SOURCE: Sigler, Carolyn. Introduction to Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll's Alice Books: An Anthology, pp. xi-xxiii. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.

[In the following essay, Sigler provides an overview of the critical reception of the Alice stories over the last century and discusses Carroll's contributions to literary modernism.]

It may be thought that in introducing a certain little lady ALICEnce has been taken. But royal personages are public property.

—Jean Jambon, Our Trip to Blundertown (1876)

Alternative Alices brings together some of the most lively and original of the almost two hundred literary imitations, revisions, and parodies of Lewis Carroll's enduringly influential Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Produced between 1869 and 1930, the works represented here do not passively imitate Carroll, but trace the extraordinarily coherent, creative, and often critical responses to the Alice novels.

The Alice imitations of this period embody the golden age of Carroll's influence on popular literature. They are associated in the ways they all adapt the structures, motifs, and themes of the original Alice books and respond to the issues they raise. These works are distinct from later, post-1930 imitations, which tend simply to make references to the Alice mythos while commenting upon issues and concerns far from Alice's world.

The literary responses of this golden age range from Christina Rossetti's angry subversion of Alice's adventures, Speaking Likenesses (1874), to G. E. Farrow's witty fantasy adventure The Wallypug of Why (1895), to Edward Hope's hilarious parody of social and political foibles in Alice in the Delighted States (1928). Alternately enchanting, experimental, satiric, and subversive, these Alice-inspired works reveal how variously Lewis Carroll's celebrated Alice fantasies were read, reinscribed, and resisted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are the most universally recognized and acclaimed Victorian works for children, having lost neither their appeal nor their mystique in the more than one hundred and twenty-five years since their publication. A few months after Carroll's death, in an article entitled “What the Children Like,” The Pall Mall Gazette reported on a poll which asked children to list their favorite books. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was ranked a resounding first, with Through the Looking-Glass following in eleventh place.¹ For children and adults alike, Lewis Carroll's Alice books remain today both popular favorites and literary classics, sold by purveyors of fine editions, university presses, and shopping-mall bookstores, and available in a wide variety of editions ranging from picture books to annotated paperbacks to luxuriously illustrated hardbacks.² In high schools and universities the Alice books are regularly taught in English literature classes and appear on virtually every Victorian “great books” bibliography. They are the most widely quoted books after the Bible and Shakespeare's plays, and have been translated hundreds of times into languages which include Japanese, Croatian, Turkish, Danish, Maori, Bengali, Chinese, Gaelic, Russian, and Swahili.³

Though often cited as vanguards in the use of fantasy in children's literature, Carroll's Alice books actually reflect widespread shifts in nineteenth-century literary tastes. These changes were the subject of much discussion and debate in the years surrounding the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as in an 1866 review-essay entitled “Children's Christmas Literature”: “Fifty years ago … the literature of the young had a violent, bitter, and puritanical tone, calculated rather to harden and contract than to expand and vivify the minds of its readers. … All this has been amended for several years; but we may add that the improvement is progressive.”⁴ Like this review, which characterizes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as “a charming tale,” most Victorian reviewers praised the originality, humor, and lack of overt moralizing in the Alice novels. A critic for The Spectator (7 August 1869) declared Alice's Adventures in Wonderland “beyond question, supreme among modern books for children.”⁵The Publisher's Circular (8 December 1865) deemed Alice's Adventures “the most original and most charming [of] the two hundred books for children which have been sent to us this year.” The critical response was not, however, universally positive. One anonymous reviewer declared, “We fancy that any real child might be more puzzled than enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story,”⁶ and The Times reviewer (13 August 1868) noted that while “we enjoy the walk with Alice through Wonderland … now and then, perhaps, something disturbing almost wakes us from our dream.”

The popular and critical appeal of Carroll's Alice fantasies did, however, solidify a shift away from didacticism in children's literature and help to make fantasy a popular paradigm in children's and, a generation later, adult literature. Several children of the late nineteenth-century who were brought up reading the Alice books, including Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce, went on to transform literature through their modernist rendering of psychological experience. As Juliet Dusinberre has shown, “Carroll's books ran in the bloodstream of that generation. … Radical experiments in the arts in the early modern period began in the books which Lewis Carroll and his successors wrote for children.”⁷ Anthony Burgess, who himself wrote an Alice-like fantasy called A Long Trip to Teatime (1976), has pointed out that James Joyce's linguistic experimentation in Finnegans Wake was influenced by Carroll's books, which Joyce had loved as a child: “What, with Carroll, began as a joke, ends, in Joyce, as the most serious attempt ever made to show how the dreaming mind operates.”⁸ After the 1920s, reviewers who had been fascinated by the Alice books as children—and who were of the same iconoclastic generation as Woolf and Joyce—began to study and critique them as more complex works, elevating their cultural status to that of innovative adult literature.

Despite the appropriation of the Alice books by academic literary culture, however, the Alice myth still informs popular culture in general. Both the Wonderland and Looking-Glass stories have been adapted for stage, ballet, opera, film, and television, and have served as the bases for many advertising campaigns, including the now-famous Guinness advertisements of the 1920s and '30s.⁹ Numerous clubs and societies are devoted to Alice study and fandom, both in America and abroad. What Morton Cohen has labeled “the Alice industry” also continues to generate countless Alice-inspired commercial enterprises: collectibles from tee shirts to teapots, chess sets, postcards, thimbles, dolls, diaries, jewelry, clocks, figurines, music and music videos, comic books, puppet shows, cartoons, stage productions, and film adaptations ranging from musical comedies to soft-core pornography. This lucrative and popular “industry” responds to readers' desires, motivated originally by the marketing efforts of the author, to possess not only the books, but the mythos surrounding the books' heroine.¹⁰

Culturally diverse readers and collectors continue to be attracted to this rather conventional, albeit adventurous, staunchly middle-class Victorian seven-year-old. As Donald Rackin points out, “In spite of her class- and time-bound prejudices, her frightened fretting and childish, abject tears, her priggishness and self-assured ignorance, her sometimes blatant hypocrisy, her general powerlessness and confusion, and her rather cowardly readiness to abandon her struggles at the end of the two adventures—in spite of all these shortcomings, many readers look up to Alice as the mythic embodiment of self-control, perseverance, bravery, and mature good sense.”¹¹ Yet the key to the enduring power of these two Victorian children's fantasy novels and their pinafored young heroine has both eluded and absorbed critics ever since the books' publications. “What is the key to their enchantment, why are they so entertaining and yet so enigmatic?” asks Morton Cohen in his recent biography of Carroll. “What charm enables them to transcend language as well as national and temporal differences and win their way into the hearts of young and old everywhere and always?”¹²

A possible answer may be found in the very number and variety of responses enabled by the form and content of the novels. Their loose, episodic dream structure and playful use of symbolic nonsense enable varied and even contradictory readings. The Alice books' enduring power and appeal may very well lie in the fact that, like dreams, they can mean whatever readers need them to mean. Indeed, Alice is herself a multifaceted and contradictory character whose identity even the Wonderland and Looking-Glass creatures attempt, and fail, to grasp. The White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland believes her to be his housemaid, Mary Ann.¹³ The Pigeon, in turn, declares that Alice is “a serpent … and there's no use denying it” (Wonderland 43). “‘Mind the volcano!’” cries the tiny White Queen to the King, after Alice picks her up and sets her on a table in the Looking-Glass parlor (Looking-Glass 114). The flowers in the Looking-Glass garden believe Alice to be another blossom, albeit with rather untidy petals (Looking-Glass 123). The Unicorn perceives her as a “fabulous monster” (solemnly assuring her, “if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you”) (Looking-Glass 175). Even Alice questions her own identity, wondering after her plunge down the rabbit hole if she's become someone else: “It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying ‘Come up again, dear!’ I shall only look up and say ‘Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else’” (Wonderland 16). Certainly, when the Caterpillar asks Alice in Wonderland's central question, “Who are you?” Alice has difficulty answering: “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then” (35). Like the Caterpillar, she is mutable, in a constant process of becoming.

Along with many other interpretations, the Alice books have consistently been read as portrayals of the experience of growing up and the construction of agency and identity. A number of critics have pointed out how strongly readers identify with Alice, our surrogate and guide through this unpredictable, sometimes funny, often frightening and violent, process. Virginia Woolf observes that “the two Alices are not books for children; they are the only books in which we become children. … To become a child is very literal; to find everything so strange that nothing is surprising; to be heartless, to be ruthless, yet to be so passionate that a snub or a shadow drapes the world in gloom. It is so to be Alice in Wonderland.”¹⁴ Morton Cohen suggests that much of the books' power can be found in Alice's—and by extension the reader's—triumph over childlike confusion and fear. Together, he argues, they experience “a catharsis, an affirmation of life after Wonderland, and on this side of the Looking-Glass”: “Once readers have associated with Alice and wandered with her through Wonderland, they are together on a survival course. They are thrown back upon their inner resources, determining whether their resources are strong enough to get them through.”¹⁵

Yet, while the novels examine the triumphs and failures of growing up, they also address the deeply conflicted, complicated and, unfortunately, often violent feelings about children and childhood which Victorian and contemporary cultures share. James Kincaid has pointed out that Alice can be seen both as representative of “the joys and dangers of human innocence” as well as “the callous egotism and ruthless insensitivity that often pass for innocence,” concluding that, through his heroine, Carroll “questions the value of human innocence altogether and sees the sophisticated and sad corruption of adults as preferable to the cruel selfishness of children.”¹⁶ Indeed, this coexistent ambivalence toward both childhood and maturity may provide contemporary adult readers of the Alice books with even more reasons to identify with the novels' heroine and her journeys. In a recent book about changes in the structure of life stages, Gail Sheehy argues that traditional expectations about age standards have been revolutionized by modern technological and medical advances, as well as recent social and economic changes:

People today are leaving childhood sooner, but they are taking longer to grow up and much longer to grow old. Adolescence is now prolonged for the middle class until the end of the 20s, and for bluecollar men and women until the mid-20s, as more young adults live at home longer. True adulthood doesn't begin until 30. Most baby boomers … do not feel fully grown up until they are into their 40s, and even then they resist. … Middle age has already been pushed far into the 50s—if it is acknowledged at all today.¹⁷

Living in a world of changing technology, expectations, and beliefs about the future, modern readers have much in common with the original readers of the Alice books. Victorians of the 1860s and '70s also lived in an age of increasing mechanization and industrialization, of economic, social, and philosophic upheavals, of cultural redefinitions of “child” and “adult” identities, and of escalating apprehension and doubt about the future. The Alice books have continued to speak to the anxieties of succeeding generations and their ongoing desire to impose order and stability on a turbulent world. Readers have, as well, continued to identify with Alice herself, perhaps if only because—as Humpty Dumpty observes—she is “‘so exactly like other people’” (Looking-Glass 168).

The range of interpretive possibilities presented by the Alice books has thus made them accessible to a wide variety of social, psychological, critical, theoretical, and aesthetic interests. The desire to “grasp” Alice (in both senses of understanding and possessing) has also been expressed through literary interpretations of her adventures. In the decades immediately following the publication of Carroll's work, hundreds of literary parodies, sequels, spin-offs and imitations began to appear. Significantly, these Alice-inspired works reveal the kinds of cultural work the Alice books performed at specific times among different kinds of readers, as authors either paid tribute to, reacted against, or attempted to revise their perceptions of the Alice books and their effects on child readers.¹⁸

The majority of these Alice-inspired works were produced in the fifty or so years following the books' publications and sharply decline after the 1920s when literary tastes and culture changed dramatically. The 1920s is also the period when Carroll's work was discovered and appropriated by high literary artists, critics, and theorists such as William Empson, Virginia Woolf, and Edmund Wilson. The decline of Alice-inspired literary efforts thus testifies to the very influence of Carroll and his successors on literary modernism. It was Wilson who in 1932 declared, “C. L. Dodgson was a most interesting man and deserves better of his admirers, who revel in his delightfulness and cuteness but do not give him any serious attention. … In literature, Lewis Carroll went deeper than his contemporaries realized and than he usually gets credit for even today.”¹⁹

Since the early 1930s, critics have interpreted Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass as Freudian allegories of a desire to retreat back to the womb, as reflections of the nineteenth-century ideology of imperialism, as archetypal journey myths, as metaphors for hallucinogenic drug experiences, as nostalgic visions of the comforting “secret garden” of childhood, as existential explorations of life as meaningless chaos, or conversely as meta-texts about the very “meaning of meaning”: “‘Is meaning necessarily contingent and relative?’ ‘How do we mean what we mean?’ ‘What does it mean to exist? to be human?’ or ‘What does it all mean?’”²⁰ Such interpretations may seem to suggest that the Alice books are, indeed, too complex for children.

Certainly, the Alice books' appropriation as high literary culture in the early 1930s marked a significant decline in their appropriation and interpretation by popular authors, particularly children's authors. Unlike the large and coherent body of works that comment upon the characters, themes, and structures of the originals, the few Alice-inspired works of the last sixty years usually refer minimally or obliquely to the Alice books and tend to be directed at a sophisticated adult audience. Recent works such as Maeve Kelly's Alice in Thunderland (1993), Rikki Ducornet's The Jade Cabinet (1993), Susan Sontag's Alice in Bed (1993), and Alison Habens's Dreamhouse (1995) show the influence of feminist and poststructuralist theory, but not of specific, popular criticism of Alice, as do the earlier Alice-inspired works. These recent works use the Alice books as starting points from which to comment on questions unrelated to the books themselves and the issues they raise. This shift from imitating the Alice books to merely referring to details of the Alice mythos, of course, not only reflects changes in literary culture but larger social and cultural changes as well, such as the growth of the women's movement.

The works collected here date from the late 1860s to the 1920s, comment specifically upon the original novels and upon popular critical responses to them, and form a coherent body of Alice “imitations.”²¹ They thus share specific characteristics with Carroll's Alice books and with one another: an Alice-like protagonist or protagonists, male and/or female, who is typically polite, articulate, and assertive; a clear transition from the “real” waking world to a fantasy dream world through which the protagonist journeys; rapid shifts in identity, appearance, and location; an episodic structure often centering on encounters with nonhuman fantasy characters and/or characters based on nursery rhymes or other popular children's texts, including Alice herself; nonsense language and interpolated nonsense verse, verse-parodies, or songs; an awakening or return to the “real” world, which is generally portrayed as domestic (a literal return home); and, usually, a clear acknowledgment of indebtedness to Carroll through a dedication, apology, mock-denial of influence, or other textual or extratextual reference.

Attempts to imitate or revise his work alternately angered and flattered Carroll, whose diary entry for 11 September 1891 notes the acquisition of several Alice-inspired works for “the collection I intend making of the books of the Alice type.”²² Carroll's frustration may have stemmed from his own vain attempts to imitate his success, first with the more mechanical Alice's Adventures in Wonderland sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and later with marketing schemes for authorized Alice merchandise such as a Nursery Alice, scaled down for very young readers, a Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case, and a biscuit tin decorated with characters from Through the Looking-Glass. He also produced several increasingly stiff and moralistic fantasies such as The Hunting of the Snark (1876) and Sylvie and Bruno (1889). In his somber preface to Sylvie and Bruno, and in the wake of Edward Salmon's unfounded suggestion that Carroll may have plagiarized Tom Hood's Alice-inspired From Nowhere to the North Pole (1874),²³ Carroll acknowledges that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass were indeed part of larger historical developments in literary fairy tales:

Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature—at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes—is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune. I do not know if “Alice in Wonderland” was an original story—I was, at least, no conscious imitator in writing it—but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen story-books have appeared, on identically the same pattern.²⁴

The range and variety of these books “on the same pattern” do offer fascinating insights into the cultural and literary situations in which the Alice books have been understood and appropriated by different audiences—female and male, Victorian and modern, British and American. They also illuminate how diversely the Alice narratives, as both literary and ideological commodities, were interpreted, expropriated, and converted in both critical and affirming ways to question those same situations and, in some cases, to question the representation of Alice herself. Victorian women writers, for example—such as Maggie Browne, Anna Matlack Richards, and particularly the evangelical Alice Corkran—clearly reconstructed an image of Alice more appropriate to their beliefs about women's cultural power and authority. Indeed, Nina Auerbach has argued that Victorian women writers use character studies, fictional biographies, and reinterpretations of classic texts to liberate female characters from “the single set of circumstances in which author and audience imagine [them].”²⁵ Though debate has been heated over whether Alice is or is not a feminist heroine, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women writers were able to appropriate and reinvent Alice to free her from the restrictions of Carroll's highly conservative narratives and, in so doing, to “reveal the conditions in which a particular ideology of femininity functions.”²⁶ The invocation of the popular and widely disseminated images of both Alice and Lewis Carroll also provided one means for unknown female writers to authorize themselves in the growing literary marketplace of the late nineteenth century. In particular, these Alice revisions illustrate the transition—especially important in the emergence of women writers—from private to public discourse: the transformation of private occasional writing for a particular child to a public text for popular consumption.

Because these Alice-inspired works are as much a response to the myriad critical readings of the Alice novels as they are to the novels themselves, this collection has been organized according to the kinds of literary responses most common to interpretations and reviews of the Alice books and, indeed, to larger debates about the cultural role of children's literature. The subversive Alice-revisions in part one respond critically to the original texts' conservative images of Victorian girlhood and domestic ideology and present Alice-like heroines who demonstrate power and authority over their fantasy adventures. Anna Matlack Richard's heroine Alice Lee tackles her adventures “not at all concerned as the other Alice had been … that she was too big.”²⁷ Maggie Browne's dauntless heroine, Merle, defeats Endom's evil Grunter Grim by learning to “Defy, Deride, Desist, Deny, / Heed not a growl, or scowl, or sigh”—words of advice she often repeats and finds “very comforting.”²⁸

While authors such as Richards and Browne see Wonderland as too restrictive, the school of responses represented in part two questions whether it is restrictive enough. Their didactic revisions attempt to counter praise that focused on the novels' lack of moralizing: “Notwithstanding any remarks of the Duchess, Alice has no moral,” declares a reviewer for The Spectator, agreeing with many earlier critics. The same reviewer also speculates about whether the books might be used didactically: “Will lessons become amusing by association with Alice, or will even Alice become hateful by being regarded as a lesson-book? The experiment is a hazardous one, and will demand no small skill and tact on the part of the operator.”²⁹The Illustrated London News (16 December 1865), however, praised Alice in Wonderland as suited for “the amusement and even instruction of children.” Indeed, much of Carroll's post-Alice writings for children are quite didactic. As later critics have pointed out, “lessons and rules abound in Wonderland,” and serve to educate Alice in the rituals and beliefs of middle-class ideology.³⁰ Alice Corkran transforms Wonderland into “Naughty Children Land,” which echoes with the dismal howls of the “Sulkies.” More ominous still, Corkran's heroine, Kitty, “fancied she heard the sound of smacking” above the sounds of screaming and shouting.³¹ Corkran reasserts the very didacticism that Carroll satirizes in the Duchess's song:

“Speak roughly to your little boy,
                    And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
                    Because he knows it teases.”

[Wonderland 48]

For evangelical women writers like Corkran, however, didacticism was an important means of asserting women's important social role as educators and, indeed, of extending the boundaries of the Victorian domestic sphere to include the literary marketplace.

In a 1927 essay entitled “Extensions of Reality,” Anne Eaton suggests that the appeal of sentimental “escape” fantasies, like the Alice adaptations included in part three, lies in their exploration of what she calls “a third region, not to be definitely located in the real world or in fairyland.” These fantasies “join on to real life and yet offer magical and mysterious spaces lying close at hand but hidden from view. There is more of a thrill in dwelling on the possibility of something unreal underneath the real, than in reading the conventional fairy tale.”³² Eaton cites the Alice books as such “betwixt and between” fantasies, also citing as “[a]mong her descendants who inherit something of the same joyous ability to play with words and ideas” Charles Carryl's Davy and the Goblin, E. F. Benson's David Blaize and the Blue Door, and Frances Hodgson Burnett's “Behind the White Brick.”³³ Sentimental fantasies such as these read and reenvisioned the Alice novels as “pure sugar throughout,”³⁴ as reflections of “a child's simple and unreasoning imagination illustrated in a dream.”³⁵ G. E. Farrow's Wallypug books respond to and expand both the playful and fantastic aspects of the Alice books, concocting elaborate and absurd fantasy creatures, puns, verse parodies, and adventures for the novels' heroes. In The Wallypug of Why, the Crocodile takes a weak cup of tea out for strengthening walks, “propped up with pillows, and carefully wrapped in a little woollen shawl,” and Girlie attends a Fancy Dinner Party where guests are served empty plates and told to “fancy” they've been served real food.³⁶ These sentimental Alice-inspired fantasies are concerned more with escape and laughter than with lessons or criticism, and tend to be dedicated to real child acquaintances or readers, as in Charles Carryl's tender dedication to his son, Guy, and G. E. Farrow's long, affectionate prefaces to his child readers and correspondents.

As children's books, the Alice novels were accessible to all, including the parodist. Modernist critics, however, took Carroll's work out of the realm of childhood—by reinterpreting them as sophisticated literary classics which would even eclipse “the productions of the Carlyles and the Ruskins, the Spencers and the George Eliots”—thus, removing the Alice novels from the sphere of popular interpretation.³⁷ The pre-modernist political parodies in part four of this collection represent the first appropriations of the Alice books for adult audiences and concerns, and, though still closely paralleling the conventions outlined above, anticipate the gradual decline of the Alice-imitation phenomenon in the late 1920s, as the Alice-books were taken out of the literary public domain by virtue of their reclassification as serious objects of scholarship. These early-twentieth-century political parodies respond to yet another popular reading of the Alice novels: as containing veiled political references and satire, largely due to illustrator John Tenniel's popularity as a political cartoonist for Punch magazine. Martin Gardiner notes the wide belief among nineteenth-century readers “that Tenniel's lion and unicorn [in Through the Looking-Glass] … were intended as caricatures of Gladstone and Disraeli respectively,” adding that if Carroll—who was conservative politically and did not like Gladstone—intended the parody, then Alice's repetition of the line “The Lion beat the Unicorn all around the town” (172) becomes politically charged.³⁸ Michael Hancher has also pointed out Tweedledum and Tweedledee's strong resemblance to Tenniel's drawings of John Bull (a satirical embodiment of the British common man) in Punch.³⁹

The literary enterprises represented here attempt not merely to follow, but to engage, to question, even to subvert the ideological assumptions behind Carroll's Alice books. They illustrate for us today some of the ways that Carroll's nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century readers responded to and resisted the Alice narratives' influential ideologies of gender, class, and childhood. These works are also full of new wonders to discover, dramatizing why children and adults alike continue to demand (echoing the title of A. L. Gibson's 1924 fantasy) Another Alice book, Please!

Notes

1. Pall Mall Gazette (1 July 1898): 1-2.

2. In a 1990 article for The New York Times Book Review entitled “The Girl Is Everywhere,” Vicki Weissman notes ninety-three Alice-related entries in the then-current Books in Print (11 Nov. 1990): 55.

3. Warren Weaver, Alice in Many Tongues: The Translations of Alice in Wonderland (Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1964).

4. The Daily News (19 Dec. 1866). A large collection of early reviews of the Alice books are reprinted in Jabberwocky: The Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society 9 (winter 1979-80-autumn 1980).

5. This quote was used by Macmillan in early advertisements for Alice in Wonderland.

6. “Children's Books,” The Athenaeum 1900 (16 Dec. 1865): 844.

7. Dusinberre, Alice to the Lighthouse: Children's Books and Radical Experiments in Art (New York: St. Martin's, 1987) 2, 5.

8. Burgess, “All About Alice,” Unesco Courier (May-June 1986): 44.

9. Guinness produced a number of delightfully illustrated Christmas booklets as part of an extended Alice-themed advertising campaign. The booklets featured parodies of familiar verses and scenes from the Alice books, all, of course, emphasizing the characters' partiality for Guinness beer:

   The Walrus and the Carpenter
   Were walking down the Strand
   And all the little Oysters came
   And followed hand in hand,
   “If we but had some Guinness now,”
   They said, “it would be grand!”
   “If seven men with seven tongues
   Talked on till all was blue,
   Could they give all the reasons why
   Guinness is good for you?”—
   “I doubt it,” said the Carpenter,
   “But that it's good is true.”

   From The Guinness Alice (Dublin: St. James's Gate, 1933). Other Guinness titles include Jabberwocky Re-Versed and Other Guinness Versions (1935), and Alice Aforethought, Guinness Carrolls for 1938 (1938).

10. The author's own desire for the child Alice may have played a part in engendering this appeal, though Carroll also worked on various commercial enterprises to market his literary creation.

11. Rackin, “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass”: Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning. Twayne's Masterwork Studies 81 (New York: Twayne, 1991) 14.

12. Cohen, Lewis Carroll, A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995) 135.

13. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, ed. Donald J. Gray, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 1992) 27. Future references will be cited parenthetically in the text as Wonderland or Looking-Glass.

14. Woolf, “Lewis Carroll,” 1929, The Moment and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948) 82.

15. Cohen, A Biography 139.

16. “Alice's Invasion of Wonderland,” PMLA 33 (Jan. 1973): 92, 93.

17. Sheehy, New Passages: Mapping Your Life across Time (New York: Random House, 1995) 4.

18. In Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860, Jane Tompkins defines “cultural work” as “the way that literature has power in the world … [the ways that] it connects with the beliefs and attitudes of large masses of readers so as to impress or move them deeply” (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985) xiv.

19. Wilson, “C. L. Dodgson: The Poet Logician,” Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll's Dreamchild as Seen through the Critics' Looking-Glasses, ed. Robert Phillips (New York: Random House, 1971) 198, 200.

20. Rackin, Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning 16.

21. Definitions of what constitutes an “Alice imitation” vary. Sanjay Sircar describes a detailed list of elements that constitute what he calls the “Alice imitation mode” in “Other Alices and Alternative Wonderlands: An Exercise in Literary History,” Jabberwocky 13.2 (spring 1984): 26-27. Sircar's article is also followed by a list of Alice-inspired works in the next (summer 1984) issue: 59-67. For additional lists of Alice imitations and parodies see R. B. Shaberman and Denis Crutch, “With Alice Aforethought: First Draft of an Annotated Handlist of Continuations and Imitations of Alice,” Under the Quizzing Glass: A Lewis Carroll Miscellany (London: Magpie P, 1972), and Charles C. Lovett and Stephanie B. Lovett, “Parodies, Spin-Offs, Imitations,” Lewis Carroll's Alice: An Annotated Checklist of the Lovett Collection (Westport: Meckler, 1990). A selected bibliography is also included at the end of this collection.

22. The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green, 2 vols. (London: Cassell, 1953) 2:486.

23. Salmon, “Literature for Little Ones,” The Nineteenth Century 22 (Oct. 1887): 563-80.

24. Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno (1889; Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1988) xxxvi.

25. Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982) 212.

26. Kathleen McLuskie, “The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare,” Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, eds. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) 106.

27. Richards, A New Alice in the Old Wonderland (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1895) 31.

28. Browne, Wanted—A King, or How Merle Set the Nursery Rhymes to Right (London: Duckworth, 1890) 261, 262.

29. The Spectator (7 Aug. 1869).

30. Jan Susina, “Educating Alice: The Lessons of Wonderland,” Jabberwocky 18 (winter-spring 1989): 3.

31. Corkran, Down the Snow Stairs; or, From Good-Night to Good-Morning (London: Blackie and Son, 1887) 48.

32. Eaton, The Horn Book 3.2 (May 1927): 17-18.

33. Eaton 18.

34. The Sunderland Herald (25 May 1866).

35. The Times (13 Aug. 1868).

36. Farrow, The Wallypug of Why (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1895) 43, 87.

37. Wilson, “C. L. Dodgson: The Poet Logician” 202.

38. The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardiner (New York: Meridian, 1960) 288 n. 10, 283 n. 7.

39. “Punch and Alice: Through Tenniel's Looking-Glass,” Lewis Carroll: A Celebration, ed. Edward Guiliano (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1982) 27.