It’s been 150 years since Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published—a most beguiling children’s story that’s not what it seems.
If you suspect that the creator of a hookah smoking caterpillar might have been a radical, then you’re not alone—take your place alongside millions of baby boomers.
Jefferson Airplane’s biggest hit, ‘White Rabbit’, from the 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow, was based on the idea that Lewis Carroll’s beloved children’s tale foretold their generation’s love of tripping out on acid.
Carroll, however, was far from liberal. His real name was Charles Dodgson, an Anglican deacon and don of Oxford’s Christ Church College. According to Canadian poet and fantasy literature scholar David Day, Dodgson was a thorn in the side of the reform-minded Henry Liddell, dean of Christ Church and father to the real life Alice.
‘Dodgson was exactly the opposite and did everything he could throughout his life to basically sabotage any kind of liberal reform,’ he says.
That included being dead set against removing Latin and Greek as compulsory subjects for Oxford students, a move Liddell initiated, despite being a leading scholar of ancient Greek. While Liddell was trying to bring Oxford into the modern world, says Day, ‘Dodgson was going backwards, fervently.’
The most radical idea of the time was Darwin’s theory of evolution. Oxford was the scene of a legendary debate between Thomas Huxley, known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, and the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, at the British Association on June 30, 1860.
How did Dodgson react to evolution? A keen photographer, he took photos of everyone involved in the debate. Perhaps he was already thinking of how he would send them up and satirise the idea of evolution in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which contains a farcical ‘kitchen of creation’ scene where everything goes wrong: men with fish and frog heads, a boy turned into a pig—it’s primordial chaos and very funny.
Even the idea of the survival of the fittest is satirised in the ditty ‘Speak Roughly to Your Little Boy’. Alice spirits the boy away, only to find him transformed into a pig. Oops!
The kitchen scene also features the Cook, whom Day believes was a spoof of Sir Richard Owen, the natural scientist and advisor to Bishop Wilberforce who disagreed with Darwin on how things evolved.
The trouble was that the bishop kept getting Owen’s science muddled, and according to Day their relationship was rocky, similar to that of the Duchess and the Cook in Wonderland, who scream and throw pots at each other.
Above the raucous scene, and throughout this charming tale, appears the smiling Cheshire Cat, the most mysterious figure in the story. Who is he? (We can probably assume that in the Oxford of the 1860s it would not be a she.)
Day believes he has rightly identified the grinning cat as the ‘conscience of Oxford’, Reverend Edward ‘Puss-Cat’ Pusey, the canon of Christ Church College.
If that seems too obvious an association, Day points out that word games, mathematics and even Latin references were all part of Dodgson’s mental playground.
Indeed, Dodgson, a polymath, invented the popular parlour game Doublets, which was first published in Vanity Fair.
Dodgson saved his most entertaining buffoonery, the Mad Hatter’s tea party, for Christian socialists. While today Christian socialists of various kinds are the doyens of the academic world, Dodgson regarded them as dangerous and even vaguely traitorous. Hence the party takes place at Cambridge, a town Dodgson never visited.
What of Charles Dodgson’s own religious sympathies? They were complex and fascinating, and anything but straightforward. On the one hand, his highly Victorian morals recoiled at vulgarity, which saw him walk out of plays that offended his sensibilities. Apparently, little girls shouting ‘damn’ in HMS Pinafore prompted him to write an angry letter to The Times.
Yet his religious beliefs were adventurous. Supernaturalism, Rosicrucianism, and Theosophy (at the time called ‘esoteric Buddhism’) drew his interest, as did the Christian Cabala.
In fact, if Day is correct, it was the Cabala which prompted him to write Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with its opening illustration of a rabbit being pursued down a hole.
Editor's note: This article has been updated to reflect the original title of Dodgson's work, 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland', rather than 'Alice in Wonderland'.
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