Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland begins with Alice falling through a rabbit hole into another world. This could be the dark place that is the camera, which sees the world upside down and in other odd ways through a small aperture. Alice, furthermore, is both enlarged and reduced, like a picture in an enlarger in a darkroom. Mathematics controls all these changes; Alice in Wonderland has been called a primer of the differential and integral calculus. And of course Alice is a little girl, and a most charming one. She is both serious and playful, and insistent upon understanding what is happening to her. She is distressed by the bodily changes that overtake her, as all little girls are, but at the same time she is brave and faces up to whatever she has to face—including caterpillars, hedgehogs, and queens.
The images of Alice in Wonderland are unforgettable; we can never get them out of our heads. (Partly this is because of John Tenniel’s wonderful illustrations for the original edition; when reading Alice you should seek an edition with reproductions of those old illustrations.) Alice swimming with the White Rabbit, with his white gloves still on, in the Pool of Tears. Alice at the Mad Tea Party, surrounded by that magical company, from the Mad Hatter to the Dormouse, sleepily sinking into his tea. Alice growing down into a mite and up into a giant, her head sticking out of the chimney of her little Wonderland house. The trial, with the Queen as both judge and jury—“That’s not fair!” says Alice; the accused is the Dormouse again, who always ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time. The famous game of croquet, in which the hoops are hedgehogs that get up from time to time and walk away, leaving the players to scratch their heads and wonder where the next shot is supposed to go. The Jabberwock. The Caterpillar smoking his hookah on his mushroom. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The Walrus and the Carpenter and the Oysters that dance into their mouths. And so forth and so on.
Some of these images come from Alice in Wonderland’s marvelous sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, which was published a few years later. The two books make up one great fantasy, and it is hard to keep them apart in the memory. In fact, it’s not worth trying to do so.
How they ever got written is an extraordinary accident. Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles L. Dodgson, enjoyed entertaining the three young daughters of the master of his Oxford college and one day they went on a picnic and were caught in the rain. Two weeks later they went on another picnic and he told them stories about a little girl named Alice who fell down a rabbit hole on a rainy day.
He always told the girls stories, and they always loved them; but this time the story seemed especially good and Alice Liddell, the oldest of his three companions—she was ten—asked him to write it down. He did so and made funny illustrations for it and gave it to her for a present. Of course she liked it all the better, and so did her sisters and her mother and father. However, nothing would ever have come of it if Charles Kingsley, the novelist, had not happened to see the manuscript lying on a table in the Liddells’ home. Kingsley picked it up and read it. “Extraordinary! It must be published!” he declared.
Dodgson consulted other author friends; they also said the book was good. He revised it and published it, with Tenniel’s illustrations, in 1865. Through the Looking-Glass came along in 1871.
By the time Dodgson died, in 1898, Alice (the two books taken together) had become the most popular children’s book in England, and by 1932, the centenary of Lewis Carroll’s birth, when there were celebrations of Alice in all the English-speaking countries, it had become probably the most popular children’s book in the world.
It is hard to say why, exactly. Many critical theories have been advanced, but they all dwindle to silliness when they face the reality of Alice itself—or Alice herself. Maybe it is just that the combination of photography, mathematics, and little girls is dynamite, especially when ignited by a lively imagination.
THOMAS HARDY
1840–1928
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Selected Poems
Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset, in the West Country of England that his works made famous, in 1840. For the first twenty-five years of his life he was torn between two careers, architecture and literature. Literature won out.
He began in the 1870s to produce a series of novels that—since they were published anonymously—were at first supposed to be by George Eliot. His first popular success was Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). The Return of the Native, somber and powerful, appeared in 1878. His most famous novel, and probably his best, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, was not published until 1891.
The subtitle of Tess was “A Pure Woman,” but the phrase is ironic. Tess is terribly wronged in this wonderful book, and it is her young and naive husband, more than anyone else, who wrongs her. The world is all against her, we see, and there is no God, no good, no deep justice to protect and succor her. If there is a God, He has sported with Tess, as we learn from the powerful last paragraph of the novel.
Yet Tess is not beyond blame. Some readers see the book as containing an accusation of Tess: it is all, this terrible mix-up, this frightful injustice, her own fault. There is merit in that reading as long as it is not the only reading of the novel.
Deeper than that, we must ask what Hardy himself thought about Tess. The other novels give us a clue. In all of them there is a woman more or less like Tess (though none is as truly interesting as she, none so breaks our hearts). And all of these heroines share a womanly strangeness and dangerousness. Hardy, who created heroines more alluring and attractive than those in any other Victorian novel, also expressed with extraordinary power the Victorian fear of women. Do women feel more deeply than men? Do their emotions go where a man’s cannot follow? Something like that is what Hardy is saying in his novels, and especially in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
Hardy’s poetical career was full of contradictions. He had begun writing poems about his Wessex country when a young man, and he kept on writing them all of his life. But during the twenty-five years when he was writing his novels, he published no poems. His last novel, Jude the Obscure (1896), was from the popular point of view a failure, although some critics regarded it highly. Hardy thereupon began to devote himself to poetry, and wrote and published it for the remaining years of his long life.
The tone in Hardy’s poems that compels readers of today and forces them to listen, but that offended many readers years ago, is one of almost total pessimism, beyond despair. The word “despair” means “without hope,” and theologically speaking that is a sin, for to despair is to deny the possibility of God’s saving grace.
Hardy did not care about that. If he was to be damned for having no hope, so be it. Many people were like him in despairing of the world and of the goodness, so-called, of mankind. At least Hell would not be a lonely place.