Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Alice in Wonderland

Study Questions

NB: If it’s at all possible, I’d like to save discussions of pedophilia, imperialism, and anorexia for the week we read the critical articles.

• This novel begins with Alice attempting to obey different rules / laws and concludes with a trial scene where Alice “gives evidence.” How does Carroll’s portrayal of the law resemble / differ from Dickens’s portrayal? What do these similarities and differences imply about Carroll’s view of social institutions / systems and the place / power of individuals within / against these systems?

• Ronald Thomas’s article (for Bleak House) discussed the influence of photography on various aspects of Victorian culture. Lewis Carroll (aka Charles Dodgson) was a keen photographer, and his black and white photographs of Alice Liddell are well-known. What evidence is there in Alice in Wonderland (1865) of Carroll’s photographic imagination? (Please refresh yourself on Thomas’s points.)

• In an essay in the back of the Norton edition, Nina Auerbach states that Alice gives a “logic of insanity.” How might you interpret this phrase (even without looking at Auerbach’s article), and how does Carroll’s “insane logic” compare / contrast with other portrayals of insanity we have encountered in previous works?

• To what extent is Alice in Wonderland a children’s novel and to what extent is it a novel for adults? What can each audience glean from this text, and what might each audience miss? Another way of putting it – if you were a child reading this novel, how might your reading experience differ?

• In 1858, Charles Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species Through Natural Selection . To what extent can Alice in Wonderland be read as a response to Darwin ’s revolutionary theories of evolution?

• In 1861, Prince Albert died and Queen Victoria went into mourning for the rest of her life for her dearly beloved, dead husband. How does Carroll’s novel respond to this phenomenon? ( Victoria would have been in deep mourning and seclusion for 4 years when this novel was published. This is 3 years beyond the requisite period of mourning in the nineteenth century.)

• Our discussions of both Lady Audley’s Secret and Bleak House led us to detect traces of a Modernist mentality in these novels’ concepts of Realism. Consider the relationship between fantasy and Realism in Alice. To what extent is Alice a Modernist text? And to what extent is it staunchly Victorian?

• To what extent is this a novel about the process of female maturation? Is this a woman’s text? Recall our discussion about Dickens’s ideals of femininity. How do Carroll’s compare / contrast?