Lewis Carroll’s Dream-child and Victorian Child Psychopathology

This essay reads Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) alongside influential mid-century Victorian psychology studies—paying special attention to those that Carroll owned—in order to trace the divergence of Carroll’s literary representations of the “dream child” from its prevailing medical association with mental illness. The goals of this study are threefold: to trace the medico-historical links between dream-states and childhood, to investigate the medical reasons behind the pathologization of dream-states, and to understand how Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland contributed to Victorian interpretations of the child’s mind.