The Age of Alice: Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Nonsense in Victorian Literature

This is not actually a thesis. It's an exhibition catalog but I'm putting it in this section anyhow since it's style is similar. It's divided into sections with an exhibition checklist and images included.

The main points include:

Preface: Talks about the exhibition.

Alice and the Question of Victorian Childhood: What it meant to be a child transformed considerably during the reign of Queen Victoria. Alice appears to be from a middle class to upper middle class family. She had memorized things from her schooling but, in Wonderland, such things don't work.

She goes to a day school with lessons in French and music, another indication she is from a fairly well-to-do family.

In 1933 something called the Factory Act was passed. All children under 9 were banned from working in textile mills which lets you know just how bad the situation was for them. Working in textile mills was very dangerous work. Youth from 9 to 13 could work as long as 48 hours per week.

The Mines and Colleries Act of 1842 prohibited children under ten and all females from working in the underground mines.

Issac Watts(1674 to 1748) wrote a lot of what would now be considered nonsense about young people and what they were supposed to do. He considered young children to be 'inherently sinful' and full of 'sloth and disobedience.' Carroll makes fun of this and basically says it's all right for children to have fun and fantasy.

Then it talks about some photos Carroll took of Alice Liddell. In one she's dressed up very fancily; in another she's a beggar maid in worn-out clothes and her hand held out asking for money. (One point of controversy about that photo is that one shoulder is totally bare and her left nipple is visible.)

The Age of Alice: Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Nonsense in Victorian England: The Victoria era saw an upsurge of stories about fairy tales, fantasy and nonsense. (Keep in mind that the usual thing were stories that were heavily moralistic in nature. The focus of children's books gradually changed from the moralistic to the types of books that showed kids having fun. In addition, some of the works of fantasy written during that time were actually aimed at adults.)

Worldbackwards: Lewis Carroll, Nonsense and the Russian Avant-Garde: The first Russian translation of Alice in Wonderland appeared in 1879.

The Invisible Teacher: His books showed the importance of dialogue in a story. He also uses asides from time to time. Both of the Alice books present a situation which does not lead along a single line of actions to the end; rather, she meets very strange characters and, in Alice in Wonderland, is not working towards a specific goal. (In Through the Looking Glass she was working towards the goal of reaching the other side of the chessboard and becoming a Queen.)

Much of what Alice sees is the unknown yet she faces that with curiosity and politeness most of the time. The situations she encounters could have been written as scary and threatening but they geneally end up 'curious and comic.'

Main Index

Main Alice in Wonderland index page