In the century now passed since the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, scores of critical studies have attempted to account for the fascination the book holds for adult readers. Although some of these investigations offer provocative insights, most of them treat Carroll in specialized modes inaccessible to the majority of readers, and they fail to view Alice as a complete and organic work of art. Hardly a single important critique has been written of Alice as a self-contained fiction, distinct from Through the Looking-Glass and all other imaginative pieces by Carroll. Critics also tend to confuse Charles Dodgson the man with Lewis Carroll the author; this leads to distorted readings of Alice that depend too heavily on the fact, say, that Dodgson was an Oxford don, or a mathematician, or a highly eccentric Victorian gentleman with curious pathological tendencies. The results are often analyses which fail to explain the total work's undeniable impact on the modern lay reader unschooled in Victorian political and social history, theoretical mathematics, symbolic logic, or Freudian psychology. It seems time, then, that Alice be treated for what it most certainly is—a book of major and permanent importance in the tradition of English fiction, a work that still pertains directly to the experience of the unspecialized reader, and one that exemplifies the profound questioning of reality which characterizes the mainstream of nineteenth-century English literature.
Hothouse Victorians: Art and Agency in Freshwater
