Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) - Donald Rackin (essay date 1991)
Donald Rackin (essay date 1991)
SOURCE: "The Alice Books and Lewis Carroll's World," in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning, Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 3-12.
[Rackin is known as an authority on Lewis Carroll. In the following essay, he places the Alice books in their Victorian social context.]
This study rests on the premise that appreciating Lewis Carroll's Alice books (1862-72) does not require extensive knowledge of their historical setting. Their continuous popularity among large and varied audiences for the past 120 years shows how accessible they are: lay readers seeking to experience and understand their power need not acquire a vocabulary of outdated words and unfamiliar historical facts, of obsolete concepts and attitudes. This does not mean, however, that the Alices are unrelated to their original cultural matrix: like all other artifacts,...
[The entire page is 3280 words long]
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