di Alessandra Lupo Pennetta

1. Alice in
Wonderland
By: Alessandra
Lupo

2. Charles Dodgson
• The author of Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland was Charles Ludwidge
Dogson.
• He published the book and other
works under the pseudonym of
Lewis Carroll because he wished to
maintain anonymity to remain
immune to any criticism on his
poetry and prose.
• His name comes from the translation
of his first two names into Latin
“Carolus Lodovicus” anglicized into
“Lewis Carroll”.

3. Lewis Carroll 1832 -98
• He was born in Cheshire, his father
was an Anglican person. The family
moved to the county of Yorkshire
when he was 11, by which time
Queen Victoria had been on the
throne for four years.. like his father
he had great success at the Oxford
University as a mathematician, even
winning a lectureship which kept him
well off for many years. Like his
father he decided to enter the
church and became an Anglican
deacon at Christ Church in Oxford.
One of the places that inspired Carroll- the door in
the garden (Christ Church, Oxford)

4. Works
• He was affected from stammer, he was also deaf and
had a weak chest. Dodgson translated these
psychological and physical flaws into his drive to
succeed as a writer. Dodgson began publishing his
own magazine in 1855, it was titled Mischmasch .in
1856 he officially published some works in the train,
a monthly magazine which prompted him to invent
his pseudonym Lewis Carroll.
It was at this time that Dodgson knew Henry
Liddell and his young family. With the children he
felt less self conscious about his stammer. Liddell’s
son and three daughters proved to be the perfect
audience for his imaginative stories.

5. It was in this way that he was encouraged to write
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
He read the first version to Liddell’s three daughters,
Lorina, Alice and Edith during a boat trip and it was
Alice Liddell who suggested him to commit the
adventures to paper. It took him three years to
complete the manuscript and to have the book
published in 1865. the book quickly caught the
collective imagination of Victorian society in fact it
has been translated into almost every language.

6. • In 1871 Dogson published a new book
about Alice, titled Through the Looking
Glass and What Alice Found There.
Apparently the book was another
conversation with Alice Liddell, where
they discussed what it might be like to
enter the reflected world in a mirror.
This second book was as successful as the
first.

7. The strange world of
•
Dogson period during
There was a paradox about the Victorian
which Dodgson lived. On the one hand it was
conservative and formalized, but on the other it was
progressive and dynamic. In 1859 Charles Darwin had
published On the Origin of Species, in which he explained
his theory of biological evolution by natural selection. It
caused the deal of scientific and theological arguments.
Dodgson was a creative mind and it was in this
revolutionary environment that he allowed his
imagination to think about the fantastical ideas that would
evolve into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. His two
books are now described as literary nonsense as he
produced stories that enter absurd worlds with
anthropomorphic animals and other strange characters
with exaggerated personality traits. He created a
nonsensical universe where social rules and conventions
disintegrate, the cause/effect relationship does not exist,
and time and space have lost their function of giving an
order to human experience. Dodgson used the scenarios
to tackle problems relating to logic, reason and
philosophical conundrums. Queen Victoria herself was a
fan of Dodgson’s work, demonstrating that she and many
other Victorians were open to the idea of allowing a little
nonsense into their lives.

8. Was Carroll on
•
Drugs?
Literary nonsense became a genre and many
subsequent authors have drawn inspiration
from Dodgson’s ability to delve into his
subconscious. It seems likely that Dodgson
had tried hallucinogenic drugs. In fact it was
known that Psilocybin mushrooms could
introduce mind bending effects. In the book
a shrunken Alice meets a caterpillar
smoking a pipe reclining on a mushroom.
Alice consumes morsels of mushroom that
make her first shrink smaller and then grow
to her normal size. Surely drugs had
something to do with such ideas.

9. 2 Minutes in
Wonderland

10. * Chart showing the ignorance of some people. (of
which I used to part of)
**notice that less than half the people were aware
of the truth.
120 people who
want to believe
100 Carroll was on
drugs
80
people who
60 know the
actual reality
40
*on a saleof 1-
20 100
0

11. The Hatter’s Name Origin
• The phrase 'mad as a hatter' was
common in Carroll's time. 'Mad as a
hatter' probably owes its origin to the
fact in that time hatters did go mad,
because the mercury they used
sometimes gave them mercury
poisoning.
• Carroll may have asked Tenniel to
draw the Mad Hatter to resemble
Theophilus Carter, a furniture dealer
near Oxford. Carter was known in
the area as the Mad Hatter, partly
because he always wore a top hat and
because of his eccentric ideas. It is
also often suggested that Tenniel
made the Mad Hatter resemble the
politician Disraeli.

12. The politician
Disraeli
The Mad Hatter

13. Allegories
• It is inevitable that people have
searched for a hidden meaning or
allegory that Dodgson wished to
express through his work, in fact he
passed a lot of comments on Victorian
society. Queen Victoria reigned during
that time, so female dominance is
displayed in Carroll's writing. In Alice
stories, the Queen of Hearts overcomes
the King both in size and power.
Carroll lived during an era
characterized by punctuality. This is
reflected in the White Rabbit's
extremely paranoical reaction to his
lateness, when he repeatedly says “I'm
late, I'm late”.

14. • Another example that the Victorian age
influenced a lot Dodgson is the fact that
no one helped Alice when she was lost.
In the 19th century there were
practically no rights for young women,
and they were basically ignored or
patronized like Alice at the tea party
and when she was lost.
the Victorian Era limited the thoughts,
speech, and actions of the individual.
People were the products of the
Victorian society in which they lived. In
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
Lewis Carroll uses the emphasis of facts
in the Victorian education system and
the Victorian discouragement to create
Alice’s confused character analogous to
the identity crisis of children during the
Victorian period.

15. His friends
• It is known that many of his literary
characters were based on the
personalities of his friends.
• He used his friends because he enjoyed
and celebrated their idiosyncrasies and
foibles. It was this encapsulation of the
human condition that seems to have
made his work so popular because the
readers moght recognise characters’
traits in themselves. For example Alice
is the attractively inquisitive and naïve
girl; the white rabbit is the neurotic
clerk; the caterpillar can be seen as the
laid back artist, end so on.

16. Dodgson has been also one of
the greatest photographers of
the Victorian age. Through the
photos he tried to express his
idea of beauty, he identified
this beauty with the recovery
of the lost innocence of the
Eden. With this vision
Dodgson refused the Calvinist
principle of the original sin.
The sisters Edith, Lorina and Alice, photographed
by Dodgson

17. The famous Alice
• The fact that he took photographs and
drew naked children has contributed to
the thesis he was a paedophile. One of
the objectives of the Dodgson’s photos
was to free himself from the burden of
the Victorian symbology, portraying his
young models as fairies and not as well-
mannered damsels of the good English
society. He was obsessed above all by a
child, Alice Lieddell, who inspired his
book Alice’s underground (the first title
of Alice Adventures in Wonderland).
Alice Liddell

18. Illustrations
• John Tenniel’s illustrations of
Alice do not portray the real
Alice Liddell, who had dark
hair and a short fringe.
• Carroll sent Tenniel a
photograph of Mary Hilton
Badcock, another child-friend,
who was the daughter of the
Dean of Ripon.
• He recommended her as a
model, but whether Tenniel
accepted this advice remains a
matter of dispute.
Illustration by John Tenniel of the poem
“Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carrol

19. “Alice” Series the Gateway for
Many Artist’s Inspirations
• Alice and the rest of Wonderland continue to inspire or influence many other
works of art to this day, sometimes thanks to Disney movies, for example

20. • The character of the plucky Alice has became immensely popular
and inspired similar heroines in literature and pop culture, many
also named Alice in homage. But she also inspired photographs,
photoshoots, clothing, jewelry, paintings, drawings, and pretty
much any type of art you can think of based on Alice and her
adventures.

21. Poems and songs
• "All in the golden afternoon..." —the prefatory verse, an original poem by Carroll that recalls the
rowing expedition on which he first told the story of Alice's adventures underground
• "How Doth the Little Crocodile" — a parody of Isaac Watts' nursery rhyme, "
Against Idleness And Mischief"
• "The Mouse's Tale" —an example of concrete poetry
• "You Are Old, Father William" — a parody of Robert Southey's "
The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them"
• The Duchess' lullaby, "Speak roughly to your little boy..." — a parody of David Bates' "Speak Gently"
• "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat" — a parody of "Twinkle twinkle little star"
• Video :
• The Lobster Quadrille — a parody of Mary Botham Howitt's "The Spider and the Fly"
• "'Tis the Voice of the Lobster" — a parody of "The Sluggard"
• "Beautiful Soup" — a parody of James M. Sayles' "Star of the Evening, Beautiful Star"
• "The Queen of Hearts..." — an actual nursery rhyme
• "They told me you had been to her..." — the White Rabbit's evidence

22. Jewels

23. Clothing

24. Objects

25. Drawings

26. Sweets

27. Statue of Alice in Central Park, 1959

28. *This chart shows the overall impact of ALL of Alice’s adventures as compared to
other films made by Disney
**Note that the chart is not really drawn to scale because it’s supposed to be 1-100
and there’s really only a small difference.
86
84
82
Alice in
80 Wonderland
78 most other
76 Disney films
*on a scale of
74
1-100
72
70

29. Alice In Wonderland – Avril Lavigne Alice
Underground Official Music Video

30. Tim Burton’ s Alice in Wonderland (2010)

31. Works Cited
(bibliography)
• Wikipedia
• http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/
• Google Images
• http://
www.insite.com.br/rodrigo/text/lewis_carroll.html
• YouTube