In Our Time - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Lewis Carroll's book which first appeared in print in 1865 with illustrations by John Tenniel. It has since become one of the best known works in English, captivating readers who follow young Alice as she chases a white rabbit, pink eyed, in a waistcoat with pocket watch, down a rabbit hole that becomes a well and into wonderland. There she meets the Cheshire Cat, the Hatter, the March Hare, the Mock Turtle and more, all the while growing smaller and larger, finally outgrowing everyone at the trial of Who Stole the Tarts from the Queen of Hearts and exclaiming 'Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards!'WithFranziska Kohlt Leverhulme Research Fellow in the History of Science at the University of Leeds and the Inaugural Carrollian Fellow of the University of Southern CaliforniaKiera Vaclavik Professor of Children’s Literature and Childhood Culture at Queen Mary, University of LondonAndRobert Douglas-Fairhurst Professor of English Literature at Magdalen College, University of OxfordProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Kate Bailey and Simon Sladen (eds), Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser (V&A Publishing, 2021)Gillian Beer, Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll (University of Chicago Press, 2016)Will Brooker, Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll and Alice in Popular Culture (Continuum, 2004)Humphrey Carpenter, Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (first published 1985; Faber and Faber, 2009)Lewis Carroll (introduced by Martin Gardner), The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, (W. W. Norton & Company, 2000)Gavin Delahunty and Christoph Benjamin Schulz (eds), Alice in Wonderland Through the Visual Arts (Tate Publishing, 2011)Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland (Harvill Secker, 2015)Colleen Hill, Fairy Tale Fashion (Yale University Press, 2016)Franziska Kohlt, Alice through the Wonderglass: The Surprising Histories of a Children's Classic (Reaktion, forthcoming 2025) Franziska Kohlt and Justine Houyaux (eds.), Alice: Through the Looking-Glass: A Companion (Peter Lang, forthcoming 2024)Charlie Lovett, Lewis Carroll: Formed by Faith (University of Virginia Press, 2022)Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense (first published 1952; Dalkey Archive Press, 2016)Kiera Vaclavik, 'Listening to the Alice books' (Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 26, Issue 1, January 2021)Diane Waggoner, Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood (Princeton University Press 2020)Edward Wakeling, The Man and his Circle (IB Tauris, 2014)Edward Wakeling, The Photographs of Lewis Carroll: A Catalogue Raisonné (University of Texas Press, 2015)

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland first appeared in print in 1865. The author's name was given as Louis Carroll, with illustrations by John Tiniel. It has since become one of the best known works in English,

captivating readers who follow young Alice as she chases a white rabbit, pink-eyed, in a waistcoat with a pocket watch, down his rabbit hole and a well and into Wonderland. There she meets the Cheshire Cut, the Hatter, the March Hare, the Mock Turtle and more, all the while growing smaller and larger, finally outgrowing everyone at the trial of Who Stole the Tarts from the Queen of Hearts. with me to discuss Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, our Francisco Colt,

Lieberhum Research Fellow in the History of Science at the University of Leeds, and the inaugural Carolian Fellow at the University of Southern California, Kea Baclavic, Professor of Children's Literature and Queen Mary University of London, and Robert Douglas Fairhurst, Professor of English Literature and Moulden College University of Oxford. Robert Douglas Fairhouse, what can we say about Lewis Carroll's early

life. Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, which he chose in his mid-twenties after rejecting various alternatives, which included Edgar Cuff Welles and Edgar UC Westhall. And it was simply his own name flipped on its head and then translated into schoolboy Latin. So Lutwitch became Ludovicus, which became Lewis, and Charles became Carolus, which became Carol. He was born in 1832 in Darsbury, a sleepy village in Cheshire. According to his nephew, there, the passing of a cart was a matter of great interest. And to begin with, he was educated at home. And then when he was 14, he was sent to board at rugby school, where he may have been teased and even bullied, because on one of his surviving textbooks, someone has written, Dodgson is a muff, i. someone who's clums you're

awkward or just not very good at sports. But I think it was probably living in a family of 11 children that really seems to have sparked and shaped his imagination, especially after the family moved to the rather grand rectory of Crofton T's in North Yorkshire. That family does seem, the family childhood seems almost too good to be true as an influence, doesn't it? So there are seven children and he was called by them the entertainer in chief,

which he did. He did, well, seven sisters and three brothers. others. And he was the eldest son. And also, yes, the family entertainer. That's what W.A. Jordan called him. And the sort of things he got up to weren't that unusual for the time. But I think what is surprising is just how many of them later turned up in disguised or distorted forms in his stories. So, for instance, he had a marionette theatre that he wrote plays for. And that's then reflected in the weird theatricality of Wonderland that's full of bits of comic stage business. And in the original illustrations by Tenial, the dodo and the caterpillar even have

human hands poking out of their bodies and see if they were wearing costumes they could simply take off whenever they wanted. He also liked performing magic tricks that also turn up in his writing, like famously the white rabbit that disappears and then reappears. Or there are words that are sliced in half and then put together again in surprising new ways. So lithe and slimy produced. slithy or flimsy and miserable produce mimsy in his pine Jabberwocky. And also at home he was producing magazines for the rest of the family that were full of puns and puzzles. One includes an early version of Jabawaki. Another one has a poem about a dog with a very long tail that was called a tale, T-A-L-E, of a tail, T-A-I-L, which of course is the same joke he then make when printing

the mouse's tail in the shape of a tail in Alice's adventures. And then one final thing he seems to have had a hand in is hiding various objects under the floorboards of a family nursery, things like totally ordinary things like a glove, a thimble, some fragments of a child's tea set, all totally ordinary things in themselves, but they're much stranger when they come back later in Alice's adventures, like a little time capsule. he could dip into in his imagination when he wanted to conjure up that world of childhood. This seems to have had a great gift and a great deal of energy to control all the other children while they listened to him. Was this noted at the time by his parents, by other people, there was this extraordinary boy?

His mother, who called him Charlie, rather than Charles, wrote in one letter that she'd seen little Charlie pulling the other children around the rectory garden in a sort of homemade train made out of a barrel on wheels. And I think she said Charlie is very persevering, which maybe wasn't altogether praise, but it certainly suggested to someone who was full of energy and wanted to get the best out of himself.

There's the other side, very strong and very important, as you're going to tell us, Francisco, that says, he showed distinction in Mathsford School and then he went to Christchard's called it Oxford, where he showed even greater distinction. He was a serious mathematician. Yes, absolutely. And I think it's really,

hard to overstate the importance of mathematics in Charles Dodson's in Lewis Carroll's life. Of course, he was very gifted at it from an early age. He reached distinction in school, reached distinction when he later went to Oxford to study mathematics, later teach mathematics. But there was also more to it. When he writes to his sister, when he's slightly older, he calls mathematics and teaching it his work for God. So it's really something that he's takes very seriously, he believes mathematics really is his calling, a gift that's been given to him. And although it's slightly tempting, perhaps, to see Lewis Carroll and Charles Dodson as two entirely different people, when you look a little bit into how he understood mathematics

and the role in his life, it actually sheds light on to how he wrote his stories. When we look at his later life, he published teaching works for children, for instance, the game of logic under the name of Lewis Carroll. And it's very interesting when we look at the examples he uses for teaching logic, which is very much the science of analyzing confusing statements and examining for what Lewis Carroll called the absolute truth. They're very much the nonsense examples, examples about white rabbits, about weird caterpillars and talking nonsense, but he uses them to teach children how to see through confusing statements and evaluate them for what is actually. the sense in them. They do dovetail very interestingly, and he clearly regarded it as something

very important in his life. He was a teacher of mathematics for the rest of his life, always came up with innovative ways of teaching it. He went to schools to teach logic there. He went to women's colleges to lecture women in mathematics. And of course, I think the final ingredient there is when he calls it his work for God. It is, of course, also what he did instead of becoming a priest. Lewis Carroll was a deacon of the Anglican Church as his college required of him. However, he never took full holy orders and when he calls it his work for God

it makes clear that he becomes a teacher of mathematics for the rest of his life instead of becoming a priest. So it's something he really wants to dedicate himself to. Thank you. He's at Christchurch College and now he encounters the little family. Who were then? And how did he get to know them?

So the little family, the family around Dean, Henry Little moved to the college when Lewis Carroll was already a resident there. The old dean died, a new dean moved there, and was perhaps unusual, is that you have to imagine 19th century, Oxford, Christchurch, rather. You have to imagine it was full of celibate men, but suddenly this whole family moved in there. Henry Little, of course, moved there with his wife and his children. The children, especially the three daughters, remember later in life, how strange that was. three little girls who always had to be quiet, who were never allowed to jump or run.

And this is where and how Lewis Carroll encounters them, actually through his hobby, which he also took very seriously of photography. One day he was trying to capture a photograph of the cathedral spire. When the three little sisters appeared in the deanery garden and distracted them from photography, which was a very delicate business, you had to stay very still to capture a photograph. And Lewis Carroll started chatting to them, started making jokes, entertaining them and later records in his diary that this is the day he met the three little sisters. He already knew the son and says we became very good friends and he does this wonderful thing in his

diary. He writes, I mark this day with a white stone which he always does when it was a very special day. Did Alice, as it were, stand out at that from the very beginning? I think it became clear very soon that Alice was the one he had a special connection to. She was very curious. She asked a lot of questions. Alice would have been about four years old at that point. Kira, according to Carol, what was the origin of Alice's adventures in Wonderland? We know that the story basically emerges from times of interaction between Carol and the little children.

So over the course of the summer of 1862, there's a whole series of river outings. So they set off from Oxford and those river outings involve things like, storytelling, games, songs, and over the course of that summer, one particular story keeps getting told. And on the day of the 4th of July 1862, Alice Little basically changes the course of literary history by asking for that story to be written down for her. Carol decides that he will do that. He spends the next months and indeed years writing down, handwriting the story, for her with his own illustrations to accompany that story and hands over the manuscript for Alice's Christmas gift in 1864, which is quite the Christmas present. I think we can all agree.

And during the process of getting it ready to hand over to Alice, he decides that he will also publish this story to reach other children too. But if we go back to the origins of the tale and the fact that it emerges out of what we now may be referred to as a kind of participatory or kind of co-creative practice. This is about adults and children coming together and responding to each other to build a new story. And it gives Carol this opportunity to respond to and react to stories that are going well,

jokes that are going well or not so well. And as any actor or stand-up comedian will tell you, a really precious opportunity to be able to sort of fine tune. And what we get then in the finished work is a whole series of traces of that oral storytelling at the very beginning. So the directed dresses, the in-jokes, the songs and music that are threaded through the whole production. So the fact that it emerges out of this live storytelling is really important.

It's reported that it's the most quotient. to work in English after Shakespeare and the Bible. Can you give, is it possible to give a resume of the plot? We begin with Alice and her sister sitting on a riverbank. And, I mean, it's a stroke of literary genius in my view that Alice is bored. An instantly relatable situation. Any child, anywhere in the world, will know about being bored. Then Alice sees this dressed, talking rabbits, passing in front of her.

So she follows the rabbit. down its hole, which turns into a well. And she finds herself in a world which is strange, fantastical and yet recognizable, peopleed by a whole range of different characters, many of whom are animals who can talk, who are dressed often, and who behave like human beings. And quite quickly, she discovers these abilities to shrink and grow, according to the foods and drinks that she imbibes.

And she also quickly decides that she's going to aim for this beautiful garden that she can see through a keyhole. What impetus it has is provided by that aim to try and get to the garden. And basically, Alice then meets a whole series of fantastical characters with whom she has usually quite fractious conversations and encounters in a whole range of different settings. So she goes to the White Rabbit's house, to the Duchess's kitchen, to a croquet ground, to a beach, and then finally finds herself in an absurd, almost nightmarish in many ways trial scene.

And it's at this point that Alice, who's patience has been massively tested throughout this experience, finally loses her call and grows to an extraordinary height, shouts at everybody. And then this is a bit of a spoiler, I'm afraid, wakes up back with her head on her lap of the sister back on the riverbank. So it was all a dream. It was all a dream. Thank you. Robert, are there any key themes or are they just close encounters? Well, we know that Carol loved inventing puzzles.

And it's tempting to read this story as the most complicated puzzle he ever invented. although, of course, it's one that seems to have lots of different solutions, depending on who's reading it and why. So for some readers, it's a story about growing up and how impossible that process is to control. But it's also a story about telling stories and about reading stories and about how they might give us back some kind of control. For other readers, it's a story that takes fragments of ordinary middle class Victorian life and then twists them into strange new patterns, like a narrative kaleidoscope. Everything from the poems of the songs that the real Alice Liddle would have known to the fact that the underground was becoming an increasingly popular place for people to visit

with the opening of the first underground railway in London and everywhere streets that could be seen being dug up for new sewers and gas maids. So going underground was becoming something people were increasingly interested in. But for most readers, though, I think it's simply a celebration of nonsense. It's a way of turning our assumptions about how the world usually works, upside down and back to front. So caterpillars turn into cats instead of butterflies, courtroom verdicts become before the evidence, and so on.

So adventures in Wonderland turn out to be adventures in logic and in language, and in all the other ways we usually try to make sense of life. How significant is it that it's a dream? To Victorian readers, it would have definitely been extremely significant that this is a dream narrative. Dream narratives have a huge history, not just in literature, but in religion and in mythology. Dream narratives are usually a journey that dreamer undergoes

to find something extremely significant, to find a revelation or something that's really life-changing to take back to the waking world. Famous texts that are dream narratives in Lewis Carroll's age. First one that might come to mind for the contemporary audience might be Charles Dickens as a Christmas Carol.

But we also have the most popular dream narrative in Lewis Carroll's time would have perhaps been the Pilgrim's Progress. But there was also another side to dreams and dreaming in the Victorian age, and that is in the Victorian emerging science of psychology, which Lewis Carroll was extremely interested in. Lewis Carroll had a huge collection of books on psychology and dreaming.

And if you take a look at those textbooks, dreaming is actually something really negative. This is the opposite of reason and the waking mind. This is something akin to madness, something that we cannot control. Creativity and imagination are completely out of control and therefore something dangerous. And so this is a debate into which Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is almost an intervention. Lewis Carroll takes sides. is dreaming something positive that we can harness for perhaps finding out something about our individual or collective unconsciousness? Or is it something we should avoid and steer clear of?

And I think Lewis Carroll comes down very much in favour of dreaming being a good thing. We can, you know, it's completely crazy. We recognise the grotesques of human foolishness, perhaps rather than sinfulness that Alice encounters in the sort of silly adult behaviour, the silliness of rules. but she does recognise them increasingly for what they are and as Kira has already said, in the end dismisses the absolute epitome of adulthood in court with the royal family as nothing but a pack-off cards. One of the things, a bit like Hamlet, isn't it? It's full of quotations. When the March Hare is explaining why the watch is not actually properly working

is because he put crumbs with a butter in and the one line that always cracks me up the most about the mad tea party is when he so whimsically says, but it was the best butter. Kira. One of the most frequently quoted is the king of hearts, actually, in the trial scene when he says begin at the beginning and go on until you get to the end, then stop.

And one of the reasons I think why that is so fantastically and so frequently used, it's just so adapted, can be used in so many different situations and has been. And we're all mad here is another really good example. In fact, the beginner's beginning is a quote that Lewis Carroll himself uses in one of his final books when he publishes symbolic logic as one of his final works. He gives the reader instructions on how to read his book on logic, on how to correctly examine speech patterns and texts, and he quotes himself saying, begin at the beginning, and go on till you reach the end.

Robert, what kind of wonder is in this wonderland? Wonder is a weirdly double-edged word, isn't it? Because we can use it to refer to things we're curious and questioning about. which is why Alice wonders how many miles she's fallen. She often wonders what's going to happen to her next. But we can also use it to think about what might strike us as remarkable, which is why she ends the adventures by thinking, what a wonderful dream she's just had.

And what the story does is bring those ideas together. Because the first time we read it, we've got no idea what the next page is going to bring. And then even when we do know what the story is going to do, it still surprises us with its sheer sense. us with its sheer weirdness. So it makes us wonder and then it makes us wonder. And interestingly, the first version of the story that he wrote, which was that handwritten manuscript we heard about earlier, was called Alice's Adventures Under Brown. And then experimented with a few other titles, including Alice's Golden Hour, Alice Among the Goblins, Alice's Hour in Elfland. So why did you

fix on Wonderland? Well, probably because a lot of other writers had used the word to refer to a place where anything could happen because it only existed in our imaginations. Francisco, can I ask you and then take it across to you? What do you think he gets right about childhood? Oh, I think one of the things that's so universally relatable about Alice's adventures in Wondland is something that is unique to childhood, but perhaps if you think about it, not so unique. The child's struggle with authorities, with rules, rules, rules, whether the child encounters them at home with their parents, with their teachers in school.

This is something where children don't understand why they need to follow rules, where they get fed up with them, exasperated with them. But I teach Alice in Wonderland not just to students who are teenagers, young adults, but also to adults, some of them older than I am. And as soon as I say things like, I think we've all been at a meeting that's a little bit like the mad tea party, the guilty smiles around the room and the chuckling. tell you that it's something that Lois Carroll gets right about childhood,

but I think is also universally relatable. Kira, I think there's a sort of fundamental arbitrariness, isn't there, of the experience of childhood, which is clearly echoed and obvious in Alice's experiences as she's navigating her way through these encounters and these experiences. I think it might also be worth just mentioning at this point, actually just how very multifaceted a man Lewis Carroll is. So we've already been talking about the fact that he is really interested in the theatre. He's interested in psychology.

So these nascent disciplines and of course also technologies. So he's really, I mean, he's a man very interested in gadgets and really at the cutting edge of new developments, new technologies. And he's also a man of God and he's also a writer. And I think the fact that Carol is such a multifaceted person is something that hasn't really been recognized as much as it might have been. And we are getting to a point now where all of the different aspects of his life and these books are starting to be recognised. Before we move on from this one, do you want to add something to the childhood business, Robert?

Something that we haven't yet talked about is the fact that, as well as writing a story about Alice Little, he photographed her. And in fact, around 50% of surviving photos that he made are of children. And putting Alice in a story and taking photographs of her might have served a similar kind of need for him. You take a photograph of a child and they don't have a change. And that was important, I think, to someone who thought that he said, there are few things so evanescent as a child's love. But of course, once you take a photograph of the child, particularly if they are happy, if they are smiling,

you've created a little bubble of fantasy for them in which little children will stay little. And the same is true of turning them into stories, which is why he could write through the looking glass several years after Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. But in the story, Alice has only aged six months. in writing as well you can play around with time you can slow it down you can speed it up. But it's interesting though isn't it? Sorry that how unhappy actually Alice is through we hardly

ever see her smiling. She's not she's hardly ever described as actually laughing or enjoying herself and I think that's a really interesting relationship and disjunction that's being set up between the child reader and the child protagonist. The child protagonist, the child protagonist is essentially having a terrible time and suffering enormously, whereas we actually are taking quite a lot of pleasure in that process and enjoying the fact that she is, I suppose the pleasure comes from the fact that she is able to best these situations and she is able to overcome the difficulties that she experiences. What was the immediate reaction to the publication of the book? The book does pretty well. It sells pretty well.

the reviews are pretty good. It's important to note how important Tenial's role is in the success, the early success of the book. So basically reviewers are saying things like, well, you know, even if there was nothing else, it would be worth getting this book because you get so many Tenial illustrations. He was, Tenial by this point, was a very well-recognised and esteemed caricaturist for punch. His illustrated works for other established literary creations had already been very well received. So he's really at kind of the top of his game at the point at which he illustrates the Alice books. He hadn't ever illustrated a children's book, so it was a first for him.

But I think, you know, it shows Carol's saviness. He chose, Carol shows his saviness in many different ways, but the choice of Tenial, who had extensively illustrated grotesques and animal characters meant that he was a really great choice for this particular job. He does well. The books are praised for their delicious nonsense and originality and so on. But I think it is important to say that it's not at this point that people are jumping up and down saying,

wow, this is a watershed moment in children's publishing. people are not saying things will never, you know, this is a complete revolution. That does come later. People will start looking back at the publication of this book and they will say this is a huge shift away from the moralising didacticism of earlier children's literature. Could you take that up? Yes, I think it's really interesting. When you look at the reviews of Alice in Wonderland, it's really interesting. You often hear sort of two sides of the story.

saying the book was extremely well received immediately, immediate bestseller, or the people who said, oh, actually, like, people didn't like it at all. I think if you look at the reviews, there's a mixture of things. There are the reviews that say it's delicious nonsense. It's absolutely lovely. There's the ones that really emphasised Ten Yale's illustrations. There's one extremely grumpy review by one particular newspaper that still exists. I don't know if I should name it. Yeah, go on, no. Yeah, the Guardian was extremely unhappy about it, so much so that they actually published a review the next year. That was much, much better because they were so embarrassed about it seemingly. But I think when you read through the reviews, they might read strange to us,

because this is a book published for the Christmas market. This is a gift book, so it's particularly well made up. It's got gilt edges. It's a lovely red binding. So it would have been quite expensive. And that is something that changes. So at first we get this book, is like, should parents invest in this book? Should they buy it as a Christmas present? Is it a good investment? And so quite a lot of the reviews, which are published by Christian Presses, say, yes, this is a book that is good and healthy for our children. It inculcates good manners because Alice is so well-behaved. But much later, we get a publication of Alice as a People's Edition, which is the Green Edition. So if you see the books, you see the Red One, you see the Green One. The Green One is the People's Edition,

which is cheaper and reaches a wider market. And so this is the point where we see sales sort of developing differently. And there wouldn't have been a People's Edition if the book hadn't done so well. There wouldn't have been a sequel if the book hadn't done so well. Robert, do we give Karin of credit as a stylist? It's a good question. We've talked about dreams already. And usually when we say that someone writes like a dream, it's just a cliche, isn't it? It means a style that's effortless, that's easy on the eye. But I think writing like a dream is exactly what Carol set out to do. There's that weird mixture of vagueness, of vividness. There's those sudden lurches in situation in tone from one episode to the next.

There are, though, I think there are two things that stylistically link everything together. The first is very simply the character of Alice herself, because although every other character that she meets is flat, I mean, literally in the case of the Queen of Hearts and all the other playing cards, but they are flat, but she is far more realistic. She is a little girl who is by turns generous and snobbing. and sweet and spiteful, and she's like a flesh and blood character who's been dropped into a cartoon world full of characters. But then keeping her company throughout the whole story,

and as it were, hidden in plain sight, there is the figure of the narrator. There's at one point at which Alice cries out, I'm so tired of being all alone here. But of course, we know that she isn't, because the narrator is always there, always watching her, always keeping her company. And sometimes he interrupts himself or he teases her or he sees things through her eyes.

But I think his main role is to act as a voice of reassuring, reliable, common sense in a world where everything else is crazily unpredictable. So he's like our tour guide to Wonderland. He's the figure who helps us get our bearings who stops us from getting lost. Runs this good. Why did Carl ride Alice through the looking glass? How's it different from Wonderland? Through the Looking Glass was something that actually developed very soon after Alice's adventures in Wonderland came out.

His publisher, Alexander Macmillan, was extremely keen for a sequel because the book was clearly doing well enough for him to say, well, why don't we write a part two to this? The book only came to fruition six, almost seven years later. And Carol, once again, struggled with a little bit through the title. He was wondering, should I call it through the mirror, behind the mirror in the world, mirror land. And Alexander Macmillan says, through is the word you're looking for. So Alice goes through the looking glass, of course, a good long period after she'd gone down the rabbit hole. The story is no longer this oral extemporised tale that was revised and reformed for publication. It was

planned from the start as a written publication. It's very structured also because it's a chess game. So it's a lot more, Alice moves in quite a linear way. It is also a story written by a more mature Lewis Carroll. This is a man who has now published several works in between those two, someone who has started harnessing the name Lewis Carroll to intervene into public debates on all sorts of matters on vivisection, political matters in newspapers. So the book has a slightly more serious tone about it.

This is no longer a first-time author. This is a public figure. at this point, who can use his name and his fame to more clearly articulate what he is thinking through the story. Indeed, having eventually, and not too far in the future after its publication, have an enormous success here, but then in America and then all over the world, what made them so popular and so enduring when they did become very, very popular? I think there's several ingredients to this.

Firstly, I think we've already spoken a little bit to the sort of universality the relatability of Alice as a character, a character that's fed up with all sorts of roles that are thrown at her, being constantly lectured by creatures that tell her how to do things. But there's also a second sort of marketing side to it. Of course, Alice was translated almost immediately

into European foreign languages, but also made her journey into the empire and all sorts of corners of the world. What was interesting about this is that those were not just translations, the translations also translated. to details of the story, references to history, to local histories. Puns were translated to puns that work in that language, so it suddenly became graspable in those languages.

The illustration changed. So the first illustrations that appear in corners of the British Empire, Alice is no longer the little blonde schoolgirl. She starts wearing a sari traditional dress. Alice changes to become that relatable character all over the world, and that is certainly true over the country. course of time. Alice always changes with a fashion, even in the books themselves, the ones that were published in Carol's lifetime, her fashion changes. So Alice is always relatable, and I think that

is a big part of her success. Kira, do you want to take that? Very much like the Red Queen running to stay in the same place, Alice's dress is essentially altered so that the relationship between her and the Victorian audience stays exactly the same. So she is kept up to date. Six years have passed between the two different publication dates between Wonderland and Looking Glass. But the fact that Tenial tweaks the style of her dress and the kind of elaborateness of her costume

actually means that she still is, she's an everyday Victorian child. And that's a hugely important. I think in terms of the relationship between the reader and the character. But just to go back to what Fran was saying as well about translation and the movement of the books out into the world, there's also a really important process of adaptation too, so that this isn't just about going into different languages. It's also in the English-speaking world,

the fact that we know that right across the English-speaking world, and in the Empire, scenes from the books are being acted out in Indian Hill stations, in New Zealand, in Australia, in Yokohama, in the 1890s. There's an amateur performance of Alice's Adventures. And then not just on the East Coast of America, but right the way across and the West Coast of America, too, there's huge take-up already within Carol's lifetime. So their kind of global circulation is already really well-established. And then it hits Hollywood.

Indeed, quite early on. And as with so many things with these books, as soon as there's a new technology, there will be an Alice version of it. Francisco, which books did this book inspire, if any? The female heroine was certainly an element that caught on. Lewis Carroll himself facetiously almost records in his diary that he started collecting books of the Alice type. And later in his career, he actually sort of struggles with that a little bit because the sort of girl going on exploring journey of Wonderlands becomes a popular trope

that he actually struggles himself to come up with a different story to write because he's so much expected to write it, which ultimately, I think, his later books are so much less well known. He writes this massive couple of novels, Sylvie and Bruno, which barely anyone knows, and he writes in the preface that he wants to write something that is not a story of the Alice type, and he actually struggled with his own success in that regard. because, of course, it was popularly adapted across theatre stages and so on.

So Alice herself was extremely popular. But if we look at contemporary children's literature, we see so many references still to Alice in Wonderland. And it's not just in literature, in film and video games and so on. One of the fantastic and fascinating afterlives Alice acquired was in the world of science. And the Festival of Britain, Alice became the guide through the Science Pavilion. Alice pops up in some of the world's most famous science books and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

She refers to wonderlandish and looking glass landscapes because it's something she feels comfortable explaining through because even though they're dream landscapes, they're familiar to all of us. There's all sorts of references in science to Alice in quantum land, quantum Cheshire cats and so on. So Alice really doesn't just have an afterlife in literature but all over the place.

Robert, was he alive when the great success hit the book? And if so, how did he react? Yes, he was. I mean, it became more successful even than he could have imagined when it was filmed, not least with Walt Disney creating 56 short films called the Alice comedies in the 1920s that went on to the founding of the Walt Disney Studios. But even during his life, yes, he kept a house. and in its adaptation into a stage play,

he licensed it for a biscuit case, he played around with other possible adaptations. So he was clearly interested in it as a kind of cultural product that he wanted to spread as wide and far as possible. Kira, I think that's theatrical, the adaptation to the theatre is absolutely key and essential. Actually, I think way beyond the Disney film, it's actually the fact that a successful stage production is mounted that makes all the difference with what happens to Alice and her afterlife. Is this in America or England?

This is in London. And so basically from the 1880s onwards, Alice becomes a totally regular feature of British childhood. So every Christmas, pretty much, there is a production of Alice on the stage in London. And so I think from that point onwards, and it's a kind of family outing. So it's, you know, adults and children involved in this process. And so, you know, I think that keeps her really at the forefront, her and it, them, at the forefront of British childhoods. And that then means that when new forms and media come along,

they have that theatrical precedent to go back to. And you think that was the biggest kickstart? I think it was hugely, hugely significant. And it's not just actually, as I've already mentioned, it's not just the professional performance. It's also amateur performances. And the fact that these are books which from their performative origins are then being picked up and used in school prize-givings.

They're being used in amateur theatricals and evening entertainments. So it means that people don't just read the books but actually live them. And, you know, they know the lines. They are able to easily retain them and quote them. And that then means that all of the ways that they move out into the worlds that we've already been talking about, it's partly to do with that fact that people are able to recall them so easily because they've not just read them but spoken them and performed them. Francisco, a final word?

Yeah, it's really interesting. Lewis Carroll lived through the fame of his own book. And it is, of course, that gets him into funny situations occasionally. One time he goes to visit his uncle in London, and his uncle is ill. He has to pick up some letters for him from a colleague. And he says, oh, gosh, I've bought these fantastic books for my children for Christmas, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, have you heard of them?

And he said, oh, well, why don't you send them to me? And I signed them for you. and his uncle's colleague looks at him slightly puzzled and says, why would I send them to you? And he said, well, because I've written them. So occasionally he gets into these situations. I referred to the fact that he went into schools, teaching logic and mathematics.

And sometimes the mothers of children would point out, oh, it's Mr. Lewis Carroll, who's coming to lecture you because they knew Charles Dodson, who was giving those maths lessons, was also Lewis Carroll, which the children were utterly puzzled by because the book was a book who was full of magic, characters because the book had such a life of its own. They could barely think that someone

invented the book. That's how alive it was. And it's absolutely fascinating reading recollections of children about this. So this is something that Carol was aware of. Carol was aware of the success because he donated his books. There were wards of hospitals named after him. He made quite a lot of money from the book at the end of his life, which he donated to charitable purposes. So it is the success is something that he actually consciously really experienced. So final word from you, Robert. Yes, you put all those examples together. You quickly realize that Alice is much more than just another literary character.

She's like an escapologist, that every time we think we've managed to pin her down, she somehow manages to wriggle free. And I think the fact that we're still talking about in programs like this one proves that she's still on the loose. Well, thank you all very much. That was exhilarating. Thanks very much to Kiera Baklevik, to Francesco Colt and Robert Douglas Berhurst, and to our studio engineer Jackie Marjoram. Next week, it's 1527 when troops of the Holy Roman Emperor sacked Rome itself,

slaughtering the Pope's guards and indirectly triggering the English Reformation. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Starting with you again. Robert, what didn't you say you'd like to have said? Well, I've been sitting here wondering how Carol would have responded to this kind of discussion. I mean, he told one fan that the thing he hated most in the world was being pointed out as,

that's the man who wrote Alice in Wonderland. And he wrote to someone else, my constant aim is to remain personally unknown to the world. But then on the other hand, he collected his early reviews in a special scrapbook, like a proud father filing his daughter's school reports. And later on, he did everything he could to keep Alice in the public. consciousness, whether that was telling the story in different ways or encouraging new readers to pick up the book. So I think he probably would have had mixed feelings about the four of us

talking about him and his most famous creation more than 150 years later. But then as he once said, we are beings of very mixed motives. We talked about the impact of the books across various different worlds into science and literature. But I think it should really be emphasised about the extraordinary range of the influence and impact of these books really across the arts and into a whole range of different creative endeavours. So from fashion to fiction, architecture, to the visual arts, video games, virtual reality, food, you name it.

Alice has proved to be an inspiration to creative people and creative people really at the top of their game. So one of the things that I really enjoy about these books and their afterlives is the fact that you have both very kind of small-scale, personal, local, anonymous engagements with the books. So that might be dressing up as one of the characters or copying the illustrations onto an envelope, which was very common practice by the Victorians.

Two, on the other hand, the people really at the top of their creative games, so the Salvador Darlies and the Annie Leibovitz's, the Vivian Westwards of the world, really thinking hard about what these books mean and getting to their sort of marrow in terms of that the intellectual content of these books, there's this incredible range across any one of those forms.

So if we take music, you have both the Grace Slicks and the Tom Petty's and the Gwen Stefani's on the one hand of the pop music spectrum. And then it ranges all the way through to the London Symphony Orchestra's recent to concert suites for young audiences and Eunuchuchin's opera. So we have, you know, any single one art form is engaged. with these works and thinking hard about them, but on lots and lots of different levels. And one final point I would say as well is that they're not just the most quoted books. So it's not just about the words.

It's also about the fact that they're some of the most visually referenced books as well. So Tenial's images are absolutely key in this process too. One of the things I find most remarkable about Alice in Wonderland is that wherever you go in society, whatever new thing you think you've just discovered, somehow you find a reference to Alice in it, wherever you go, Alice seems to have already reached that place before you got there. One of my favourite things about researching Alice in Wonderland is the random connections you make, that there's somehow wherever you go in the world, somebody will always have a personal connection to the book, whether they're a computer scientist, whether they're a psychologist,

or whether they are in my favorite interaction ever, a school librarian. A few years ago I was contacted by the school librarian of, Sherbourne School, who might well be listening, who got in touch and said, well, did you know that one of our famous students of our school, Alan Turing, was a big fan of Alice in Wonderland and of Lewis Carroll. And I said, that is wonderful. How did you find out? And she said to me, well, we have his library records and we can see the young Alan Turing being absolutely fascinated and a young developing mathematical mind. It would perhaps be intuitive that he went to take Charles Dodson's books out of the library, but he in fact took repeatedly out the Game of Logic and Alice in

Wonderland and through the looking glass and seemed to have read them again and again. So it is so interesting for me to think about what this book has meant to people all over the world, what they have found in it, what corner of Lewis Carroll's mind, which was so multifaceted, they connected to, they related to. And it's just so fascinating that it is this story that sprang from this multifaceted Victorian mind that managed to get so many different bits in this story that over 150 years ago it still speaks to so many people, so personally, but all over the world. Are there more from you, Robert? Maybe just one line, which is the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, says,

what do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning? And I suppose the conversation we've just had and all those other cultural responses as we've just been listening to, proves that Alice can be filled with meaning endlessly. The books have become like these looking glasses or distorted mirrors for our own culture. But we create different versions of her and her story at different times to meet different needs. So there is no one Alice. There is no one Wonderland. One thing I liked about us, but I forgot. What happened to Alice afterwards, after the success of the book, and she grew up?

So Alice married and married well. She married a man called Reginald Hargreaves and moved to a rather grand Georgian country house in the new forest called Cuffinels. And there she brought up a family, three sons, two of whom sadly died in the First World War, and the other one lived and became effectively her tour manager. And then she was revealed to the world when she decided to sell the original. manuscript that Lewis Carroll had written and illustrated for her. And then she went on a sort of tour of America in 1932, where everyone was desperate to see the little girl who'd fallen down the rabbit hole. And what they saw was then a rather old woman. But they still talk to her as if she was the little girl, as if her wrinkles like a mask. She should just take off whenever she wanted. Thank you all. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Anyone like to your coffee? I would love a cup of tea.

I'd like a cup of tea. Two teas? Three teas. Three teas. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.

On this cultural life from BBC Radio 4, leading artists and performers reveal their creative inspirations. I saw something that was so beyond what I was being taught at school. Discuss their best known work. I do get messages all the time saying this is our life. The Handmaid's Tale is already here. and reflect on their own cultural lives. Rock stars need to be simply drawn. They can't be too complex.

Join me, John Wilson, and my guests including Nick Cave, Stephen Fry, Margaret Atwood, Florence Pugh, Paul McCartney, and Whoopi Goldberg. I always knew I was going to be a character actor. I'd never thought I was going to be a famous movie person. This cultural life. Listen on BBC Sounds.