[Rackin is known as an authority on Lewis Carroll. In the following essay, he places the Alice books in their Victorian social context.]

However, because Lewis Carroll's world of the 1860s bears many resemblances to middle-class life in developed countries today, these connections are often relatively easy to understand and appreciate. In their daily lives, Carroll and his first readers experienced intimately the changes produced by industrialism, laissez-faire capitalism, and limited representative democracy, and familiar features of that familiar context often appear in Alice's dream fantasies. The sense of life in an unregulated, rapidly expanding, free-market economy in a secularized and fragmented society whose various power arrangements, competing classes, goals, and values are rapidly changing in response to numerous technological, economic, demographic, and political changes is a sense of life we share with Carroll and his contemporaries. Indeed, because the Victorian bourgeoisie were experiencing our world in its nascent state and because many of them still knew directly and yearned earnestly for another, much slower-paced, more coherent world of serene certainties and secure social values, their reactions to such unprecedented change are frequently fresher, more passionate, and more vivid than are our comparatively blasé or resigned reactions to similar cultural phenomena.

When, for example, Alice discovers herself in a looking-glass railroad carriage, modern readers should find the scene's references to the details of public rail travel generally familiar. Even more familiar will be the scene's hyperbolic representations of time as an industrial construct, of time's ridiculous but actual connection with money and by extension with a frenzied getting-and-spending capitalist system—a dream subject directly relevant to the wide-awake anxieties suffered by Victorians as a result of the rapid expansion of consumerism, a cash economy, machinery, and mechanically measured time as dominant forces in their daily lives. Taken together, the extremely fast-paced Alice adventures caricature a paradigmatic shift in the very conception of time, a shift greatly accelerated in the nineteenth century by major discoveries in astronomy, geology, and biology, and by technological achievements like the rapid development during the first half of the Victorian age of the factory system, railways, steamships, and telegraph lines—four of the period's many contributions to commerce, transportation, and communications that radically changed the relations between time and space and the way people live in them (a central topic of the Alices).

The rapidity of change occurring almost everywhere during the period, the dizzying pace of life in a multifarious, mechanized mass society is reflected in Alice's fast-paced, crowded, discontinuous dream adventures. So too is the sense of speedy motion, not for the sake of progress toward a definitive goal, but simply for its own sake. Thus, the Red Queen's frequently quoted response to Alice's assertion that "in our country .. . you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing" is especially relevant to the empty bustle of urban existence in Carroll's mid-Victorian England, an England suddenly coming to question its own faith in inevitable progress and the benefits of mechanical invention. "Now, here," says the Queen, "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

"Tickets, please!" said the [railway] Guard, putting his head in at the window. In a moment everyone was holding out a ticket: they were about the same size as the people, and quite seemed to fill the carriage.

"Now then! Show your ticket, child!" the Guard went on, looking angrily at Alice. And a great many voices all said together ("like the chorus of a song," thought Alice), "Don't keep him waiting, child! Why, his time is worth a thousand pounds a minute!"

The anxious dream-satire of the Looking-Glass railway scene is directed, in part, at the improbable regimentation and commercialization of what was until then considered beyond such strict mechanical control and quantitative measurement. In Alice's dream of the railroad carriage, time and space are measurable by a new mechanized, monetary standard. Money, not inherent worth, now determines value; now "time is money" (the insubstantial "smoke alone," according to the awe-inspired consumers in Alice's carriage, "is worth a thousand pounds a puff!"). Tickets the size of human beings represent with surreal clarity the way various social and commercial institutions, like mass transportation, had during Carroll's childhood and youth grown to the point of dwarfing, dominating, even crowding out the people they were meant to serve, quickly turning the recent masters of the machines into the machines' clockwork "chorus" of harried, cramped, but worshipful servants—a process that deeply troubled many intellectuals among Carroll's earnest contemporaries, including the famous literary prophets of social disaster, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and Carroll's friend John Ruskin.

The frantic railway scene is but one example of the numerous allusions in the Alices to the mechanization, commodification, and acceleration that were transforming Victorian life. The first character Alice meets is the harried White Rabbit, a desperate slave to his watch and busy schedule. Moreover, many of the humanoid creatures in her adventures are actually mechanical things playing mechanical parts—cards, chessmen, set figures from traditional nursery rhymes—inflexible cogs in an unprogressive, incomprehensible but perpetual, all-consuming social mechanism.

In the world's great age of machinery, England was the very center of the Industrial Revolution, "the world's workshop" and the epitome of the modern shift from manual to mechanical labor. Effecting an enormous transformation in the quality of everyday life, this triumph of materialism and machinery was celebrated by many Victorians, especially those in the newly rising classes; but it was at the same time often deplored in a variety of Victorian literary texts, perhaps most powerfully in the fantastic, often bitter satire of Charles Dickens (one of Carroll's favorite authors and popular among all literate classes), who in a series of best-selling novels in the 1850s and 1860s created a large, funny, but macabre gallery of caricatured Victorians dehumanized by the system into manufactured, automatic, scurrying things.

CULTURAL ANARCHY

In the same years as the publication of Alice's anarchic adventures, Matthew Arnold, the leading literary/cultural critic of his time, warned in his most famous work, Culture and Anarchy (1869), of the ways the British worship of machinery was quickly leading to anarchy: "Faith in machinery is . . . our besetting danger; often in machinery most absurdly disproportioned to the end which this machinery, if it is to do any good at all, is to serve; but always in machinery, as if it had a value in and for itself. What is freedom but machinery? What is population but machinery? What is coal but machinery? what are railroads but machinery? what is wealth but machinery? what are, even, religious organizations but machinery?"

For many conservative, establishment figures like Arnold and his fellow Oxford don Carroll (both were also graduates of Rugby as well as sons of upper-middle-class Church of England clergymen), "machinery" could be a heavily fraught symbol for the loss of traditional humane values, for cultural anarchy, even for imminent political revolution:

For a long time . . . the strong feudal habits of subordination and deference continued to tell upon the working class. The modern spirit has now almost entirely dissolved those habits, and the anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself, of our superstitious faith, as I say, in machinery, is becoming very manifest. More and more, because of this our blind faith in machinery, because of our want of light to look beyond machinery to that end for which machinery is valuable, this and that man, and this and that body of men, all over the country, are beginning to assert and put into practice an Englishman's right to do what he likes; his right to march where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes. All this, I say, tends to anarchy.

The Victorian mechanical revolution, then, was part of a broad context of interdependent revolutions—intellectual, scientific, economic, political, social, religious, artistic—in an age of revolution. The revolution in biological theory, generally attributed to Darwin but actually begun earlier in the century, generated among Victorian intellectuals a frightening vision of "Nature, red in tooth and claw" (Tennyson, In Memoriam) and of themselves as no more than one of countless, dispensable species in an inescapable biological mechanism governed (like laissez-faire capitalism) by survival-of-the-fittest instincts. Soon, numbers of earnest thinkers were seeing themselves and their follows as mere selfish, appetitive apes thinly disguised as altrustic, humane, respectable Victorian ladies and gentlemen. This materialistic, God-less vision profoundly affected philosophical thought, religious belief, and political action—almost every area of social concern. Moreover, the revolutionary notion of inevitable class warfare—linked to nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, mass industrialization, laissez-faire economics, a large and growing proletariat, urbanization, cheap labor, unionization, cycles of inflation and depression, and devastating poverty in the midst of immense wealth—created for the elite, privileged, once-secure class of Arnold and Carroll the frightening prospect of literal anarchy and revolution. (Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 was based on firsthand observations of the deplorable conditions of workers in Manchester; with Karl Marx, Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, translated into English in 1850.) Despite several Parliamentary Reform Bills during the period that gradually granted voting rights and some political power to larger, less privileged segments of the population, and despite other social reforms that ameliorated the worst horrors of an unregulated capitalist system, England seemed for much of the period dangerously close to the political upheavals that had periodically rocked Europe since the days of the bloody French Revolution. "The fear of revolution," as one leading Victorian scholar puts it, "had almost become part of the collective unconscious."

A WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

These revolutionary tendencies of the period and the anxieties they provoked often lie close to the surface of Alice's dreams. In a sense, the Alice books are about revolution in that they present a funny but anxious vision of an entire middle-class world turned upside down: two topsy-turvy, "backwards" places where the sensible child of the master class acts as servant, and the crazy servants act as masters; where inanimate, manufactured playing cards and chessmen have seized control, giving rude orders to a real, live, polite human representative of the ruling class that had but recently manipulated them as inert counters in games of her class's devising; where time itself will no longer "behave" its erstwhile governors so that in the Mad Tea-Party it is always six o'clock (quitting time for many factory workers); where the old, comfortable, seemingly unchanging social fabric has been so unravelled that each atomized creature now lives in its own, completely self-centered, disconnected world, freed from the fabricated "rules" and traditions of bourgeois community, rank and order.

The once sacrosanct, relatively static class system that had served, primarily, the interests of a small minority of privileged Anglican gentlemen like Arnold and Carroll was therefore deeply threatened by change in an increasingly materialistic, competitive society, increasingly driven by mechanical innovation and the volatile, mechanistic standards of the market. For adherents of the bourgeois ethos like Carroll or like his adored heroine Alice, daughter of Dean Liddell of Christ Church College, Oxford, such revolutions represented a threat to personal identity itself: "What will become of me?" is a question Alice often asks, in various forms, throughout her adventures. Given its historical context, the question deals with far more than her physical nature: it carries for her class broad and sinister implications. So too does Gilbert and Sullivan's hilarious comment on this social aspect of their revolutionary age as that age drew to a close: "When every one is somebodee, / Then no one's anybody!" (The Gondoliers, 1889).

Carroll's mature lifetime was passed in an age of burgeoning technology that rapidly increased the spread of new material goods, ideas, and ways of doing things; of unprecedented population concentrations in cities; of enormous factories and serious environmental pollution; of great shifts in the distribution of wealth and power; of Karl Marx's Das Kapital (the first volume, written in England, appeared in 1867) and the rise of English socialism; and, in general, of the zenith and incipient decline of the bourgeois hegemony in politics and culture. Beyond England's shores, it was also the heyday of the British Empire—arguably the greatest empire the world has ever known, but an empire already threatened by violent revolutions against imperialism as well as by peaceful but irreversible evolutions toward colonial independence (Canada, for instance, became essentially self-governing in 1867).

It was, moreover, the period of Freud's youth (Freud was 13 years old when Wonderland was first translated into German in 1869), of impressionism in the arts, of a growing fascination with dreams and other workings of the inner life—with what Walter Pater, the age's leading aesthetician, characterized just three years after the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as the individual "mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world." At the same time, it was also the period that witnessed among the middle-classes a wide dissemination of earlier Romantic views of child psychology and of the child as the innocent, near-divine "father of the Man." These views, in turn, fostered a burgeoning body of children's literature (like the Alices) aimed at nurturing young readers' precious innate creative imaginations rather than beating out their natural savagery or filling their blank-tablet minds with didactic, cautionary tales.

It was, in addition, an age of intensified sexism and misogyny (critic and reformer John Ruskin's notorious "Of Queens' Gardens" [1864-71] is often cited as the paradigm of the patriarchal "woman's place in the home" and "on the pedestal" ideology that permeated the culture). But at the same time it witnessed the public emergence of successful, celebrated women intellectuals, among them the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And it was the first age of organized, revolutionary feminism—a feminism that in some ways overshadows that of our own period (John Stuart Mill's On the Subjection of Women, a major philosophical formulation of modern feminism, was published in 1869).

Carroll's contemporaries also experienced a revolutionary crisis of faith perhaps unparalleled in modern history. Not only was the period plagued by bitter, destructive sectarianism among warring Christian denominations, it was also an age in which many of the best minds had already lost all religious conviction. It is of course no coincidence that in his 1869 indictment of his materialistic, mechanistic society, Arnold repeatedly uses such terms as faith, religious, and worship. Newly secularized, scientized England was, as Arnold suggests in a celebrated 1855 poem about faith and doubt, "wandering between two worlds, one dead, / One powerless to be born." For Arnold and many other mid-Victorian thinkers, the fear was that England, now bereft of its "dead" world of a common religious faith, an established church, and a secure system of mystified bourgeois values, was quickly becoming a totally secular political entity, nothing more than a collection of self-serving factions and individuals lacking any true vitality, any agreed-on center of transcendent belief and ethical principles. As Arnold writes in "Dover Beach" (1867),

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
  Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Soon, it seemed, England would be merely a free-floating political aggregate held together by nothing more glorious than money or (enlightened) self-interest, devoid of its once-cherished cultural and spiritual landmarks—a godless place not unlike the chaotic underground into which poor Alice falls in her first adventure, or the "backwards" world she discovers just behind the comforting bourgeois looking-glass.

VICTORIAN EARNESTNESS

Victorians are often noted, sometimes ridiculed, for their irrepressible optimism and earnestness. Despite the grave doubts generated by the massive revolutionary changes that characterized their age, many of them continued to believe passionately in progress and in the efficaciousness of their earnest efforts to make their world better. Arnold himself, as if obeying Thomas Carlyle's Calvinist injunctions to dispel doubt by hard work in the concrete world, became in middle age a reforming commissioner of public education. In earnest do-it-yourself manuals like Self-Help (1859), Lives of the Engineers (1861-62), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1880), Samuel Smiles became one of the period's bestselling authors by preaching to the lower-middle and working classes a no-nonsense, humorless gospel of personal industry and unabashed get-ahead, commercial success.

But Victorians also knew how to make fun of their own earnestness, their middle-class reverence for work, money, and social respectability, as well as numerous other foibles of their complex, disturbing world. A number of the writers cited here—Carlyle, Dickens, and Gilbert and Sullivan most obviously; the Brontës, Eliot, and Arnold in more subtle ways—are noteworthy for their humorous treatments of the most serious social issues of their day. Victorian literature includes a wide variety of other writers who showed their age how to laugh at itself—among them, William Makepeace Thackeray, Edward Lear, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Samuel Butler, and the young George Bernard Shaw. The Alice books, like their earnest and very respectable author, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll), thus fit for another reason rather predictably into their historical context—an age of great comedy made in spite and at the expense of great earnestness. It should come as no surprise that the period ends with another earnest Victorian making wonderful, irreverent fun of respectability and earnestness, putting Victorianism in its final place, as he so often did, with epigrammatic and telling wit. Even in its title, Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) sounds the keynote of this admirably earnest age of revolution, bourgeois anxiety, and playful laughter.