me spelled out in currants. She eats it and
violently shoots up to nine feet tall, hitting
her head on the ceiling. She is also altered
by fanning herself with the White Rabbit's magical
fan. Oh right, she shrinks again. And later,
the caterpillar provides her with the mushroom.
One side makes her taller, the other side shorter.
She has to carefully nibble from each hand, balancing
her intake just to regulate her height back to
normal. But this constant obsessive intake of
food... has much darker undertones when you consider
the Victorian context, right? Oh, absolutely.
Because Victorian children were intimately acquainted
with mortality. Disease was rampant. Life was
fragile. So in Wonderland, it's not just about
Alice enjoying a snack. It's about what is eating
what. The food chain. Exactly. Nina Arbach, another
literary critic, discusses how the novel fundamentally
revolves around things entering and leaving mouths.
But as the scholar Rose Lovelsmith points out,
Alice's shifting size continually, dangerously
repositions her within the food chain. That is
such a fascinating point. When she is 10 inches
tall, an ordinary puppy she encounters in the
woods isn't just a cute pet. No, it is a terrifying
behemoth that could effortlessly trample or eat
her. And later, when her neck stretches high
above the tree canopy after eating the mushroom,
a pigeon aggressively attacks her face. And because
the pigeon is absolutely convinced Alice is a
serpent coming to eat her eggs. And Alice can't
even assure the bird she isn't a threat. She
admits she's a little girl, but the pigeon cross
-examines her, and Alice truthfully confesses
that little girls do eat eggs. So to the pigeon,
that just makes her a different type of serpent.
The categorization doesn't matter. The consumption
does. Alice is suddenly hyper aware of this brutal
eat or be eaten attitude that permeates every
interaction in Wonderland. It creates a horrific
underlying anxiety throughout the text. And let's
look back at the riddle for a moment. Why is
a raven like a writing desk? OK, the one with
no answer. We mentioned Carol didn't have an
answer when he wrote it, but years later, a scholar
named Bo Burns put forward a chilling, deeply
Victorian solution to the riddle. Oh, I remember
this from the notes. It's messed up. It really
is. The solution is a raven eats worms and a
wooden writing desk is worm eaten. That is incredibly
dark. It is an image of life feeding on life
itself. The worm is the meal for the bird, and
then eventually the worm becomes the eater of
the wood and symbolically of the dead. It encapsulates
the grotesque reality of mortality. The cycle
of consumption is inescapable. It's like Alice
is a character in a video game collecting power
-ups to bypass physical obstacles. But every
single power -up comes with a terrifying loss
of bodily autonomy. That's a great modern parallel.
When she first shrinks in the hallway, she actually
worries she might disappear entirely. She says,
for it might end, you know, in my going out altogether
like a candle. That is some deep, profound, existential
dread for a 10 -year -old girl to casually express.
Right. She's literally afraid of blinking out
of existence. And we see physical bodies being
treated as consumable, malleable, or as livestock
throughout her journey. Let's look at the chapter,
Pig and Pepper. Okay. Alice visits the Duchess,
whose kitchen is filled with thick choking pepper
that makes everyone sneeze violently. It's chaos
in there. The cook is throwing fire irons at
people. Yes. And the Duchess is nursing a baby.
When she decides to go play croquet, she carelessly
throws the baby to Alice. Just tosses a human
infant. And Alice carries the baby outside to
save it from the violence. But as she walks through
the woods looking at it, the baby's nose turns
into a snout, its eyes shrink, and it begins
grunting. It literally transforms into a pig.
right in her arms. And Alice just sets it down
and it trots off into the woods to live as a
pig. She thinks to herself that it would have
made a dreadfully ugly human child, but it makes
rather a handsome pig. It's a literal transformation
of a human infant into livestock. That's horrifying
when you really think about it. It reinforces
the grim fluidity of life and death, predator
and prey, human and animal in this universe.
No form is permanent and everything can potentially
be consumed. Because Alice navigates this perilous,
shifting food chain, she is desperately searching
for the rules to keep herself safe. She wants
instructions on how to survive. Naturally. Which
leads her to expose the completely arbitrary,
often violent nature of adult authority. The
literary scholar Daniel Bivona writes that Alice
is characterized by game -like social structures.
What does that mean? It means Wonderland is extremely
rule -bound, but the rules are alien to our world.
What's fascinating here is the stark contrast
between Alice and the native creatures of Wonderland.
How so? Well, the creatures approach their world's
madness uncritically. They just accept the chaos
as normal. But Alice, as the critic Jillian Beer
suggests, constantly looks for rules to soothe
her anxiety. She craves order. She actively seeps
out instructions, like when she first falls down
the hole and finds the Drink Me bottle, she doesn't
just chug it. No, she's cautious. She deliberately
checks the bottle to make sure it doesn't say
poison because she remembers cautionary tales
of children who got burned or eaten by wild beasts
simply because they didn't follow the rules.
She wants to be obedient. But the rules in Wonderland
are chaotic and actively hostile. Look at the
Queen of Hearts croquet game. Oh man. That game
is pure stress. It is the ultimate manifestation
of arbitrary, unyielding authority masking total
incompetence. The physical ground of the cord
is made of deep ridges and furrows. And the croquet
balls are live hedgehogs. The mallets are live
flamingos. And the arches are the Queen's playing
card soldiers, doubled over on their hands and
feet. And the equipment actively refuses to cooperate.
Right. Alice gets the flamingo tucked nicely
under her arm. And just as she goes to hit the
hedgehog, the flamingo twists its long neck round
and looks up into her face with such a puzzled
expression that she bursts out laughing. And
the hedgehog unrolls itself and just crawls away.
And the soldiers who form the arches keep getting
up and wandering off to other parts of the garden
when the queen isn't looking. Furthermore, there
is no turn -taking. They play all at once, shouting
and fighting over the hedgehogs. It's complete
pandemonium. It's a game completely devoid of
structure, fairness, or logic, yet it is governed
by the absolute lethal authority of the Queen.
Who just stomps around screaming, off with his
head, or off with her head. About once a minute
at the slightest provocation. It is a portrait
of tyrannical adult rage. Then there is the mock
turtle's education system we talked about earlier.
We laughed at the drawing master, but... Look
at the rest of his classes. He lists the regular
courses. Reeling and writhing, of course. Then
the branches of arithmetic. Ambition, distraction,
uglification, and derision. A clear spoof on
reading, writing, addition, subtraction, multiplication,
and division. But when Alice asks how many hours
a day he did lessons, he says 10 hours the first
day, 9 the next, and so on. And the Griffin explains
the pun, saying that's the reason they're called
Lessons, because they lesson from day to day.
A joke, yes. But think about the underlying implication
there. What's that? The education system is actively
degrading. The more time you spend in it, the
less you do, until presumably it vanishes entirely.
It is a profoundly cynical view of institutional
learning. This absurdity all culminates in the
grand finale, the trial of the Knave of Hearts,
who is accused of stealing the Queen's tarts.
It perfectly, ruthlessly exposes the sham of
judicial authority. The trial is brilliant. The
King of Hearts serves as the judge, wearing his
crown awkwardly perched over his judicial wig.
A great visual. And during the trial, Alice,
who is watching from the gallery, begins to physically
grow large again. Because she's eating the mushroom.
Actually, it just kind of happened spontaneously.
And the King, intimidated by her growing physical
presence, suddenly reads a rule from his notebook.
He says, Rule 42. all persons more than a mile
high to leave the court. Notice how the king
invokes a rule only when he feels physically
threatened. Authority relies on invented statutes
to maintain dominance. Precisely. And Alice just
calls him out. She doesn't cower. She says, I'm
not a mile high. Besides, it's not a regular
rule. You invented it just now. And the king
insists it's the oldest rule in the book. And
later, when they're considering the evidence,
which is just a letter containing a set of completely
nonsensical verses that prove absolutely nothing
the queen demands, sentence first verdict afterwards.
It is the ultimate critique of how adult society
relies on arbitrary rules and blind obedience
to maintain power. The justice system is exposed
as a theatrical farce designed only to inflict
punishment, not to discover truth. So what does
this all mean for you listening? Think about
how often in your own life, your own workplace,
your own society, you do things just because
that's the way it's done. We all follow broken
rules. We do. And Alice represents the child's
clear -eyed, uncorrupted ability to look at massive
adult bureaucracy, see that the emperor has no
clothes, and loudly call it out. By the end of
the trial, when she has grown to her full towering
size and the Queen orders her immediate beheading,
Alice doesn't run away. No, she stands her ground.
She simply looks at the entire screaming courtroom
and says, who cares for you? You're nothing but
a pack of cards. She recognizes the artifice.
Exactly. She breaks the illusion of authority
by stating the plain material reality of her
oppressors. They aren't kings and queens. They
are flimsy pieces of cardboard. Once she names
their reality, they lose all their power over
her, and they fly up into the air, waking her
from the dream. Which is such an immensely empowering
moment of catharsis. But this brilliant subversion
of society, this empowering rebellion, it almost
didn't reach the public. Oh, it came very close
to failing. The physical creation of this book...
Transitioning it from Dodgson's mind to a printed
object was rigorous, dramatic, and almost obsessive.
The publication history is a saga in itself,
revealing just how protective Dodgson was of
his vision. He first met Alexander Macmillan,
the powerful London publisher, in October 1863.
Yes. Macmillan agreed to publish the book, recognizing
its unique charm. But remarkably, Dodgson actually
financed the initial print run entirely by himself.
Wait, why would he do that? that if a major reputable
publisher agrees to take your book, why on earth
would you pay for the printing costs out of your
own pocket? Because paying for it gave him total
unassailable editorial control. Ah, the ultimate
creative control. Exactly. He wasn't beholden
to Macmillan's budget or deadlines. He managed
the typesetting directly. He engaged the illustrators
himself. He oversaw the physical dimensions of
the book. He micromanaged it. He did. He approached
John Tenniel, who was already famous as the chief
political cartoonist for the highly influential
satirical magazine punch. So he got a big name
for the art. He wanted Tenniel to reinterpret
his original amateur drawings, and Tenniel provided
42 spectacular wood engraved illustrations. And
the collaboration between Dodgson and Tenniel
was notoriously intense. two massive perfectionists
just clashing. Very intense. The first run of
2000 copies was finally printed and ready by
July 1865. OK. But Tenniel received his advance
copy, looked at the pages and objected to the
print quality. He wasn't happy with how the illustrations
looked. The ink was bleeding slightly or the
pressure of the press wasn't right. And because
Dodgson had financed it and maintained total
control, he actually listened to his illustrator.
He did. He instructed Macmillan to halt the publication
entirely. scrapped the whole run. He destroyed
the UK print run. Though some unbound sheets
were later sold to a publisher in the US with
a different title page to recoup costs, the primary
UK run was scrapped. Wow. Dodgson then paid £600
entirely out of his own pocket to reprint the
book with a completely new printer, Richard Clay,
who he felt could do the woodblock's justice.
Let's put that in perspective for a second. £600
in 1865 is a staggering amount of money. It was
a fortune. It is the equivalent of tens of thousands
of dollars today. It's like an indie filmmaker
today taking out a second mortgage to shoot a
movie, getting it perfectly edited, and then
burning the expensive master print right before
the premiere just because the color grading was
slightly off in one scene. And then paying to
reshoot it. Yes. It shows a fierce, almost terrifying
dedication to his artistic vision. Because of
that massive recall, There are only 22 known
first edition copies of that initial rejected
1865 run in existence today. Making them some
of the rarest books in the world. The new approved
edition finally came out in November 1865, though
it was dated 1866. And Dodgson insisted it be
bound in bright red cloth because he deems that
color the most appealing to young readers. And
it was an immediate sensation. But interestingly,
regarding those famous illustrations, Tenniel
did not portray the real historical Alice Liddell.
No, he didn't. The real Alice had dark haircut
with a short straight fringe. Tenniel drew a
girl with long flowing blonde hair. And the iconic
blue dress we all associate with Alice. The one
from the Disney movie and countless Halloween
costumes. That wasn't even established in the
original publication. It wasn't. No. That visual
cannon wasn't set until 1911 when an artist named
Harry Thieker was commissioned to color 16 of
Tenniel's original black and white plates for
a new edition. Oh, that's fascinating. I didn't
know the blue dress came that late. But despite
the visual differences from the real girl, the
text and Tenniel's illustrations became totally
symbiotic. They are permanently fused in the
cultural consciousness. The source material notes
a fascinating event about that, actually. When
the copyright on the book finally expired in
the UK in 1907 and the text entered the public
domain, a plethora of publishers rushed to release
new versions with new contemporary illustrators.
They flooded the market. They did. But the public
and the literary reviewers actually rejected
them. because Tenniel's vision was inextricably
linked to Carol's words. You cannot imagine the
mad hatter, the white rabbit, or the grinning
Cheshire cat looking any other way. The specific
cross -hatching, the slightly grotesque realism
of Tenniel's animals, it perfectly matches the
sharp unsentimental tone. of Carol's nonsense.
That fierce dedication, that financial risk,
and that perfect artistic marriage paid off exponentially.
It turned a personal improvised tale into a global
timeless phenomena. Alice has become... what
we might call a cultural inkblot. Let's talk
about that legacy because the sheer scale of
it is hard to wrap your head around. It has literally
never been out of print since 1865. Never out
of print. And it has been translated into 174
languages. Think about the linguistic difficulty
of translating the ablative case joke or the
pom de terre pun into Japanese or Swahili. Right.
How do you translate a Latin grammar pun based
on a Greek lexicon into another language? Yet
translators attempt it because the core story
is so vital. Walt Disney himself wrote in 1946,
no story in English literature has intrigued
me more than Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
And he released his famous animated film in 1951,
which obviously codified the imagery for a whole
generation. But the very first screen adaptation
was a British silent film made way back in 1903
when cinema was still in its infancy. And its
influence spans every conceivable medium. Eva
Le Gallien staged famous, highly acclaimed theatrical
plays in in the 1930s. It has been adapted into
complex contemporary operas by composers like
Unsuk Chin. It has been turned into massive,
visually stunning ballets by choreographers like
Christopher Wheldon at the Royal Opera House.
It deeply influences modern music too. John Lennon
explicitly attributed the surreal fantastical
imagery of the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds, the tangerine trees and marmalade skies
directly to his childhood reading of Carol's
books. It even became a vessel for intense political
expression. Yes, the Argentine prog rock band
Cerro Duran used Alice as an extended thinly
veiled metaphor to represent the tense, dangerous
and oppressive political climate in Argentina
under the military dictatorship during the 1970s.
Their song Cancion de Alicia en el Pes used the
Queen of Hearts and the Madness of Wonderland
to sing about disappearances and tyranny without
getting censored. The story is so incredibly
elastic, so fundamentally robust, that it can
hold almost any meaning you pour into it. There
was even a widespread contemporary myth that
Queen Victoria loved the book so much she requested
Carol's next publication be sent directly to
her. I love this story. And according to the
myth, she was thoroughly bewildered when she
received a dry, highly technical mathematical
treatise on determinants. I desperately want
that to be true. It is a delightful story, though
Dodgson himself vehemently publicly denied it
ever happened, but the The fact that the myth
existed and was widely believed speaks to the
absolute cultural saturation of the book. As
Robert Douglas Fairhurst wrote, the blank faced,
rational little girl made famous by Tenniel's
illustrations has become a cultural inkblot we
can interpret in any way we like. From surrealist
masters like Salvador Dali, who provided stunning,
melting illustrations for a 1969 edition, to
modern video game designers mapping out deep
psychological trauma and horror in games like
American McGee's Alice. Everyone projects their
own specific anxieties, fears, and wonders onto
her. She is the ultimate, dauntless, no -nonsense
heroine navigating a world of absolute madness.
She doesn't have a sword or magic powers. She
just has logic, manners, and a profound refusal
to put up with nonsense. And in doing so, she
single -handedly created the template for the
entire modern Portal fantasy genre. Every story
where a normal person falls into a magical world
and has to learn the rules from Narnia to the
Matrix owes a massive debt to Alice. Indeed.
And it all stems from a story that simply sought
to entertain a bored child on a damp boat rather
than to lecture her. That's quite a legacy. So
we have journeyed a long way today. From a rainy
boat trip on the river Isis to a biting satire
of 19th century symbolic algebra, we've seen
a linguistic rebellion against the crushing weight
of Victorian rote learning. And we've unpacked
an existential masterpiece about the brutal reality
of the food chain and the completely arbitrary
fragile nature of adult authority. It is the
book that liberated children's literature forever.
Which brings up an important lingering question
and it's hidden right at the very end of the
novel, a moment people often forget. What happens
at the end? After Alice wakes up from her dream,
she tells her older sister, the one who is reading
the boring book with no pictures on the bank,
all about her curious adventures. And then Alice
runs off to have her tea. But she leaves her
older sister sitting alone on the bank. Right.
Alice runs off to be a kid. And the sister just
sits there, resting her head on her hand, watching
the setting sun. Exactly. And as the sister sits
there, she begins to dream of Wonderland herself.
She doesn't fall down the hole, but she looks
at the real world and she imagines the rustling
grass as the white rabbit hurrying by. She imagines
the splash of the nearby pool as the giant mouse
swimming. She hears the tinkling of the sheep
bells in the distance and imagines it's the queen
ordering her executions and the voice of the
shepherd boy calling his flock becomes the violent
sneeze of the Duchess's pig baby. The real world
is suddenly overlaid with the magic. She is completely
irrevocably overtaken by the story. Wonderland
isn't just a physical place Alice visited in
her sleep. It is a contagion of imagination.
By simply hearing the story, the sister is infected
by it. The mundane world will never look the
same to her again. And for over 160 years, so
is every single reader who picks up the book.
The true magic of the text isn't just that Alice
fell down the rabbit hole. It's that she dragged
the rest of the world down there with her. Which
leaves us with this final thought for you. In
a modern world full of its own arbitrary rules,
chaotic logic, algorithms, and relentless demands
on our time and identity, what rabbit holes are
you letting shape your reality today? Are you
questioning the nonsense around you, demanding
to know the rules, or are you just drinking the
potion and hoping for the best? Thanks for tumbling
down this one with us. Go pick up the original
text, read it closely, and see what nonsense
suddenly makes sense to you.