Lewis Carroll: "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" & "Through the Looking Glass"These are two undeadly adventure stories that you will never will be finished enjoying. They were published in Oxford in 1865 and 1871. Lewis Carroll is a pseudonyme for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832 - 1898), who was a teacher of mathematics at a college in the town. "Wonderland" was first given in a hand-written version to Alice Lidell, the daughter in a family connected to the same college, but published as a real book the year after. In "Wonderland" Alice starts following a strange rabitt dressed in a suit down through a hole in the ground and comes to a world very different from what she is used to. She drinks from mysterious bottles she finds and becomes alternating very small and very big. She meets a lot of strange people and animals that behave like strange people, but everybody are following rules that are quite different from the rules Alice has grown up with. And last but not least she meets the despotic queen of spades from the card game, who all the time wants her subjects executed by beheading. "The Looking Glass" is about what happens when Alice manages to creep through the big looking-glass over the mantelpiece in the familys home, and come to the mirrored world, which also turns out to be very different from what she is used to. Here she meets another despotic queen, this time from the chessboard, and she explains to Alice which rules that governs this world, but in a rather bewildering way. For instance, very suddenly she commands Alice to run as fast as she can, together with the queen. They run and run for quite a long time, Alice thinks, but when they at last stops, it turns out they are at exactly the same place where they started. Alice of course find this a bit peculiar, and she explains to the queen that in the country she grew up, you normally come to somewhere else when you run so fast for a so long time. "Yours must be a very slow country," says the queen, "In this country, in order to stay where you are, you have to run as fast as you can. And if you want to come somewhere else, you have to run at least twice as fast as that." This was written in 1870, but I guess many people today will find it an adequate description of their daily life. |
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Alice is drinking tea with the March Hare, the Hatter and the Dormouse. One of John Tenniels illustrations to the
original version of "Wonderland".
