As a child, Disney’s movie version of this book scared me. It was baffling and nightmarish in its randomness. Some modern movie makers have made the most of this by creating dark fantasy versions of the book as movies. These video representations completely miss the lightness and humor of the book entirely.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was written in 1865 by Lewis Carrol, who was a professor at Oxford. His interest in puzzles and word plays is very evident in the written versions of the books and is very difficult to translate well in a play or movie. The books are a series of jokes based on double meanings, literal interpretations of idioms, logical fallacies, and childish play. An example of this is when all the characters are wet, instead of drying off with a towel, one of the characters stands up and gives a “dry” lecture. We are supposed to laugh at this silliness. Children who are properly prepared ahead of time to look for these jokes do laugh at them.
The story of Alice starts with her lying down in a garden with her sister. We are given many clues that she is falling asleep. She doesn’t realize this but dreams that she sees a white rabbit with a pocket watch that she follows down a hole. She then enters a world where she continually changes size, talks with many odd characters, enters a royal garden with a deck of cards, and is woken up by her sister in the end. The adventures are loosely tied together by her following the white rabbit to the Queen of Heart’s garden. Each interaction highlights different wordplay, idioms, and bits of logical fallacies. The book is best read like an Easter egg hunt in which you consciously search out the layers of humor being used rather than just leaving it to hit you intuitively. We don’t encounter humor like this much, and it is easy to just gloss over it as arbitrary randomness.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has a sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. This sequel includes some famous nonsense poems, but nothing that Lewis Carroll writes is completely arbitrary. Again, a reader needs to search for the words plays, literal use of idioms, logical fallacies, and irony. This sequel deals with a world that is full of living chess pieces and is less obviously a dream, perhaps a daydream, but not a sleeping dream like the first book.
In both books, Lewis Carroll has a good grasp of child-like behavior and thoughts set in his Victorian time. The first book is interpreted by Alice’s sister as a sweet dream of childhood, and we are expected to believe her. The overall feel of the book should be of whimsy and not nightmarish at all. Any darkness that we bring into this story is the darkness of our adult sensibilities.
Re-reading the book this time, I picked up more than I did as a child. The mad hatter’s tea party is one of the most memorable scenes in the book, but reading it made it so much better. I had not realized that they had killed time, and so it was always tea time. Since they had no time to wash dishes, they just moved one seat over when they needed a new dish. Perhaps the movies had brought this out, but I never caught it with all the silly nonsense.
I highly recommend this book for children in late elementary school and up. I think it benefits from an adult introduction to the humor and word plays in the book. In fact, I think it is an excellent book for middle school English Language Arts. It is an excellent way to cover semantic fields, idioms, logic, and various forms of poetry. As a homeschool parent, I went through this novel very slowly with my oldest son so we could try to catch all the bits of humor and play with creating our own bits. Then we used the poetry in the book to transition into a poetry unit. We had a lot of fun and laughed a great deal.
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