The extraordinarily large body of critical response to Lewis Carroll’sAlice’s adventures in WonderlandandThrough the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found Thereis wide-ranging in both critical methodology and focus. This says, because “Carroll’s fairy tales realize forms both literary and scientific types of philosophers, logicians, mathematicians, physicists, politicians, as well as literary critics ... all interpretation in the Alices” (86).* One potentially approach that has generally been overlooked relates tradition of earlier children’s literature in and formal features of the Alice books.¹ The only major exception to date is the critical attention paid to Carroll’s consistent fascination with...

Any reader familiar with the three contemporary scholarly editions of that Carroll frequently drew on prior children’s literature or works about children in elaborating his fantasics. Martin Gardner has, following James Joyce’s directive about reading, “wiped his glosses on what [he knows]” inThe Annotated AliceandThe More Annotated Alice;Donald Gray has recently published the second edition of his Norton Critical Edition of the Alice books(1992); and Roger Green has especially concentrated consolidating Carroll’s sources and analogues from children’s in his Oxford World’s Classics edition. Any modest here takes its lead from Green’s work, and sometimes consists of...

The state of literature produced for children from the last decades of the eighteenth century through the turn of the century and on into the 1860s may be accurately characterized as a battle between several major kinds of literature: religious, rational/moral, and informational on one side and imaginative on the other. Although there were frequent antagonisms between the religious and rational/moral writers, the renewed religious didacticism-both Church of England and Evangelical (see, for instance, the work of Sarah Trimmer and Hannah Moore respectively) — shared a belief in the aesthetic of utility with both moral and informational didacticism, although these latter...

When Lewis Carroll dropped Alice down the rabbit-hole, he sent her into a Wonderland shaped primarily through his use of the topos of the world upside down and its special antipodean geographical figuration, the principal example of radical inversion of perspective in Western literature. This ancient convention, altered but still in use in the middle of the nineteenth century (see, for example, George MacDonald’sThe Princess and Curdle), helped Carroll to work out the structural “logic” of his satiric fantasy by providing him with the means to compare and contrast (that is, a basis for a critique of reality), along...

The tradition of the looking-glass book plays an important structural and thematic role in Lewis Carroll’sThrough the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.¹Yet, while a survey of the critical responses to this fantasy reveals that Alice’s passage through the physical looking-glass and its attendant reversals have received a great deal of critical attention, her simultaneous passage through the tradition of the looking-glass book has been virtually ignored. This chapter locates the tradition, particularly as it developed in the looking-glass book for children and in Carroll’s fantasy, and demonstrates how the fantasy functions to introduce children’s literature as a...

The last of the three major distorting elements (joining the world upside down and the looking-glass) that contribute to Carroll’s fantasy is dream, specifically as developed in the form of the dream vision. To a twentieth-century reader, dream is the most obvious of the elements at work, but it was rarely used in children’s literature prior to the Alice books. In the preface toSylvie and Bruno(1889), Carroll emphasizes this fact while noting that the “pattern” he developed inAlice in Wonderlandsome twenty-four years earlier had appeared in “something like a dozen story-books” in the intervening years (241)....