[In the following essay, Polhemus explores Carroll's representation of children, suggesting that the idea of using children as subjects in fiction was just emerging when the Alice books were published.]

What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning?

Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll's two books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), regarded when they were first published as amusing pieces in the developing subgenre of “children's books,” turned out to be major works of nineteenth-century literature and part of the history of serious imaginative writing. Carroll's words and images created art so radical and variously appealing that it could, did, and does bring many kinds of readers to look with fresh wonder at the structure and meaning of experience. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), the shy, eccentric bachelor, mathematician, logician, Oxford don, and cleric, made up tales for little girls, turned them into books by Lewis Carroll—his pen name—and, in doing so, astonishingly expanded the possibilities for art, fiction, and speculative thought. In creating the Alice texts, he became a master of what we might call a stream of unconsciousness that others could tap into and use. He points the way to both modernism and postmodernism, but he is also a writer who shows the fact and importance of the emergence in the nineteenth century of children as subjects in the enterprise of fiction—a key cultural fact that deserves recognition and attention.

Carroll's Alice is, after all, the most famous child in nineteenth-century prose. She de-centers, de-constructs, and de-familiarizes the Victorian universe. A telling passage in Through the Looking-Glass, when Alice first passes through the mirror and sees the chess-piece kings and queens come alive and appear as befuddled parents and incompetent self-managers, offers a symbol for Lewis Carroll's subject and method:

Alice looked on … as the King … began writing. A sudden thought struck her, and she took hold of the end of the pencil, which came some way over his shoulder, and began writing for him.

The poor King … at last … panted out “My dear! I really must get a thinner pencil. I can't manage this one a bit: it writes all manner of things that I don't intend—”

The child takes hold and writes what it wants, taking writing in new directions. That makes a good epigraph for Carroll's Alice fiction, and it can serve as a metaphor for the role of unconscious intention in all art. It points up the source of Charles Dodgson's imagination and also represents a process of high significance at work in nineteenth-century English literature. The royal road to the Freudian unconscious runs not only through dreamland, but through childhood.

Carroll's way is the way of regression. By befriending small girls, identifying with them, seeking to divert them, projecting himself back into childhood, and imagining stories explicitly for children, he managed to create two texts that have been, and are, as widely read, known, and quoted as any imaginative literature of the past two centuries. The Alice books do not directly address our serious, responsible, moral selves; Carroll turns his back on the adult world—the so-called real world. Nevertheless, this man who retreats into juvenility and dream states, reverts to play and nonsense, toys with language, avoids any overtly didactic or practical purpose, and escapes from society, history, and maturity into the fantasy of his own regressive mind, appears before us as a prophet of the twentieth-century romance with fantasy life and a father of the future in psychology, art, and literature.

Carroll represents his child in her dream visions, and he brings together in imagining her experience the literary convention of the dream, the mood and feeling of real dreams, and the full play of his fantasy—and he exploits their potential for comedy. Nobody before had done anything quite like that. In all that is comic, as in dreams and fantasy, there is something regressive that takes us back to the mental experience and the world of play that we first knew as children. Comedy, dreams, and fantasy all somehow involve regression, a word that may have frivolous, even pejorative connotations. But the regression in Lewis Carroll—comic or not—is the opening to progress.

Carroll's Alice implies and affirms the tie-in of fiction and the child to the processes of regression and the unconscious. Henry James, describing his girl-heroine Maisie in What Maisie Knew (1897), alludes neatly to the intimate relationship between the child and fiction, between child psychology and novelistic practice: “She was at the age for which all stories are true and all conceptions are stories.” One point on which Lewis Carroll, the novel, and psychoanalysis agree is that no matter how we age, we keep this fiction-loving child somewhere, literally, in mind.

Regression means a going or coming back; it can be defined as a reverting to earlier behavior patterns, perceptions, and experiences so as to change or escape from undesirable situations and mental states. It is both radical and conservative: radical in rejecting the present and in juxtaposing material from both conscious and unconscious processes; conservative in holding on to time past. In Freudian dream psychology, regression means the translation of thoughts and emotions into visual images and forms of language when something in the mind resists or blocks their path to normal consciousness. It is a way of expressing and elaborating suppressed conflicts, memories, and daring psychic formations from infancy and childhood and letting them play on present realities. Regression can thus be a means of seeing life anew—of seeing it in Wonderland, for instance, as a falling into unknown territory beneath the surface of things, a mad tea party, and a farcical trial; or in Through the Looking-Glass, as an involuntary game, a series of dialogues with strange beings, an exercise in interpreting puzzling language, and a living out of preexistent linguistic formulas. The child's fantasy can be the generator of the adult's changing perception and world.

In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce, parodying the Holy Trinity, invents a Carrollian trinity that sums up the content and pattern of Carroll's creative regression: “Dodgfather, Dodgson & Coo.” The words and syllables, in their order, suggest the Carrollian movement away from manly, rigid patriarchy, away from the fixed single self, and toward the child and its identity with some wondrous spirit of freedom and comic wordplay. That happy “Coo” can signify the coup by which the Holy Ghost, its symbol the gentle dove, and Carroll himself merge into the girl Alice; the company that makes up his metamorphosing plural selves; and the sound that, mocking sentimentality and pomposity, connotes skepticism and bespeaks the voice of the new turtle heard in the modern lands of the absurd and irrational. From out of his rabbit-hole and looking-glass world we can see coming not only such figures as Joyce, Freud, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Proust, Artaud, Nabokov, Beckett, Waugh, Lacan, Borges, Bakhtin, and García Márquez, but also much of the character and mood of twentieth-century popular culture.

One of the main projects of the novel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been to give expression to the child and a plot to childhood, and in this collective effort Lewis Carroll played a crucial part. Carroll and Alice give us a chance to see what the term “child” could mean in their Victorian society. The “child,” of course, is not a static, given entity but a social construct that develops and changes in history. Focusing on Carroll and the Alice books can show why they have lasted and also how his child heroine relates to the children and childhoods represented by other important makers of fiction. That writers have made children subjects and objects of their work in the last two centuries has helped definitively to form people's thoughts and feelings about children. Our whole conception of childhood and children derives, in some degree, from the imaginative power of such writers as Rousseau, Wordsworth, Dickens, George Eliot, Freud, and, not least, Lewis Carroll.

Like Dante's Beatrice, Carroll's Alice is named after a real person. It was Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, who inspired the Alice books, and who, with her sisters, made the first audience for the stories from which the book grew. The comparison is not as far-fetched as it might appear, for Dodgson loved the girl Alice as surely as Dante loved the girl Beatrice; and he found, like many others of his era, a genuine faith in his sense of devotion to his idea of the child. The personal circumstances of Dodgson's life that led to Alice in Wonderland are well known and need only be mentioned briefly. He was the third child and eldest son in a large family of eleven children (seven sisters); his father was a patriarchal cleric, his mother a sweet, loving, child-burdened woman who died before Charles turned nineteen. Though he grew up a stammerer, he seems to have had a happy childhood at Daresbury and Croft, where his father was rector. He loved to care for, amuse, and entertain his siblings—his sisters especially—with stories, games, and nonsense. Though he respected his father's forceful personality and intellect and held him in awe, he identified emotionally with his mother. At school at Rugby, he seems to have been rather a misfit, but he did well in his studies and matriculated to Christ Church, Oxford. There he took a first in mathematics, won a scholarship, and eventually became a master and tutor in his subject. There also he lived out his life as a bachelor. Conventional, adult, genital sexuality and marriage were not for him; in fact, there is no evidence that he ever engaged in physical sex with anyone or wanted to. It was a sublimated libido that flowed compulsively, but with kindness and propriety, toward the figure of the child.

According to his biographer Derek Hudson, the psychological lesson of Dodgson's childhood above all others was that he could never, so long as he lived, be without the companionship of children, and by children he meant little girls. They were a necessity to him; “They are three-fourths of my life,” he once said. In 1856 he befriended the Liddell children, offspring of the dean of his college, and fell in love with Alice just at the time when he took up photography (he became a leading amateur photographer and one of the century's outstanding photographers of children). On an afternoon boating excursion with the girls in 1862 he began diverting them with a tale of nonsense and wonder that he elaborated into Alice's Adventures Under Ground (a private book, which he illustrated, meant expressly as a gift for the “real” Alice) and, later, the two published Alice books. His art of fantasy is thus rooted in real occasions, aimed at particular people with their particular wants and needs, and created for very personal reasons. Many incidents in the history of his relationship with Alice and the other Liddells, such as getting caught and drenched in the rain on an outing, find their way into his texts. The genesis of Lewis Carroll's fiction is the wish to give pleasure to a child—to children—whom he adored and idealized, to make his specific audience happy, and to seduce its goodwill and affectionate regard for himself. His desire was to project himself into the life of a child, to bind that child to his imagination, to break down the social and psychological barriers between adult and child, and to re-create the child in his own fantasy life. Virginia Woolf wrote that “childhood was not dispersed in Dodgson as it usually is in adults, but remained in him entire, so he could do what no one else has ever been able to do—he could return to that world; he could re-create it.”

As it happens, Carroll's desire and practice here—his intense subjectivity—signify a good deal about his originality and importance, and about fiction, literary transaction, and the emergence of the child in fiction. The child, according to Jacqueline Rose, in The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction, appears in literature when the relationship between adult and child becomes a concern, a problem, a cultural issue. For many reasons—the rise of the middle classes, the subtle assaults on supernaturalism, the growing emphasis on the moral value of the family the changing world's need to stress formal education, for example—that relationship, by the mid-nineteenth century, was much in question. With Carroll, however, we are talking of an adult's desire for the child—the desire, specifically, to serve the child, to make the child an icon and fetish, to use it to distance and dissolve threatening erotic energy, to introject the child into his psyche, and to live vicariously through the child. Freudians have had grand times analyzing the kinks in Charles Dodgson's personality, but the striking irony is that psychoanalysis and its theories that stress the determining significance of childhood experience and the importance of language, fantasy, dreams, jokes, and puns in showing the workings of the unconscious and the mind's reflective games, seem to flow right out of Carroll's wonderland.

In the Alice books Carroll can be seen working in the developing, often overlapping nineteenth-century traditions of children's literature and the child protagonist in fiction, but the immediacy of his original audience and the conflation of his central character, his hearers, himself, and the imaginative recreation of experiences he has shared with Alice Liddell and other little girls led him to break with convention. The purpose of most children's literature had been mainly didactic and moral: it was supposed to educate and lead children to adapt certain kinds of behavior, become better, grow up to be good people—for example, obedient Christians and productive citizens. And in the novels of Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, children are generally portrayed either as agents who reflect on the moral condition and worth of the other characters and their world (Oliver Twist [1837], Silas Marner [1861]), or, most significantly, who show the development and logical relationship between a character's childhood and his or her later life and consciousness (Great Expectations [1861], Jane Eyre [1847])—“the continuity, the unity of human experience,” as Peter Coveney puts it. Lewis Carroll's first intention would seem to have been to make his audience find him wonderful through his imaginative ingenuity and ability to delight, divert, and play seductively in language. What originally motivates the Alice tales, it seems, is a wish to break through to a new state, to go underground, to get through the usual conventional reflections to a new site of reflection behind the traditional moralizing mirrors of art—to move into the wonderland of the unconscious and the “other” where the beloved not-self somehow mirrors the self.

Carroll imagines such literary mirroring in the form of a picture—almost a photograph—in the memory of a child whom he has imagined. This becomes clear in a passage from Through the Looking-Glass describing the White Knight—a virtual self-portrait by the writer:

Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey …, this was one that she always remembered most clearly. Years afterward she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday—the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the knight—the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her—the horse quietly moving about …—and the black shadows of the forest behind—all this she took in like a picture.

It is the invented Alice who validates and preserves Dodgson/Carroll's being and lets him make art out of the mirror stage, in which, according to Lacan, we take our image of ourselves early on from what we find another perceiving and desiring.

He particularized the audience for his fiction, writing both for a child—whom he was out to please, honor, and fascinate, not change, or use for moral propaganda, or show to be the parent of the adult the child would become—and for himself, a witty, repressed, curious intellectual with a brilliantly intuitive imagination and an obvious need to express safely the contents and fantasies of his complexly fissured mind. Because Charles Dodgson loved a real child, Lewis Carroll was moved to write fiction—a fiction that broke with realism, rejected a traditional marriage plot (staple of both the novel and the fairy tale), and mocked reality as “dull.” The focus in Carroll is on the child itself, as in a portrait or photograph of a young girl, not on the state of childhood as a prelude to something else. His writing is for fun—the fun of Alice—but it also calls attention to a sense of life's alienation and to both the continuing presence and otherness of childhood for grown-ups.

Through the child, Carroll pushed the limits and conventions of fiction, expanded them, and made fantasy probing, speculative, radically comic, and intellectually rewarding. His libido drove him beyond memories and representations of realistic childhood experiences, such as Dickens depicts, into the unconscious, where, for example, he finds and reflects through the mirror of his art an image of himself as a shy, joke-making insect—Victorian ancestor of Kafka's Gregor Samsa—fluttering helplessly about the flame of a little girl (see “Looking-Glass Insects,” chapter 3, Looking-Glass). He moved from conscious social or practical purpose to comic subversion and new perspectives. Carroll pointed toward specialized and diverse audiences developing for fiction—for instance, children, nostalgic adults, teachers, child-rearers, academics, logicians, and intellectuals—and also toward the complicated and various motives that bring one to read and write fiction. (One motive that became important in the developing countercultural tradition in art would be to turn outsiders into insiders, giving them the last laugh.) The motives and circumstances behind the making of Alice let us see how the reading public was fragmenting into special groups and also into what we might call a collection of myriad-minded, private reading selves.

The child as subject and the literary transaction were for Carroll ends, rather than means. Paradoxically, therefore, this outwardly orthodox, but odd, little-girl-struck author of what may have been the favorite children's book of the century helped to rid fiction of its heavy load of Victorian moral baggage and move it toward something like sovereign play in and for itself—pleasure for pleasure's sake and art for art's sake too. Thus, strangely enough, it previews both popular culture and modernism's high art of fiction with its exalted, romantic notions of “creative writing” and the writer. “Alice” was born out of the need to please some little girls and to turn the rational world upside down. A little child destined for the commercial stage, movies, cartoons, amusement-park rides, and TV—the whole money-making Alice industry whose history shows perfectly how the child has been commercialized in modern times—would lead the avant-garde.

The cult of the child flourished in Victorian times, and other authors, particularly Dickens, exploited to the last emotional pang the sympathy and identification that people had come to feel for children in print, especially orphans and lonely, misunderstood, victimized children. Of the major writers in the language, however, only Carroll and Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, used the child primarily for comic purposes. Natural symbols of regeneration, children—in modern times normally much closer in years to birth than to death—live relatively free of the fear of time and give themselves to play, games, and the pursuit of pleasure. And if you write for them, you can give way to fantasy, say things that in another context might be construed as wild or blasphemous, and claim you're doing nothing but amusing children. But before you can fully realize the comic potential of the child, you have to rebel against the powerful idea that adult life is somehow superior to child life. You must really admire, even envy, want to be, the child, and choose the child over the parent—even the parent in yourself and the parent that you are in your imagination. Lewis Carroll did. This laureate of growing up absurd knew that a part of the self resents having to grow up, and he insisted that maturity, whatever else it may be, is somehow a sham and a joke.

Such a writer and such a vision can succeed only when there is a deep, if repressed, skepticism about the authority—and authoritarianism—of the past, both individually and collectively. (cf. Günter Grass's Little Oskar in The Tin Drum in post-Nazi Germany.) The intensive questioning of authority and power that the Alice texts render could take place only when people, feeling themselves to be children of an incomprehensible or disappearing God, of the state, of a ridiculous universe, or of some other sort of unfathomable, but oppressive authority, and consciously or unconsciously resentful, were ready to defy and mock the omnipotence, mystery, wisdom, and reason of a rigid adult order—the internal and external ancien régime.

Philippe Aries, the pioneer historian of childhood, and his followers, critics, and revisers have tried to chronicle the processes by which childhood began to be recognized as something more than a period when, as Kimberley Reynolds puts it, “miniature adults were stuffed with food, information, and attitudes with which to become fully-developed adults”—when, in other words, children began to be perceived as different from adults. Whether this changing perception occurred in the early Renaissance, the seventeenth century, or, on a widespread scale in the early nineteenth century, by the late-Victorian period the child in art and literature reflected a concern for helping middle-class adults identify and resolve their problems by identifying with children. If we compare the nature of fiction through the Victorian era and the twentieth century with what it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century we see how a mushrooming emphasis on the child has changed things and led novelists to the rendering of children's points of view (Dickens, Proust, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Woolf), children as featured characters (George Eliot, Christina Stead, Thomas Mann), children as magnets for twisted, dangerous eroticisms (Joyce, Nabokov, Toni Morrison), children as lovely, innocent figures whose well-being is the touchstone of the good (Henry James), and children as a targeted audience (Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, J. M. Barrie, T. H. White). For the more privileged classes in the nineteenth century, home and family came to be idealized as sacred places. But, as Reynolds says in words that bear on Carroll, “The image of the child was simultaneously sentimental, escapist, the repository of all that was good and pure, and also the domain of covert desires and fantasies.”

When Lewis Carroll began to write, there had been increasing public and private concern for more than a century about the condition of children. In the nineteenth century the state, mostly at the behest of the evangelical movement, had begun to take official notice and make some early efforts at regulating child labor, protecting child welfare, and mandating at least some schooling. Attitudes were changing. In the eighteenth century new interest and sentiment for children and new idealizations of family affection had appeared. Romanticization of childhood, though it had been slow to develop, went together with middle-class romanticization of women and motherhood. Historically, capitalism, the expansion of the empire, and the coming of industrialism had made a great many people richer and brought for the growing numbers of the privileged classes more leisure for their children and a longer period of childhood before beginning the work of the world. This led to growing emphasis on education and also on the aestheticizing of the child as people took pride in their progeny and wanted to show them off. The development of scientific method, rationalism, and new areas of knowledge challenged ideas of personal immortality and drove many to find hopes for a regenerative future in their children. Also, as time passed and the rudiments of modern medicine appeared, people saw greatly increased chances for infant survival; in many cases, that perception appears to have opened the floodgates for wholehearted sentimental feelings for children, who would no longer so often discourage their parents' by dying young.

Meanwhile, of course, print technology developed and literacy was spreading. It was necessary to teach children to read and to give them material suited to the education adults deemed proper for them, but some also thought that giving them things they might want to read for pleasure would develop their literacy skills. Later, in the Victorian era, came another technology highly significant in the history of the child as subject: the development of the camera, which made the personal fetishizing of the past and widespread preservation of familial images possible. Photography, as Lewis Carroll, like the later billion-dollar camera industrialists, knew so well, went hand in hand with the contemplation of children and childhood; the hugely popular loving, aesthetic contemplation of children in culture seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon—and one in which Carroll has surely had a hand.

In the nineteenth century, boarding schools proliferated, as did various other professional educational practices, and, Aries suggests, these were important in creating a separate sphere for children and a distinct juvenile literature because they increased the distance between the worlds of adult and child and cast doubt upon the suitability of shared reading material. Literature from the eighteenth century on, of course, was a growing enterprise that included a developing market for books aimed at children; and by the time Lewis Carroll started inventing stories for the Liddell girls, commercial as well as heuristic and religious motives were coming to figure more and more in the making of children's fiction. Publishers of children's books, then, though they were mainly interested in getting across theology, moral ideology, and pragmatic lessons that would make people more industrious, had nevertheless printed The Arabian Nights' Entertainments for children (1791), collections of Mother Goose tales or nursery rhymes (1744, 1780, 1810, 1842), fairy tales (1729, 1768, 1849), and, in the mid-nineteenth century, a number of boys' adventure stories relating to school, exploration, colonialism, and travel (e.g., Frederick Marryat's Masterman Ready [1841] and Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays [1856]). Such reading, among other things, inculcated a sense of wonder and a penchant for fantasy, nonsense, pleasure, adventure, and vicarious power. (Fiction for girls, as it slowly developed and differentiated itself in the nineteenth century, tended to stress their domestic and Christian duties and their chances of demonstrating the moral responsibility and moral superiority of their gender, and it allowed much less scope for fantastic adventures.) But before Alice, children's books, whether by Rousseau-influenced, neo-Enlightenment humanists like Thomas Day (The History of Sandford and Merton [1783]) and Maria Edgeworth (Early Lessons [1801]) or by God-fearing Calvinists like Hannah More and Mary Martha Sherwood (The Fairchild Family [1818-1847]), were under the restraining thumb of the moralists.

Moral controversy swirled about the developments of children's literature and fantasy modes. Historically, fairy tales seem to have been connected with the mythology of superstitions and magical cults—in other words, with outlawed religions. At first, fairy tales were condemned for lacking ethical purpose and religious seriousness, but then more flexible educators and guardians of orthodoxy found they could be expropriated and used to inculcate correct behavior in much the same way as traditional Christian dream visions had been used. By the time Carroll wrote the Alice books, nearly all children's stories pushed religion and ethics, and even fantasy was serving disciplinary ends. (Later in his life, in Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Continued [1889 and 1893], Carroll—perhaps I should say Dodgson—would use it for the same ends, and spoil his genius.) Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which he calls a “fairy-tale,” mock this sort of thing and claim fantasy, miracle, dream techniques, and the child for comedy.

Fantasy as a literary genre was developed in the Victorian era most notably by Carroll, Thomas Hood, George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, and William Morris. It grew out of the Romantic movement—specifically from such late eighteenth-century historical phenomena as intensified interest in childhood, the collecting and setting down of folk tales and verse, the revival of interest in beast fables, and the burgeoning market for children's stories. It seemed important to some that children's powers of fancy be developed—especially since the Romantics prized imagination—and that people should find ways to stay in touch with the playfulness of childhood. The cult of the exotic, the cultivation of the self's visionary powers, the fascination with irrational states of mind (including dream states), the felt need for new or rejuvenated myths and symbols to meet the breakdown of religious orthodoxy and the crises of faith, all helped to produce fantasy fiction and make it respectable. Victorian fantasy proclaims the continuing need for a renaissance of wonder (Carroll, at the end of Wonderland, calls the waking world “dull reality”—an astounding assertion if you think about it).

Before the Christian era, the classical male mind-set of the Greeks and Romans—in which children, being immature, were considered less human, less complex, and therefore less interesting than adults—had seemed relatively uncurious about the child as such. Christian dogma would change that indifference, though it would take a long time and involve much historical contention. Robert Pattison has shown how deeply a divided early Christian heritage has colored thoughts about children. On the one hand there was Augustine's expounding of the orthodox doctrine of Original Sin and the damnation of human offspring without Christian salvation, baptism, and intervention into the corrupt, selfish nature of children. On the other side, preparing the way to see the child as a religious symbol, were the scriptural “massacre of the innocents,” the advent and representation of Christ as a miraculous babe, the words of Jesus, “Suffer little children … to come unto me for of such is the kingdom of heaven,” and the influential Pelagian heresy arguing for a primary innocence in the child. Pattison says that Augustine, in his Confessions, brought confessional autobiography and Original Sin into the world together, and if this is so, he pioneered the psychological novel: “Augustine's doctrine laid the foundation for the child as literary image. He had connected childhood [including his own] and sin, made the infant an adult of sorts, and surrounded him with a fallen nature, which existed in that condition because of man's fallen will.” That doctrine, which makes salvation of the child a precarious matter of the utmost religious urgency, became especially influential in the Reformation and helped lead, in the age of growing literacy, to the severely moralistic, often Calvinistic religious tracts, manuals, education literature, and monitory children's stories that proliferated especially in the first half of the nineteenth century and that were popular at least until World War I. More generally it has fostered the influential notion that the child's fate is crucial but the child's moral nature is, by itself, lost, or at least dangerously weak and in need of vigilant adult protection from the world's wickedness and its own innate propensities to do wrong.

In the social and intellectual upheaval of the last half of the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the most influential theorists of childhood, countered such ideas in Emile (1762), his treatise on proper education, and in his own famous Confessions (1781): A Pelagian, he sees the child as naturally good and ideology about Original Sin as pernicious, but he does support the Augustinian idea of childhood's importance. Education is vital—that is, education which leads the maturing human being to preserve in itself the goodness of the natural child and harmonize the excellence of nature with culture. The natural child, for Rousseau, is conceived as innocent of the contradictions and conflicts that disrupt a harmonious relationship with the world. Jacqueline Rose observes that for him sexuality—as culture had distorted it—and social inequality “were realities that the child could be used to circumvent” or remedy. His idea, which he expresses both theoretically and autobiographically, is that, as Rose puts it, “it is sexuality which most totally sabotages the child's correct use of language and its exact [proper, accurate] knowledge of the world.”

Rousseau himself was deeply influenced by John Locke, whose rejection of innate ideas, stress on a blank-slate image of the child, and belief in empirical experience as the determiner of the child's being and the adult's fate have been of great moment in shaping the ways people imagine and educate children. Locke put forth the idea of the child's proper education through direct encounter with the real world in which the problematic nature of language and its imperfections did not figure. According to Rose, for many to this day who follow these philosophers, the child is set up as an uncontaminated, “pure point of origin in relation to language, sexuality, and the state.” Thus, Carroll's comic focus in the Alice books on the problematics of language for children and adults alike (e.g., puns, the involuntary nature of language, its subjectivity, Humpty Dumpty's assertion that words mean whatever he wants them to, “the wood of no names”) is one of his fiction's most original and important features. Rose notes that “literature for children first became an independent commercial venture in England in the mid-to late-eighteenth century, … when conceptualisation of childhood was dominated by … Locke and Rousseau,” and one could say the same thing about the novel in general, whose advent as the dominant popular genre parallels the advent of the child as a popular subject of representation. For both these philosophers, however, as for the strict Christian believers, moral, social, and practical education, however defined, is the proper end of literature—not pleasure or any intrinsic interest. But they opened up childhood as a state of innocence, purity, and blankness, an enticing space for the projection of faith, hope, love, and desire. One key comparison to make between the child as a concept developed in the last two centuries and fiction is to see them both as sites where people could project themselves, could identify, could read what they wanted, could have hope of vicarious life for their own desires.

Adapting Rousseau's mode of introspection, his feeling for the goodness and the intensity of early life, and his sense of childhood's determining power, William Wordsworth gave nineteenth-century Britain its romantic image of the child: the child as “seer blessed,” “father of the man,” the “best philosopher,” “trailing clouds of glory,” a “darling of the pigmy size,” the seed from which the poet's mind grows, and a little intimater of immortality. His visionary contemporary Blake also made children central, showing how the child could be featured as both religious symbol—image of innocence and holiness—and social symbol of a fallen, exploitive world (victim of industrial cruelty, poverty, disease, neglect). Following Augustine, Rousseau, and Wordsworth, the child becomes in fiction a figure leading to self-identity and self-knowledge, and following Blake, the child becomes a sacrificial social victim or an innocent little lamb of God, a natural stand-in for the mystical, holy Christ. “The purpose of the romantic image of the child,” according to Peter Coveney, was “above all to establish a relation between childhood and adult consciousness,” but it was also to serve, in a world increasingly skeptical of supernaturalism, as an image of faith. The Romantics, Coveney asserts, “were interested in growth and continuity, in tracing the organic development of the human consciousness, and also, in lowering psychic barriers between adult and child.” In writing of the child, their interests were adult. Nevertheless, in finding certain superiorities in a child's being over an adult's, they opened the way to the cult of the child. And the fear of losing touch with childhood, so pronounced in Wordsworth, is one of the chief generating motives not only for Carroll's work but for much of the distinguished fiction of the last two centuries. The novel needed the subjectivity of the child in order to become a powerful mode of psychological exploration and suggestiveness.

It was Charles Dickens, more than any other writer, who made children crucial subjects of faith, erotics, and moral concern, and nothing he did as a novelist was more influential than choosing to represent children. To know and tell the stories of life, it was necessary to understand and imagine what happened to children—to Oliver Twist, Smike, Little Nell, Tiny Tim, Paul and Florence Dombey, David Copperfield, Esther Summerson, Jo the Sweep, Amy Dorrit, Pip, and the rest of his fiction's boys' and girls' chorus. Traumatized by experiences from his own childhood, he stamped the romantic image of the child upon the imagination of millions and taught people to feel and identify with abused, exploited children and with the psychology of early life. Two passages, one from David Copperfield (1850) and the other from the preface to The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), get at his vision of the child as a mirroring image of self-pity, imaginative vindication, and regenerative possibilities:

When my thoughts go back, now, to that slow agony of my youth, I wonder how much of the histories I invented for such people hangs like a mist of fancy over well-remembered facts! When I tread the old ground, I do not wonder that I seem to see and pity, going on before me, an innocent romantic boy, making his imaginative world out of such strange experiences and sordid things!

(David Copperfield)

I had it always in my fancy to surround the lonely figure of the child [Little Nell] with grotesque and wild … companions, and to gather about her innocent face and pure intentions, associates … strange and uncongenial.

(The Old Curiosity Shop)

Of this mass impulse to regression that Dickens tapped, expressed, and helped to form, Carroll made his fiction.

Dickens regards the child as both a center of innocence (Nell, Oliver, Florence) and as the crux of developing personal and cultural history (David, Pip). For the light it brings to the concept and figure of the child as moral savior, the revealing custom of feminizing and infantilizing the essence of virtue, and to Alice, The Old Curiosity Shop is especially relevant. People devoured the novel and its pathetic child-heroine Nell not for its literary merit or for simple diversion—no character in Dickens has been more severely criticized or raucously mocked—but for the sake of faith: the girl-child is presented as something good to believe in, a narrated icon. The power of Little Nell is the power of religious feeling. As I have shown in Critical Reconstructions (1993), she represents quite literally an assumption of the traditional religious power of the Virgin Mary and holy Christian sacrifice into the female child. The aura, effects, and influence of the girl-child as moral guide and redeemer show up not only in the popular sentiment of the age but in the work of such intellectual sophisticates as George Eliot with her little golden-haired Eppie in Silas Marner (1861), John Ruskin in his quasi-devotional writings about feminine purity and the sanctity of girlhood, Henry James in What Maisie Knew, and, naturally, Lewis Carroll. The child had traditionally been seen as the proper object for religious and educational instruction. Now, in The Old Curiosity Shop, she becomes popularly the subject, embodiment, and teacher of worthy and sacred values.

That “she,” of course, matters: it is almost always a girl, not a boy, who stands for pure goodness (the sacrificial—and feminized—Paul Dombey is the exception). Why? The boy in Dickens usually represents the struggling self; the girl is often the morally and spiritually perfect other, the ideal projection. The still-prevalent sexist Manicheism about children (see, for example, bad-boy Bart, good-girl Lisa in the animated hit TV show “The Simpsons”), famously summed up in the nursery rhymes “snips and snails and puppy dogs' tails; that's what little boys are made of,” and “sugar and spice and everything nice; that's what little girls are made of,” feeds The Old Curiosity Shop and Lewis Carroll too (for example, note, in Wonderland, chapter 6, the quick change from boy baby to pig and the lines, “Speak roughly to your little boy, / And beat him when he sneezes: / He only does it to annoy, / Because he knows it teases”). The rise of the novel, children's fiction, and the number of juvenile characters in literature did not create separate gender spheres, nor gender-specific social functions for males and females, but literature was a primary means of reflecting, transmitting, defining, and redefining important social images of gender. A boy in the time of the novel as dominant literary mode was supposed to grow up, find his manhood, become somebody, follow a vocation, make a living, achieve status, accomplish something, and, all in all, see and live life as a worldly process and profession of becoming, rather than just being. A girl was supposed to find love, which meant that she had to be, or at least seem, lovable and loving. A middle-or upper-class girl's fate, according to cultural ideology, would likely depend on being “attractive” and learning to please, serve, and ameliorate—to preserve and regenerate domestic harmonies and uphold spiritual and moral values. For the richer classes, the girl-child could be encouraged to behave modestly and nicely, dressed up and made pretty—aestheticized, idealized, and fetishized as a repository of civilized value. She was appreciated not for what she would become, but for the way she might appear to be: a breathing treasure, a pearl of great price, a lovely looking glass that would give people back pretty reflections in which they could find evidence of their noblest desires and their best selves. The expansion of wealth and of the middle classes meant that more and more families could aspire to have their own little Velazquez princesses.

In her cozy setting at the beginning of Looking-Glass, Alice typically represents the Victorian and modern wish to see the time of childhood as a bastion against the dangers and troubles of the grown-up world—a paradise at the beginning instead of the end of life. The Victorian girl-child could be posed and imagined as living proof that in a hard and changing world it was possible to maintain and nurture sweetness and natural purity. She made an ideal raison d'être for life's struggle and also symbolized an escape from it. Childhood became a kind of wildlife refuge for the fancy and wonder that might seem impractical in adult life. It is true that the privileged Victorians tended to make ornaments of their little girls (and often their little boys too), but to see what that means, we must understand that “ornament” had the radiant force behind it that the “ornament” of stained glass would have had at Chartres: visible evidence for faith.

Like Dickens, the great female novelists of mid-nineteenth-century England—Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot—also render the subjectivity of the child, using it to explore the inseparable questions of gender and self-identity. They adopted and also rejected gendered stereotypes of children. Jane Eyre represents in Helen Burns (closely modeled on Charlotte's older sister, Maria, cruelly mistreated at school and dead at eleven) the same sort of martyrdom of an idealized, sacrificial girl-child as Dickens shows in Nell and Florence Dombey. Brontë, however, effectively dismisses Helen as a model for living girls to emulate, makes Jane the hero and first-person subject, and focuses on her childhood victimization and her progress from an abused girl to an assertive, vocationally competent, erotic, and successful adult. This governess manqué and creative genius doesn't sentimentalize children in her fiction, doesn't even seem particularly to like them, but renders childhood experience and trauma as crucial in forming character and fate.

Her sister Emily, in the early chapters of Wuthering Heights (1848), imagines in the childhoods of Cathy and Heathcliff the turbulent passion, polymorphous perversity, and determining effects of infantile sexuality that psychoanalysts, shocking propriety, would later claim to be natural—even normal. Like her sister, she breaks through conventional decorum, ridicules notions about little angels-in-the-house, and gets at the violence of childhood and its spawning of obsessions. But she does represent the second Cathy as the moral redeemer of the novel's world. George Eliot makes the girl-child of Silas Marner the figure that upholds civilization and leads to moral progress, but in The Mill on the Floss (1860) she addresses the issue of the gendered, sugar-and-spice stereotypes and the damage they can cause. Maggie Tulliver's long childhood is a depiction of how the girl is mother to the woman, but it is also a relentless narrative of steady, restrained, feminist anger and resentment about the horrors of abstracting girls and boys and making them conform to conventional, rigid gender roles.

As do the Alice books, the fiction of these novelists who seized upon childhood as a major subject revealingly renders tension between a passionate, sometimes sentimental will to identify with the child, together with a sense of the irrecoverability of childhood and alienation from the myth of the sanctified girl. The child who is seen as part and parent of the adult consciousness and point of view has already lost its being in the very act of that reflection. Edmond de Goncourt, using the documentary procedures of French realism and aiming exclusively at an adult audience, wrote the novel Cherie (1884), featuring a child protagonist, because he thought his role as novelist was to be “un historien des gens qui n'ont pas d'histoire”: children before the novelists got at them, in other words, were people without history; but then, with the coming of novelistic retrospection, they tended to become part of the history of adults, rather than “people.” The unself-conscious nature, special innocence, and uncurbed potential of the child are time-doomed, as Blake, singing of experience, knew. Moreover there is a serious psychological flaw in putting faith in the saintly child, because people, especially the introspective, remembering that they have been children, usually know somehow that—no matter how they want and try to deceive themselves—they were never pure, never angelic; an innocent child, in some dark recess of the psyche, is a falsehood and a moral reproach. Still, the Victorian writers of fiction, led by Dickens, moved people to identify with children, to take the child's part; and Carroll's subversion of the adult world—his identification of the self with a child rather than an adult—marks a revolution of sensibility and outlook.

Lewis Carroll actually loved and wanted to be the girl-child, the other, the not-self in a way that his distinguished older contemporaries in fiction did not. Dickens and George Eliot, writing of the child in David Copperfield and The Mill on the Floss respectively, seem to be working out the problem of How did I come to be the person I am? by answering imaginatively the question What was my childhood like? With Carroll, however, the questions seem to be about self-effacement and the suppression of the adult: How can I get away from a self-identity that seems ineffectual, irrelevant, bound for extinction, like the Dodgson Dodo in Wonderland or the autobiographical Gnat in Looking-Glass? How would it be possible not to be the person I am? How can I escape my sex? The answer: by sticking imaginatively close to the child Alice. “No novelist,” Harry Levin says of Carroll, “has identified more intimately with the point of view of his heroine.” He moved beyond looking to the child for unworldly perfection, for a symbol of allegorical virtue, and for the analytic key to his own personality. In his Alice texts the child becomes the means to fantasy, to mental traveling, to play and comic liberation from the tyranny of adulthood with its pride, pretentiousness, and incessant moralizing.

Fantasy indicates the secularization of wonder, and Carroll, through the emergent child, is its prophet. Dreams for him sanction fantasy. Creating fantasy is, like dreaming, a way of internalizing miracles; but, of course, it is consciously done and historical. One reason he links dream vision and fantasy to childhood is that empirically, as psychology has since shown, the way people revisit their childhoods and the mental nurseries of their fantasy lives—and the way the child intrudes on the adult with its continuing presence—is often through dreams. Like dream work, fantasies, according to Freud and his followers, grow out of childhood experiences, words, and imaginings. They, too, are animated images of repressed hopes and stifled wishes set free.

Animation, the breath of life, motivates Carroll's comic dream and fantasy world: he animates fantastic images. Nursery rhymes, words, thoughts, poems, animals, chess pieces, and flowers all come alive, take visual shape, move and talk. As everything in a dream is part of the dreamer, so everything in wonderland and through the looking-glass is part of the fantasist's personality. Carroll animates new forms of life on every page. The cinematic movement of dreams in Carroll is the movement of animation. Tenniel's illustrations in the Alice books (Carroll's fussiness about them nearly drove the artist out of his mind) are as important to the text as those in any book I know. Repressed thought turns to visual images, and such images move and live in Carroll's fantasy of childhood. Try to think of Humpty Dumpty without benefit of the Carroll-Tenniel image and you can see the force of Carroll's animation. If you could combine his fantastic literary animation with his photographic interest, you would get “motion pictures”; and he is spiritual father, as sure as any technological innovator, to that revealing progeny of the twentieth century, animated cartoons. In these visions, whose main audience is supposedly children, horrendous falls, accidents, fights, murderous intentions, and carnivorous frenzies seem not only harmless but funny. Animation by definition excludes death, and these visual fantasies—classic examples of comic regression—present a world where infantile wishes predominate and mortality has no sway. It may be that one of greatest sources of pleasure in animation is that it seems to take us back to a time in childhood when we felt ourselves to be the center of life and made no distinction between the self and the other—when everything we knew was alive and personal, and we had no need to care about the alien. The animation of all, which we find in Carroll, the personalizing of objects, may express a craving to be all, to ingest all, and to eliminate boundaries—between people and things, between stories and life, between kinds of animal life, between differentiated physical drives and the different body parts signifying the oral, anal, and genital modes of sexuality, between mother and child.

In Carroll's hands fantasy becomes a comic mode to ponder and enjoy; it can purge contradictions and hard realities from the mind or at least turn them to play and jest. His comic fantasy depicts a world so outlandish that it never could be and therefore provides some relief from social pressures and moral responsibility; but his imagination very often gives us exactly the sort of silliness that goes on all the time in the real world. “We're all mad here,” the Cheshire Cat insists; “Sentence first, verdict after,” proclaims the King of Hearts; “I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” says the White Queen to Alice, and “The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day”: fantastic and funny lines, but also true to life.

The way to grow up and participate in experience in wonderland is to grow little, and the way to go forward in looking-glass land is to go backward—back to origins, early years, first principles, early pleasures, early fears, early desires—in order to see with fresh clarity what, through habit and personal and social repression, you have come to accept as the real and true and to find in a place of make-believe, in a world of fiction, that make-believe—fiction—is reality. The way to freedom and curious wonder is to recognize and comprehend the arbitrary, predetermined, and artificial structures of your life. The way to knowledge of culture and society is to explore your inner fantasy life. The way to honor intelligence is to know and laugh at its limitations. The way to celebrate creation is to play with its silly mysteries. The intention—conscious or not—that comes through in the Alice texts is, in effect, one meaning of humanity's comic capacity and literary capability: I will play with and make ridiculous fear, loneliness, smallness, ignorance, authority, chaos, nihilism, and death; I will transform, for a time, woe to joy.

Carroll offers a metaphorical, metonymical compendium of the obsessions and urgencies of the modern world of collective individualism, and the rhetoric of his fiction, persuading people that they can read and find reverberating significance in the child and her dream-life, makes him a major writer. The child, as psychology would show, just would not stay in a bracketed-off area, remote from serious adult life and history. Like the transmitters of myths, legends, sacred writings, and folklore, Lewis Carroll and such modern writers as Kafka and Beckett give people open-ended metaphors—word images that have the suggestive quality of their own dreams and eschew directly stated meanings. Carroll allows us to read our own stories, desires, fears, and to make fun of them. Through two very short and very funny books, Carroll shows us the frightful self-consciousness of modern times (“Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle!”), the fantastic shapes of the inward journey (objects come alive; physical being becomes unstable; Alice never quite knows just where she is), the quest for innocence and withdrawal from a rude, jostling, intrusive society (“‘No room! No room!’”; “At this the whole pack … came flying down upon her”). He conveys loneliness (“‘Only it is so very lonely here!’ Alice said … and, at the thought of her loneliness, two large tears came rolling down. … ‘Oh, don't go on like that!’ cried the poor Queen … : ‘Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you've come today. Consider what o'clock it is. Consider anything, only don't cry!’”). He shows the frustration of intimacy (“She looked back, once or twice, half hoping that they would call after her: the last time she saw them, they were trying to put the Dormouse in the teapot.”) and conveys the sense of living on the verge of hysteria (“His voice rose to a perfect scream”; “‘I can't stand this any longer!’”). He gets at the feeling of existing in a dream or game whose form is constantly changing. He expresses a typical ambivalence toward authority, a rage for chaos (the witty and entertaining “mad tea-party” in Wonderland and Looking-Glass's wild “coronation” banquet) along with a desire to find and keep order and meaning without losing a sense of humor (the intricate chess-game structure of Looking-Glass). He imagines the relativity of being (sudden size changes in Wonderland), the problems of identity (“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”), and of split, diced personality (e.g., Wonderland's “This curious child was fond of pretending to be two people” and the Carrollian self-portraits in the Gnat, Humpty Dumpty, and the White Knight in Looking-Glass). He renders for us the fictional nature of reality as it is registered in the inevitably distorting mirrors of our perception (“Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!”). He shows us our necessarily equivocal fate as word-centered creatures who experience language both subjectively and objectively. (Alice's comment on the nonsense poem “Jabberwocky,” “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't know exactly what they are!” describes his sense of language perfectly, provided that we stress “exactly” and keep in mind the bizarre, utilitarian richness of those “ideas.”)

Carroll is important as a writer who makes fun of what Jacqueline Rose calls “the whole ethos of language as always reliable or true.” As the child knows and shows, language is anything but a neutral, transparent medium that simply reflects an existing reality. Linguistic power creates a joyous surge of identity and also a knowledge of otherness, as Alice learns in Looking-Glass when she finds herself alienated from the faun once they pass out of the “wood of no names” and back into the realm of human language. Carroll stresses throughout both the delight and the farce of misunderstanding that are inherent in words and dialogue. The texts render what children feel about language as they struggle to master it: that it is slippery, confusing, hard, rule-ridden, and frustrating, but also creative, pleasurable, and full of play. Language proves our social being and determines our fate, but, as a child learns, it is also the means for defining and expressing our desires, our individuality, our confusions, our subjective freedom, and our bonds. We live by linguistic fictions. In Carroll, many of the characters act out verbal structures, for instance, Humpty Dumpty, the Tweedles, and even Alice, whose movements in Looking-Glass exactly conform to the predictive words of the Red Queen at the beginning.

Carroll helped to lead in making language a great subject for thought and comedy and literature, but for him it is nothing to be idealized. It can never be a precise communication system because it is inseparable from its users. From the first in Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll tells us that Alice moves in a dream world composed of words that exist independently of personal will. When the White King exclaims of his pencil, “It writes all manner of things that I don't intend,” he is talking about the unmanageable nature of language, and he previews its role in the book, and in twentieth-century intellectual history. And when “Jabberwocky” appears to Alice, we know that we are in a fictional world of sense, absurdity, and wordplay all at once, like a child trying to fathom language.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

The verse foreshadows the whole book. The extreme tensions in the poem—between the unconventional use of language (invented vocabulary) and the conventional (normal syntax, grammar, rhythm, and rhyme), between referential significance and self-contained nonsense—define and energize Carroll. “Jabberwocky” puts the focus on the very fact of language itself, whose very existence—as children see and feel—is just as marvelous, just as fantastic, as any of the meanings it conveys.

Even as the figure of the child in the last two centuries has called forth interpretation, assertions of authority, and projection, so has Carroll's fiction. Lewis Carroll's work is particularly susceptible to the regressive tendencies of critics and writers who find in it images, words, meanings, and emotions that liberate, clarify, articulate, and give play to their own ideas, longings, and obsessions. Alice defines her readers as their dreams and childhoods do.

Read what has been written about Carroll and you find a wonderland of interpretation. It has been argued, for example, that Queen Victoria wrote the Alice books, that Alice is a phallus, that she is an imperialist, that she is an existential heroine, a killjoy, a sex-tease, or a symbol for what every human being should try to be like in the face of an outrageous universe; it has been claimed that her pool of tears represents the amniotic fluid, that the Caucus race parodies Darwin, that it sports with Victorian theories about the Caucasian race, that the Alice books may contain a secret history of the Oxford movement, that they allegorize Jewish history, that the “Pig and Pepper” chapter is a description of toilet training, that the White Queen stands for John Henry Newman and the Tweedles for Bishop Berkeley; that these tales are dangerous for children, that they are literally nonsense and do not refer to the real world; that Carroll was a latent homosexual, an atheist, a schizophrenic, a pedophile, a faithful Christian, a fine man. Some of this criticism is brilliant, some is lunatic, some is both by turns, some is hilarious, much of it is fascinating and insightful, nearly all of it is entertaining, and most of it is offered with the dogmatic surety of Humpty Dumpty, who says, “I can explain all the poems that ever were invented—and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.” My purpose here is not to patronize other commentators but to show that something in the nature of the writing itself—some vacuum of indeterminacy—sucks in a wide variety of reaction and engagement. Children are subject to authority, but Carroll puts authority in doubt and questions it. The Alice fiction deals with the crisis of authority in modern life, and readers are drawn to solve it. People project their wishes and beliefs and concerns onto these fictions as they lay them upon children. Like the parables of the Bible, like dreams, like depicted fantasies, Carroll stimulates a hermeneutics of subjective ingenuity and a multiplicity of views. These malleable texts resist closure of meaning; they remain open-ended and dialogical.

Of course, I am giving my own interpretation of Carroll, and obviously it stresses his use of a problematic dream-child in an antiauthoritarian, carnivalesque literary comedy and centers on the way that child opens up the play of language, the unconscious mind, and floating, contradictory desires. The world he creates is both referential and nonreferential, both like the world we live in and a different, fantasy world of nonsense. When the Mock Turtle tells Alice that in school he learned “Reeling and Writhing” and the different branches of arithmetic, “Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision,” the text offers both an example of nonsensical, creative wordplay that breaks free of “reality” and a satire on what real children actually do learn in real schools. Through the child, Carroll gets across his sense of a fantastic, alternative world of being, a sense of rebellious knowledge of actuality, a sense of humor (i.e., putting life in a play-frame), and a sense of the importance and imprecision of language. The comic fantasy of chapters like “The Mock Turtle's Story,” “A Mad Tea-Party,” and “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” have the improvisation, the inventive drive, the Dionysian upswing of the best twentieth-century comic ensembles, such as the Marx Brothers and Monty Python's Flying Circus. This whirling dialogue of whimsy, wisecracks, puns, nonsense talk, and verse moves to overthrow the drabness of routine and predictability.

In “The Emperor's New Clothes,” a child exposes the ruler's nakedness by cutting through lies and illusions to give people the perspective they need for seeing their own gullibility and the ruses of power. That's how Carroll works. He makes the child his protagonist, her dreams his narrative; and he pretends that children are his only audience so that he can rid himself and others of inhibitions and repressions. Through the child, he strips away both personal and social conventions and prejudices (e.g., you must not think or talk disrespectfully of parents, royalty, or “sacred” things; life should make sense; we all speak the same language; personalities are coherent; poetry is elevated; a well-brought-up little girl does not harbor murderous thoughts; the world of childhood is simple); he holds them up to ridicule and sets loose possibilities for imagining the unthinkable (e.g., original words and fantastic physical beings, the pleasure of the obliteration of others, the animation of the inanimate, the stupidity of mothers and fathers; the joys of madness). In the reversed looking-glass of his art, Carroll uses Alice to show up the silly childishness—in its pejorative sense—and the arbitrary limits of the so-called adult world. He proves in the Alice books that even in the most outwardly conventional and time-serving of adults there may be a wild and brave child struggling to get out and mock the withering realities that govern life. Such is the hope of this comedy of regression.

Carroll's way is to begin and frame his text with mawkish, sentimental descriptions of childhood. It is as if, in his introductory poems and in the opening monologue of Looking-Glass featuring the girl-child, he is trying to represent the most morally unobjectionable being that he and his fellow Victorians could conceive of in order to smother his psychic censor in a well of treacle. Watch a child alone at play with its toys and dolls and after a while you may begin to hear and see these figures taking on roles that dramatize aspects of the child's life. Different tones and voices arise, words come out that reveal thoughts and visions neither you nor the child knew it possessed. Carroll's fiction is like that. In Looking-Glass, after Alice babbles, “I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields that it kisses them so … and … says ‘go to sleep, darlings’” and Dr. Dodgson appears to lull himself to sleep, Mr. Carroll suddenly bursts through the looking-glass and through the double wall of superego and sentimentality: he quotes Alice saying, “Nurse! Do let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyaena, and you're a bone!” That explodes the pious little-girl image and releases manic, unpredictable energy into the text and a typically resonant complexity into the character of Alice.

To show how significant the approach and the sudden move in portraying Alice here are and what is at stake with respect to both the fuller rendering of children's psychology in fiction and the relationship of Carroll and his heroine, I quote a passage from What Maisie Knew. Henry James is imagining his girl-child—about the same age as Alice—alone, confused in her feelings, and at odds with an awful adult world of arbitrary power and mysterious sexuality, and he begins to relate the subject of the child to fictional projections and transference: “The stiff dolls on the dusky shelves began to move their arms and legs; old forms and phases began to have a sense that frightened her. She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment.” The developing child in the history of the novel means an inner life and psychological conflict—the psychodrama of alienation, conscious and unconscious repressions, contradictory motives, and imaginative identifications. Edmund Wilson says that “the creatures that [Alice] meets the whole dream, are Alice's personality and her waking life,” but, of course, they are Carroll's personality and life too.

Not surprisingly, the character and function of Alice have become bones of critical contention. I have put her by and large in a favorable light, but some in the late twentieth century, focusing on problems of race, class, and gender, judge her more negatively. She has been seen as a quintessential figure of Victorian ethnocentrism for her continual attempts to bring her own standards, customs, mores, and manners to bear on the beings and circumstances she meets in her wonderlands. Carroll does sometimes betray his own upper-class biases, and he does render Alice's privileged-class assurance, especially in her occasional bouts of snobbery and patronization in the early chapters of Wonderland. She can also be seen as an example of essentialist gender stereotyping that makes the Victorian girl into a litany of virtues (and Alice surely displays most of humanity's good qualities). Such views have merit and interest, but they miss the dream psychology and the plurality of being Carroll imagines for her and also, I think, the main historical point: this writer moved one of history's most notoriously marginalized groups of beings, children, to the center of existence.

He could identify with the otherness of childhood, and its diversity; and in narrating the progress of Alice on her journeys he could reveal, as Freud would do in his famous essay “A Child is Being Beaten,” one of the momentous secrets of childhood—and life: the imaginative processes of transposed and projected violence. Of course, Carroll is, among other things, a colonialist of childhood. He imposes upon a child and children his own dream of childhood, his sense and definition of a child. But this dream is fluid, and he is also a liberator of childhood. The Alice tales end with the question of whose dream this is, and here Carroll touches upon the imperialism of desire. The question suggests a sense of fiction's mediation between author, audience, and cultural context, and, fittingly in a book about a child, it opens up the subject of custody.

Henry James, writing in the preface to his prophetic novel What Maisie Knew about a child-custody battle, captures the feeling and the general conception that Carroll has for Alice and the child's role: “… the case being with Maisie to the end that she treats her friends to the rich little spectacle of objects embalmed in her wonder. She wonders, in other words, to the end.” James goes on to discuss his own faith in the imaginary girl:

Truly, I reflect, if the theme had had no other beauty it would still have had this rare and distinguished one of its so expressing the variety of the child's values. She is not only the extraordinary “ironic centre” I have already noted; she has the wonderful importance of shedding a light far beyond any reach of her comprehension. … I lose myself, truly, in appreciation of my theme on noting what she does by her “freshness” for appearances in themselves vulgar and empty enough. They become, as she deals with them, the stuff of … art; she has simply to wonder, as I say, about them, and they begin to have meanings, aspects, solidities, connexions—connexions with the “universal!”—that they could scarce have hoped for.

No words better indicate the far-ranging significance that Lewis Carroll's Alice and the emergence of wonder and respect for the child that she represents have had for modern fiction, history, and culture.

Selected Bibliography

Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood. Trans. Robert Baldrick. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.

Coveney, Peter. The Image of Childhood. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Penguin, 1967. Originally published as Poor Monkey. London, 1957.

Gray, Donald J., ed. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland. 2d ed. New York and London: Norton, 1992.

Darton, Harvey. Children's Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life. 3d ed. Revised by Brian Alderson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Gardner, Martin, ed. The Annotated Alice. New York: Random House, 1990.

Hudson, Derek. Lewis Carroll: An Illustrated Biography. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1977.

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