It is very hard, almost impossible, to say anything fresh or new about *Alice in Wonderland*. I like it. I read it when I was a kid and I thought it was enjoyable nonsense. I read it as an adult and I think it is enjoyable nonsense.
It really is a remarkable book, nothing else is like it. It is the result, I suppose, of Dodgeson’s unique love for logic problems, mathematics, nonsense poems and little girls.
My only intelligent contribution is to say there are multiple Alices. There’s the feisty Alice of the book who boots Bill the lizard up the chimney and who shouts ‘Nonsense!’ at the Queen. There’s Carroll’s idealised Alice in the poetry:
Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.
And there is the real Alice Liddell who spent the rest of her life being pointed out as Wonderland’s Alice, who married a boring, absolutely typical for his class gentleman, had children, lost two of them in the war, and found herself in her old age without the funds to maintain her house, but who still owned something quite unlike any other woman her age. She sold the original, hand written and hand illustrated version of *Alice in Wonderland* which Carroll had presented to her when she was a child for a huge sum in the 1926.
There’s the Disney Alice, who exists only to sell things.
I have no other comments to make, except that Alice is nearly beheaded under Rule 42. Is this where Douglas Adams got the answer to life, the universe and everything?
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