![]() (Lorina, Edith, and Alice also reappear in the Dormouse's tale as the three sisters who live in a treacle-well.) The long-winded Mouse may represent Mary Prickett, the Liddells' governess.Īs for who inspired the Mad Hatter, there's some dispute. They are Carroll's friend Robinson Duckworth, and Alice's sisters Lorina (Lory) and Edith (Eaglet). The choice of bird is a reference to his stutter he would sometimes pronounce his own last name as “Dodo-Dodgson.” The Dodo's companions the Duck, the Lory, and the Eaglet also represent passengers on the boat trip where Carroll first told the story of Alice's adventures. That's because the Dodo was Lewis Carroll himself. The girls would also have recognized the Dodo, whom Alice encounters shortly after falling down the rabbit-hole, after she becomes tiny and is caught up in a flood of her own tears. (Photos: Public domain/WikiCommons Public domain/WikiCommons) He wasn't happy with it, and pasted a photograph of Alice over the sketch his original drawing was not discovered until the 1970s. Neither Carroll's nor Tenniel's drawings were based on the real Alice Liddell-Tenniel, in fact, said that his were based on nobody in particular, since he never worked from a model-but Carroll did attempt a portrait of the real Alice on the very last page of the manuscript. Instead, it was decorated with Carroll's sketches of a darker-haired Alice. ![]() The MS, though, didn't have Tenniel's iconic illustrations. Wonderland's words went through some changes on the way to publication (for instance, Carroll added the Mad Hatter's tea party and the “caucus-race,” where Alice and several animals run in dizzying circles), but for the most part the story was preserved. In many ways, Alice's Adventures Under Ground was a very different book from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland-but not because of its text. But Vega says it wasn't in popular use, and we can probably credit Carroll for the way that “wonderland” has become a universal term for a place full of marvels. Though Carroll coined many words we still use today-chortle, snark, galumph-“wonderland” wasn't one of his it first appeared 75 years earlier, in Peter Pindar's A Complimentary Epistle to James Bruce, Esq.: the Abyssinian Traveler. The title page of Lewis Carroll's manuscript for Alice's Adventures Under Ground. (Photo: Public domain/British Library)įor publication, Carroll came up with a few different titles, such as Alice's Golden Hour, Alice's Hour in Elfland, and Alice Among the Goblins, before settling on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. As Martin Gardner writes in The Annotated Alice, “it is hard to believe that Carroll had all this in mind.” The moon's cycle would be consistent even underground where the position of the sun is meaningless, Taylor argued, and the difference between the lunar and calendar months is two days. Taylor, in his book The White Knight, suggests that the Mad Hatter's watch only tells the day of the month (and is “two days wrong”) because Wonderland is close to the center of the planet, where it makes more sense to run on lunar time than solar. Charles Kingsley's novel The Water-Babies, for instance, has its protagonist enter fairyland by falling into a river.) It's easy to forget that the adventure was meant to take place inside the earth, since Wonderland is full of trees and animals, but Carroll always described it as an underground adventure. (Getting children into fantasy worlds through geological formations was not an uncommon approach in Victorian-era fairy tales, according Carolyn Vega, assistant curator of literary manuscripts at the Morgan Library, which just closed an exhibition about Alice. Carroll was particularly fond of Alice-he had a lot of little girl friends, a fact that many later readers have found unsettling-and he named the heroine of the story after her.ĭodgson called his original manuscript Alice's Adventures Under Ground, since it starts with the heroine falling down a rabbit hole. ![]() Carroll and one of his friends were bringing the Liddells to the town of Godstow for a picnic, and while he rowed he told them a story. On a July day in 1862, Alice Liddell, ten years old, and her sisters Lorina and Edith were rowing with their grown-up friend Charles Dodgson, a mathematician who had recently started publishing his writing under the pen name Lewis Carroll.
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