COPYRIGHT © 2015 DAVID DAY All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law. Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited Library and Archives of Canada Cataloguing in Publication is available upon request ISBN: 978-0- 385-68226-8 ISBN: 978-0-38568227-5 (epub) Editor: Tim Rostron Editorial Assistants: Loribeth Gregg Kiara Kent Carly McMillan Zoe Maslow Peter Phillips Melanie Tutino Managing Editor: Susan Burns Design: CS Richardson Production Director: Carla Kean Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company www.penguinrandomhouse.ca v3.1 TO RÓISÍN, MY IRISH ROSE, AND TERRY JONES, MENTOR AND FRIEND Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication INTRODUCTION i. What’s in a Name? ii. A Portmanteau Mind iii. Wonder Words and Riddles iv. The Reason Why PART ONE: ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND Prelude Poem: All in the Golden Afternoon Three Fatal Sisters Chapter 1: Down the Rabbit-Hole The White Rabbit Chapter 2: The Pool of Tears Curious and Curiouser Chapter 3: A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale The Dodo and the Dodgson Chapter 4: The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill A Temple to Science Chapter 5: Advice from a Caterpillar De Quincey’s Caterpillar Chapter 6: Pig and Pepper The Kitchen Oracle Chapter 7: A Mad Tea-Party A Socialist Tea Party Chapter 8: The Queen’s Croquet-Ground Games in the Garden Chapter 9: The Mock Turtle’s Story Ruskin and the Gryphon Chapter 10: The Lobster Quadrille Stalking Tennyson Chapter 11: Who Stole the Tarts? Trial of the Heart Chapter 12: Alice’s Evidence A House of Cards PART TWO: AFTER WONDERLAND i. Sentence First—Verdict Afterwards! ii. From Alice to Malice iii. Through the Looking-Glass and Beyond iv. Last Years Bibliography Acknowledgements Image Credits About the Author “… who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable ƈharm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection,—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?…” Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, 1889. Tom Gate, the main entrance to Christ Church, Oxford: The college was Dodgson’s home for most of his life. Introduction I. WHAT’S IN A NAME? “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas only I don’t know what they are!” Alice might very well have been describing any reader’s first encounter with her adventures. Something peculiar and quite magical is happening in the word spell that is Wonderland. No one had written anything quite like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland before, and—save for its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass— no one has written anything like it since. It is a child’s adventure set in a fantastic imaginary world that is explored by a brave little girl armed only with her own common sense and an all-consuming curiosity. It is a book that can and should be read for pleasure by the young, but looking at the author’s unique use of language, it is remarkable that children can comprehend it at all. And yet somehow they do, and we do. Furthermore, it evokes in all its readers a tantalizing sense that there is something else to be revealed just under the surface of this compelling tale. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a British mathematician, logician, clergyman and photographer. A resident Oxford don for almost half a century, he was famously known as Lewis Carroll, the author of two great children’s classics. Alice’s adventures have become part of popular culture worldwide, and have been translated into virtually every language. If these adventures were just flights of fancy, or simply “nonsense” as Dodgson/Carroll liked to call them, why, you might ask, are they so often quoted by physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, political scientists, historians, psychiatrists, logicians, poets, filmmakers, novelists and computer geeks? Wonderland has an undeniably strange atmosphere, in part because it is largely inhabited by literary tropes—that is, imaginary beings with no existence except as figures of speech or as characters from children’s