Did You Know…

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll has always been classified as a children’s book. You can go to any local bookstore and find it sitting on a shelf underneath the children’s section. Hardly ever is it placed in the young adult or even the adult section. Both of the famous Carroll stories Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass should never be placed under the children’s section because they are far from a children’s book. The books were written for a child, Alice Liddell, whom Lewis Carroll had a friendship with. But just because they were written to suit the whim of a six year old girl does not mean that the books are children’s stories. The books follows the fairy-tale structure, with interesting characters and the element of magic lingering in the air, but the story holds more to it than just funny characters and a strange new world. It presents mature readers with life lessons that are universally known, but hardly ever practiced. The books show a journey through life, the stages of growing up, and the complexities that life can offer. Lewis Carroll was, after all, a mathematician. I highly doubt he would write just any fairy-tale, but rather try to incorporate as many lessons and morals into it as humanly possible.

The purpose of this blog is to analyze the Alice books and take them apart piece by piece. I want to give people a better understanding of what the books mean rather than letting people focus on the humor of the characters and scenes. The books have much more too them than humor. Did you know that some of the characters were based on real-life people? For instance the Queen of Hearts, renown for her favorite phrase “off with his head!”, was really based on Queen Victoria. Did you know that the Mad Hatter was actually based on a popular saying at Lewis Carroll’s time, “You’re as mad as a hatter”? Hatters back then didn’t have all the fancy stuff to use as we do now, and they often obtained mercury poisoning through curing felt, causing them to literally go mad.

There’s many things that people don’t know about the Alice books, and many questions people may want answered. Hopefully, I can help provide some insight on these crazy stories, and maybe you’ll get a better understanding of just how important they really are.