Saturday 4 July 2015

Alice in Wonderland at 150: innocent fantasy or dark and druggy?

This year marks the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll's children's book. But what has it meant to different generations?

Photo: Royal Mail

11:04AM BST 04 Jul 2015

Walt Disney made a film of her. Jefferson Airplane wrote a song about her. And now Royal Mail has released a set of stamps in her honour.
Alice in Wonderland celebrates her 150th birthday this year and we are still enthralled by her spell - or rather, the spell cast by Lewis Carroll when he wrote the much-loved children’s book in 1865.
The fantasy world of rabbit holes and mad hatters, magic cakes and secret doors, has charmed children and adults the world over and sparked a string of adaptations.
But is it just an innocent tale of a child’s dream-like adventure, or is there more to it than at first meets the eye? Since its Victorian genesis, subsequent generations have been eager to pick out hidden meanings and messages. Is it really about drugs? Was the author perhaps less benign than he seemed?
Professor Will Brooker of Kingston University London, author of Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture, says each generation has interpreted the text in ways that reflect their contemporary culture.
“In the 1930s it was psychoanalysis, in the 1960s it was psychedelia, and in the 1990s paedophilia,” he says. “The 1930s was when people started to take what was originally conceived as a pleasant, delightful, nonsense children’s story and thinking there must be something deeper than what’s on the surface - a Freudian interpretation.
“Then, in the 1960s people assumed Carroll must have been on the same drugs they were on because the story seemed to tally with their experiences of LSD and cannabis. They thought he was speaking their language.”
Listen to the words of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit and it’s hard to disagree. “One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small…”
Surely Carroll had turned on, tuned in and dropped out?
The 1990s then arrived, and moral panic over paedophilia gripped society. Consequently Carroll’s relationship with the real-life Alice – the daughter of a friend, on whom the book was based – came under fresh scrutiny.
“People started asking ‘what’s going on here, a man having a close relationship with a young girl?” says Prof Brooker.
But in his view, these various interpretations had more to do with the ideas of the day than with those that informed the Victorian children’s tale.
Far from being on drugs, Carroll – whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson – was in fact a rather abstemious man, according to his first biographer.
Prof Brooker agrees. “They had opium and laudanum in those days but I don’t think he was the kind of guy to take drugs” he says.
Not the first acid head, then, but a grounded 19th century writer, mathematician and even an Anglican deacon.
Likewise the idea of some dark secret behind his friendship with Alice was arguably a product of a more cynical era.
“It’s symptomatic of our tabloid culture to think people must have secrets, that there must be some scandal,” says Prof Brooker. “But I don’t genuinely think he had scandalous secrets.”
The popular appeal of the story meanwhile endures. The 1951 Disney film was one of several to be made, the most recent of which was Tim Burton’s dark adaptation from 2010. There are video games, there are theme park rides and there is endless merchandise.
Future generations may see other hidden meanings. In a tale this rich, it seems highly likely they will. But for children the story itself, with its universal theme of an innocent youngster attempting to make sense of a strange adult world, is enough.
So down the rabbit hole we go, and let’s leave our modern assumptions at the door.

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