David Day - Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Decoded: The Full Text of Lewis Carroll’s Novel with its Many Hidden Meanings Revealed

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v3.1

TO RISN, MY IRISH ROSE,

AND

TERRY JONES, MENTOR AND FRIEND

who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable harm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection,to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side? Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, 1889.

Tom Gate, the main entrance to Christ Church, Oxford: The college was Dodgsons home for most of his life.

I. WHATS IN A NAME ? Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas only I dont know what they are! Alice might very well have been describing any readers first encounter with her adventures. Something peculiar and quite magical is happening in the word spell that is Wonderland.

No one had written anything quite like Alices Adventures in Wonderland before, andsave for its sequel, Through the Looking-Glassno one has written anything like it since. It is a childs adventure set in a fantastic imaginary world that is explored by a brave little girl armed only with her own common sense and an all-consuming curiosity. It is a book that can and should be read for pleasure by the young, but looking at the authors unique use of language, it is remarkable that children can comprehend it at all. And yet somehow they do, and we do. Furthermore, it evokes in all its readers a tantalizing sense that there is something else to be revealed just under the surface of this compelling tale.

C harles Lutwidge Dodgson was a British mathematician, logician, clergyman and photographer. A resident Oxford don for almost half a century, he was famously known as Lewis Carroll, the author of two great childrens classics.

Alices adventures have become part of popular culture worldwide, and have been translated into virtually every language. If these adventures were just flights of fancy, or simply nonsense as Dodgson/Carroll liked to call them, why, you might ask, are they so often quoted by physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, political scientists, historians, psychiatrists, logicians, poets, filmmakers, novelists and computer geeks?

W onderland has an undeniably strange atmosphere, in part because it is largely inhabited by literary tropesthat is, imaginary beings with no existence except as figures of speech or as characters from childrens rhymes, fairy tales or myths. These are creatures such as the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Mock Turtle, the Gryphon and the King and Queen of Hearts. In Wonderland, real things like hedgehogs and flamingos are treated as objects, while objects like playing cards and numbers behave like real things.

Also, as many critics have pointed out, Wonderland is a complex and sophisticated construct full of literary allusions, parodies and variations of other fairy tales, rhymes and songs: Robert Southeys Goldilocks and The Old Mans Comforts, Goethes Sorcerers Apprentice, Aesops Belling the Cat and The Tortoise and the Hare, Isaac Wattss How Doth the Little Bee and The Sluggard, James Sayless Star of Evening, William Mees Alice Gray, Mary Howitts The Spider and the Fly and Charles Lambs The King and Queen of Hearts.

In all things, Dodgson felt the need for disguises of one form or another. Just as he always insisted on separating the life of the mathematician Charles Dodgson from that of the author Lewis Carroll, so was he careful to visually differentiate the real dark-haired Alice Liddell from his fictional blonde dream-child moving through the land / Of wonders wild and new.

Charles Dodgsons many pseudonyms included Edgar Cuthwellis and Mad Mathesis.

I nsight into the mind of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson can be gained by looking at a few of his numerous pseudonyms, such as Mad Mathesis, Balbus, Dares, Edgar Cuthwellis and Edgar U. C. Westhill. The first of these obviously refers to his vocation as a mathematician, the second is a classical allusion to the Roman Balbus the Stutterer (an affliction shared by Dodgson), the third relates to his birthplace of Daresbury and the final two are anagrams of his first two names, Charles Lutwidge.

These are simple enough, but Dodgson also invented many other fairly obscure variations of his name or initials. One typical example was Mr. De Cielpronounced Mr. D. C. L.a scrambling of his initials, C. L. D. Elsewhere, he used the signature Sea ld, pronounced sealed or C. L. D. And even more obscurely, on one occasion Dodgson used as a pen name the initials R. W. G.: the fourth letter in each of his names.

And then of course there is the Reverend Dodgsons celebrated pen name, Lewis Carroll. As most Carroll fans know, Dodgson began by translating his first two given names, Charles Lutwidge, into Latin, to arrive at Carolus Ludovicus. He then reversed the order of those names and translated them back into English, to arrive at Lewis Carroll.

This much we know from Dodgsons own correspondence. Yet there is another possible level of interpretation, consistent with this authors obsession with multilingual wordplay. As the classically educated Charles Dodgson knew full well, ludo is Latin for I play and carol is both English and Old French for a joyous songso Lewis Carroll could have the wonderfully appropriate meaning I play a joyous song.

F rom an early age, Charles Dodgson wrote stories, plays, fairy tales, poems, riddles and games. He saw in literature a wide variety of types of entertainment that children loved; that would benefit them by keeping boredom, despair and temptation at bay; and that wouldas he strove to do (in a manner unlike any other childrens author) in his eventual writing of the Alice bookssubliminally educate them.