Three Times in Wonderland

Nothing proves more the challenging complexity of an artwork than a choir of synchronic critical voices which propose in parallel with each other inventive, new interpretations of a widely-read canonized classic some hundred and fifty years after its original publication. My review essay outlines a transnational, comparative interface of three recent academic studies published between 2013 and 2015, all targeting creative rereadings of Lewis Carroll’s Victorian nonsense fairy-tale fantasies about Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and beyond the Looking Glass. The scholars weighing in the postmillennial discussion of this irresistibly curious textual corpus are all specialists of nineteenth-century and children’s literature who fuse their philological skills with exciting research agendas—such as the sociology of texts and publication history (Jaques and Giddens), ludology combined with reception theory and the post-semiotics of subjectivity (Iché), or the study of antiquity (Brown). A carnivalesque proliferation of meanings results from the different methodological apparati, theoretical frameworks, cultural backgrounds, and languages used to discover untraveled pathways into the familiarly strange Carrollian textual territory.

Zoe Jaques and Eugene Giddens’ Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: A Publishing History (2013) was published in the year preceding the sesquicentennial anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as an early bird at the dawn of worldwide celebrations, and remains a definite reference point for readers interested in the adventurous publishing history of the Alice tales. An overview of the classic’s transformation from improvised oral narrative to gift-book manuscript to print, illustration, theatrical play, game, collectible, television, and cinema is particularly interesting for twenty-first century readers. Those readers are likely to be familiarized with the figure of Alice through transmedia storytelling, whereby integral elements of Wonderland’s fictional universe are so intricately dispersed across multiple delivery channels (each making a unique, original contribution to a coordinated entertainment experience) that it becomes tremendously difficult to tell the original apart from its manifold adaptations.

Jaques and Giddens indeed understand publishing history in a broad sense in accordance with McKenzie’s notion of the sociology of texts, aiming to trace the cultural-history of “verbal, visual, oral, and numeric data’s” transmissions, modifications, and repurposings in different eras, locations, and interpretive communities. Hence, as the introduction points out, the book is concerned not just with the cultural objects we call “Alices” but with “the stories surrounding their creation and use.”

The study relies on documentary evidence, including Carroll’s letters and diaries as well as previously published research, to demonstrate Carroll’s ambiguous attitude to authorship and the authority over his fictional universe. His rigorous control over the publishing, printing, illustration, and marketing process (illustrated by his recalling the first print run because of his dissatisfaction with the poor paper quality of Wonderland’s initial sheets) was coupled with his recognition of the inherent flexibility of his episodic dream-stories which constituted “unusually fruitful sources for reappropriating” (an extraordinary adaptogenic quality he exploited in two adaptations and abundant meta-textual commentary he added to the original text) and an ardent desire to disseminate his story (hence his insistence on having it translated).

The progression of Jaques and Giddens’ book is chronological: the first chapter deals with the initial evolution of the story covering the period from 1862 to 1875, the second traces the impact of the Alice novels and its early adaptations on Victorian audiences, the third discusses the canonical sedimentation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a children’s classic between 1890 and 1907, and the fourth and fifth follow the textual and non-textual afterlives of Alice up until the...