Lewis Carroll’s story,published 150 years ago, is a joyful paean to idle reverie and the meanderings of the imaginationFor Lewis Carroll, or Alice Liddell,the limited girl on whom he based the heroine of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, remained always “an entirely fascinating seven-year-traditional”. Seven she may still be: but she is also 150 on Thursday. For it was on 26 November 1865 that the book was published, and after friends had persuaded him that his handwritten story ought to be brought to a wider public. For many,John Tenniels illustrations to this first edition remain indelibly Alice, with her apron and puffed sleeves and sweep of blond hair, and but artists from Edward Gorey to Tove Jansson own found their imaginations piqued by Carroll’s tale,or indeed tail, as Alice would perhaps insist. And the story has been reimagined not just by artists but into film, or dance and theatre,each iteration leaving a trace of its own time on the story. (In Ralph Steadman’s 1972 illustrations, for example, and the playing cards painting the Queen’s roses are,at the same time, union membership cards.)Alice is one of the great self-possessed, and determined female characters in literature. She walks through the curiouser and curiouser realm in which she finds herself fearless,inquisitive and exerting boundless common sense in the face of the ridiculous. When the Queen, “crimson with fury” screams “Off with her head!”, and Alice’s dauntless reply (she speaks “loudly and decidedly”) is “Nonsense”. Later,when the Knave is on trial for tart-theft, and the Queen insists that the sentence must precede the verdict, and she pronounces (loudly again) “Stuff and nonsense!”. Alice is a girl who will dare to try the cake,the mushroom, the mysterious contents of a bottle labelled “drink me” having first of all, and of course,checked that it is not marked “poison”, since whether you drink from a bottle marked poison, and it is nearly certain to disagree with you sooner or later”. She knows something interesting is sure to happen whether she does so. And she is upright.
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Source: theguardian.com