From the Library of Dr. Oliver Sacks: Book Review #2: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

NOTE: Today’s book review was inspired by another book entitled Letters. That book was a memoir of scientist and storyteller Dr. Oliver Sacks, told through a lifetime of his personal correspondence with friends, family, patients and many other interesting people. Over the course of his letter writing, Dr. Sacks often made reference to the written works of others. Today’s book(s) is one such work that he referenced.  

The Context in Which Dr. Sacks Made Reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.

Before studying to become a doctor, Oliver Sacks decided to see a bit of the world. Thus, as a young man in his mid-twenties, Oliver left his homeland of England and set out for North America. He began his journey in the Rocky Mountains of Canada. As we saw in the book review for Lost Horizon by James Hilton, young Mr. Sacks was dazzled by the beauty of Lake Louise, comparing it to Shangri-La, in a letter that he wrote to his parents, Elise and Samuel Sacks back in England. In that very same letter (on Page 11 of the book Letters) he wrote the following:

I went to the Columbia icefields, one of the few icefields accessible without being an accomplished climber. This was the real thing, gunmetal grey and limitless in size, not like the fairy grotto stuff of the Swiss glaciers. We rolled up three miles of it in snowmobiles and were told that we now had 1100 feet of ice beneath us. I saw a pothole into which a stream was pouring, and this was 800 feet deep. You saw the deepening blueness passing to black. You heard the rush but never the impact of water. My first thought, foolishly, was of the marmalade pot lined tunnel through which Alice fell. 

In a footnote at the bottom of the page, editor Kate Edgar noted, “One of OS’s touchstones was Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. 

A Brief Summary of the plot of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was first published in 1865. Its popularity with children and adults alike has been so tremendous that it has been in a continuous cycle of reprinting ever since. 160 years later, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass remain as one of literature’s most recognizable and iconic titles. The book is so famous that even if you have never actually read it yourself, you are probably reasonably familiar with the broad strokes of the story. In the original story, a young girl named Alice falls asleep under a tree on a summer’s day. She awakes with a start as a white rabbit rushes by. He is holding a pocketwatch and muttering about being dreadfully late for something. Curious, Alice follows the rabbit, quite literally, down the rabbit hole. She falls and falls, eventually landing in a hallway lined with doors. So begins a series of adventures and encounters that change Alice’s perception of her world and how it functions. In rapid succession, she grows and shrinks, she meets a series of animals that can all speak English, she attends the strangest tea party of her life, she talks to a caterpillar that is smoking from a hookah, she meets a Duchess who has a pig for a baby and a servant who abuses her, she encounters the grinning cheshire cat and, of course, attends the Queen of Hearts’ croquet match, barely escaping with her head still on her shoulders after some tarts are declared missing. Not long after that, Alice wakes up to discover that the entire plot of the book may have, in fact, been nothing more than a dream.

My take on the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass (for what that is worth)

It is very difficult to be original. But Lewis Carroll managed to pull it off back in 1865 with his children’s tale. The reason I can say this is that back in the 1800s, the idea of producing something entertaining for children was unheard of. Up until Carroll came along, the stories, poems and songs that children in England were exposed to were known as didactic in nature. That means that the stories and nursery rhymes focused on morals and/or on instructions or on intellectual development. To simply amuse children was something that just wasn’t done. So what was it that gave Lewis Carroll the notion to follow the path that he did? Well, it had something to do with love.

One of the most important things to know about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is that the character of Alice was a real person but that the author, Lewis Carroll was not. Lewis Carroll was the pen name of a mathematics lecturer/university don at Oxford/ordained deacon in the Church of England named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Young Dodgson grew up in a large family of ten (!). His father was a mathematician who enjoyed wordplay and tomfoolery, laying the groundwork for Charles to view life through the same lens. Dodgson remained a lifelong bachelor and has never been romantically linked to any woman throughout the course of his life. However, he was known for maintaining a series of personal diaries. In these diaries, Dodgson spoke of being the happiest when in the presence of small children. Not surprisingly, he often found himself befriending colleagues and neighbours who had young families of their own. This is how Charles Dodgson first met young Alice Liddell. 

One of Dodgson’s hobbies was photography. In 1865, having access to a camera was a real novelty. Dodgson’s camera helped him gain invitations in the homes of many local families where he would photograph the family members. In time, Dodgson developed quite a reputation for photographing children. This was how Charles Dodgson met the Liddell family. Henry Liddell was Dean of Christ Church in Oxford. He had four children, one son and three daughters (one of which was Alice). Charles Dodgson was invited to photograph the Liddell family. He not only took their pictures but they all hit it off so famously that, from that point onward, Dodgson was invited to social events at their home on a regular basis. In no time, he became a trusted adult figure in the lives of the Liddell children.

The story goes that one sunny summer’s afternoon, Henry Liddell invited Charles Dodgson to accompany him and his children in a rowboat they owned. As the group rowed lazily along a winding river, the children beseeched Dodgson to tell them a story. The story that Dodgson told from his head was what would, in a year or two, become Alice’s Adventures Underground.  That afternoon, the children were delighted with the fantastical nature of Dodgson’s storytelling. As mentioned earlier, children’s stories in those days were always serious and weighty. The children were delighted to be so amused. When they returned to shore, Alice begged Dodgson to write his story down so that she could have her own copy. Dodgson did and presented it to young Alice as a Christmas gift two years later. In that original manuscript, Dodgson included his own illustrations. The gift was so well received that Dodgson was encouraged to seek a publisher who could help turn this story into a proper book for children. Dodgson did so. The text of the story was accepted as it was, the title tweaked to the more familiar Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland but the publisher suggested that Dodgson find a proper artist to create the illustrations. Thus, Dodgson turned to a man named John Tenniel. The final consideration Dodgson gave to his story before allowing it to be published was regarding the publicity it could potentially garner. Dodgson was a reserved man by nature. He worked in formal institutions such as Oxford University and in churches. He was uncertain how his “nonsensical” story would be received by his employers. So just to be safe, he decided to publish under the name Lewis Carroll. *(Dodgson’s initials began as C.L. (Charles Lutwidge) so he merely swapped the order around and used L.C. as initials for the man who became one of the world’s most famous children’s writers of all time, Lewis Carroll).

It is all fine and good for the tale to end here. Dodgson created a story that was amusing and well received by a child he was fond of. He became famous because of it. Ta da! End of story. But that is not the end of the story at all. Charles Dodgson managed to do something quite original but also something quite subversive with this story. It is this subversive element that has so inspired scores of people ever since such as writers James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, along with more modern acts such as The Beatles (who claim Alice was their inspiration for the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”) and even a young man exploring icefields like Oliver Sacks. 

Like many writers, Charles Dodgson based the story elements of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on real people and real places and real events going on at the time. The Liddell family all played characters, with Alice Liddell being “Alice”, of course and with Dodgson being the Dodo bird *(He also wrote himself into the sequel as the White Knight to Alice’s Queen). Wonderland was inspired by the real city of Oxford and so on. But what Dodgson really did with this story was use this children’s tale (and the nonsensical nature of how the story is told) to speak the truth to the powers that be in 1865. What Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland really is, is a scathing critique of the education system of England at the time, as well as the social structure of English society. A few simple examples of this can be found in how Alice’s dream world turns the normal rules of society on its ear and how ill-prepared Alice is to deal with these changes. All throughout her journey, Alice struggles to remember compositions she had been forced to memorize in school, she can’t recall her multiplication facts and so on. Dodgson, as a don and lecturer at Oxford, was perfectly positioned to see how restrictive a learning environment it all really was and how little value there was in simply drilling and memorizing facts. As much as Alice was on a journey from one absurd scenario to another, the journey she was ultimately on was one of learning to think for herself. The further into the dream she goes, the more she understands what is happening because she begins to actually make inferences and reach conclusions that are correct. For example, the Queen of Hearts can rant and rave about chopping off her head all she wants but, in the end, she and her guards are only playing cards so Alice is actually in no danger at all. It wasn’t her education that allowed Alice to survive, it was her ability to problem solve and intellectually sort things out. 

Secondly, Dodgson lived in a very hierarchical society in 1865. At that time people were not encouraged to believe that they could grow up to become whatever they wanted. Instead, most knew that their families had a station in life that would, in all likelihood, be their station in life as they grew into adulthood, too. Many members of the ruling class held their positions, not by merit but by birthright. Thus those sitting in the seat of power in England weren’t always deserving of the respect their titles commanded. We see Dodgson lampooning English society through his portrayal of characters such as The Duchess and the King and Queen of Hearts. None of those characters receive any sympathy from Dodgson. In fact, they are all ridiculous and worthy of ridicule. At one point he ties both targets together (the school system and the structure of society) by having the Duchess go on and on about the moral of this and the moral of that as she flees the Queen’s wrath. To Dodgson, moralizing equals didacticism equals yesterday’s news. 

If any more proof be needed to declare Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland  as a great work of social satire, it can be found in the hiring of John Tenniel as illustrator. John Tenniel was a respected and accomplished illustrator long before Charles Dodgson ever showed up with his story in hand. Tenniel rose to become the chief illustrator for a satirical magazine called Punch. Not unlike how Dodgson used Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to criticize the English education system and the structure of society, Punch Magazine routinely came out with parodies of the rich, famous and powerful in English society, too. By lampooning those in positions of power and influence, Punch Magazine gave voice to the voiceless and those in opposition. By agreeing to illustrate Alice for Dodgson, Tenniel recognized the Punch-like hidden critiques contained within this children’s story. 

While it is evident that Dodgson was creating more than just a story for the amusement of children, of greatest importance to him was how it helped him remain connected with Alice Liddell in real life. When one speaks of a grown man loving a child, it conjures up negative images of inappropriateness. However, there was never any evidence that Dodgson’s feelings for the real Alice were ever anything more than fondness that he kept securely locked within his own heart. In quotes attributed to the adult Alice Liddell, she recalls her association with Charles Dodgson with great delight. To fully understand the nature of their connection, one must talk briefly about the sequel to Alice called Through the Looking Glass. In this book, Dodgson draws upon his mathematician side to create a bizarre, dreamlike world that functions through the playing of chess. In this story, he created a character called the White Knight for himself. It is the White Knight’s character who accompanies Alice to the threshold of where she becomes Queen. As the White Knight reaches the end of his stage of the journey, he asks if he could sing Alice a song that, according to him, always makes people cry. He sings a song about an old man and about loneliness. Alice doesn’t cry but she does thank him for the gesture. There are many in the world of academia who believe that the whole reason that Dodgson wrote a sequel in the first place was to give his Alice one final gift from him before she entered adulthood and left him to go out into the world and on with her life. Those same academics point to the White Knight’s song as his public farewell and his acknowledgement of how much he was going to miss her. That the White Knight’s song makes people cry has turned out to be true but not because it was a sad song for Alice to hear but because it was a sad song for Dodgson to sing. In the story, the White Knight walks Alice to the edge of a river, across from which she will become a Queen. In reality, Dodgson was walking a now teenaged Alice Liddell to the end of her childhood. But, as the old saying goes, when you truly love someone, set them free. So the White Knight sings his song, says his goodbyes and mounts his trusty steed, leaving Alice to continue the next phase of the journey on her own. On paper in a story, as in real life, too.

That Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland became a “touchstone” in Oliver Sacks’ life is something that I can state with confidence having read his entire book called Letters. In that book, Sacks speaks on many occasions, to many different correspondence, of how dissatisfied he was with his own educational experience in England. He felt it as too limited and uninspiring. He also speaks often of how he feels scientific progress is too stilted and static because of limitations scientists place on themselves through their unwillingness to think “beyond the box”, as it were. Many of Dr. Oliver Sack’s greatest achievements came because he dared to work with patients whose brains worked differently. Sometimes the greatest acts of compassion come from the willingness to see beyond what society deems to be acceptable and normal and into those worlds where being different can sometimes being fantastical. *(Please take a moment and meet one such patient of Dr. Sacks…a young man named Stephen Wiltshire). Being curiouser and curiouser about life can yield wondrous discoveries and heal many a wounded heart. Therefore, it is no wonder that in the beauty and majesty of the Columbia icefields, young Oliver Sacks would harken back to an image from a book that finally allowed him to feel seen. We all need signposts along life’s highway to guide us and show us the way. Sometimes, courage, resourcefulness and resolve help make that journey purposeful and memorable, especially when life’s highway veers down a rabbit hole.

The link to the official website for author Lewis Carroll aka Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) can be found here.

The link to the official website for Dr. Oliver Sacks can be found here.

The link to the main Letters page (where all book reviews in this series are) can be found here.

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