To think Alice in Wonderland is actually really shit.

[HomerSimpsonsStubble]

Not EU related but maybe just as controversial.

I've started reading it to my 4 year old recently and have come to realise it's just a load of waffling and rambling thoughts of an obviously high/drunk person.

I wonder if something like it, written the way it is, would get published today...I don't think it's anything special.

No wonder the film was changed so much.

(I did really enjoy LOTR though and have read it 3 times)

[Letmehaveausername]

Maddy I am extremely curious if GoT is Game of Thrones? Because if you've read that whole series in 8 days you are my new hero I thought I was a fast reader, being able to finish one GoT book in 3 nights (no reading during the day), I'd never ever be able to read all books in 8 days though!!!

[steppemum]

I have recently read aloud several classics, in the original:

Secret Garden
Alice in Wonderland
Railway Children.
Huckleberry Finn

They are all in principle great stories and they are all SO BORING to read.
Every single one should be abridged to half the length, all the philosophizing and moralizing cut out, and the speaking down to children re written. Then they would be wonderful.

[dizzyfucker]

I love the story. I wouldn't read it to a 4 year old. I read it when I was 12 and have just read it to my 10 year old. When language crops up that is no longer used, it is a great learning opportunity. She learnt a lot about the history and richness of English. But she is interested in languages, history and structure. We are tackling other old books now, that have different language and social structures like The Railway Children

I think a lot of people are quick to jump on the wagon of claiming that Dodgson/Carroll was a paedophile because he liked young girls. Loved them actually.

In the course of my career I have had the misfortune of meeting many paedophiles. I have yet to meet one who actually likes children. They do not think of children as innocent children as most people do. They either don't particularly like them much or try to make them more mature and less innocent than they are. It is how and why they can do what they do. He doesn't fit the profile and I just can't make him fit it.
If he was a paedophile he probably did not act on it. Which puts him into a grey area.

[Letmehaveausername]

cory if this is not too personal a question, what is it that you do? Cause it sounds pretty darn good!

[ohtheholidays]

YANBU I've never been a fan and I can't stand the films either,though all 5DC loved the films.

[SeekEveryEveryKnownHidingPlace]

Children were expected to have longer attention spans in the 1860s I think! Jesus, try The Water Babies if you think Alice rambles - 'now, children, you will have heard the theories of great men like Mr Darwin and Mr Huxley....'

[HopperBusTicket]

Haven't read Alice in Wonderland since I was a child, when I enjoyed it, so I can't comment on that. I tried reading The Hobbit as a child and couldn't get into it at all. I tried reading Winnie the Pooh to my son last year (when he was in Reception) because they were studying it at school and it was awful. I couldn't bear to carry on. Paddington Bear on the other hand we all enjoyed and found surprisingly funny (in a very gentle way).

[FaFoutis]

I came across a letter to some people I was researching asking to take naked photos of their children. It took me a while to realise it was from LC (CL Dodgson/ Dodgeson I think). The children were young girls, I couldn't find any trace of a response from the parents.

[rumbelina]

I've just read The Nursery Alice to my 5 yo. It's an abridged version that LC wrote for 0-5s. Much easier to get through although I was sad about some bits being missing as I LOVE the original. Will read to DS when he's a bit older.

The Johnny Depp film is DREADFUL. Tried to watch it again the other day but I just had to turn it off.

[tootsietoo]

YA totally NBU! I've just tried to read it to DD2 who is 8 and is my more "imaginative" one, but we gave up when we got to the Gryphon and Mock Turtle on the beach singing the Lobster Quadrille. I do agree that the book did conjure up some amazing images, a gift to a filmmaker like Tim Burton, and there was some sort of story just about hanging together but by the time we got to the Lobster Quadrille we both felt as if I was just reading out strings of unrelated sentences! So we stopped. I was also very worried that Alice would never get home. And now I don't know if she ever does - I can't remember how it ends!

[sue51]

Steppemum you are being vvvu. The secret garden is a great read.

[alexandragimenez]

I love Alice in Wonderland! I think its really engaging, it helps to boost kids' imagination as well which is a good thing!

[MrsSnufkin]

YANBU. It's a rambling bore. Hugely overrated.

[AllegraWho]

There is a theory that LC had ASD, which certainly would explain to a great extent both the unusual inner logic of the Alice books (which always made perfect sense to my AS DD, for instance), and also his somewhat inappropriate conduct with young children.

Unless, of course, we just want to yell paedophile. It is a possibility. Certainly someone who behaved the way he did around children now could not be assumed to be doing so with honourable intentions.

But he lived in very different times. Both attitudes to sexuality and attitudes to children and childhood were very, very different to those we hold now. Also, eccentrics were far more tolerated and accepted, assuming they belonged to a privileged class.

In short, whilst I would have a serious problem with an adult male nowadays preffering the company of young girls, and wishing to take photographs of them naked for artistic reasons, I can actually see that an adult male with an out of the ordinary neurological setup could do so in that time and that place, with perfect innocence. Context is everything

Looking at it from another angle though, I can also see that if he was a paedophile in that place and that time, this would not have put him beyond the bounds of acceptable society, assuming he did not indulge his urges with respectable girls. There were plently of child prostitutes around for him to indulge himself with should he have wished to do so.

I do think though that, if it was known that his tastes ran that way (and it would have been), Alice Liddell's parents would have been far less accepting of the attention he paid their daughter.

Oh, and LOTR rocks.

[steppemum]

The secret Garden - I read an abridged version to dd a few years ago, not a short one, a decent on IYSWIM. It was really good, we enjoyed it.
Then last month I read the original, interested to see what it had in addition to the abridged version.

well, nothing. Long drawn out passages of moralising which were missing from the abridged. The book was twice as long, but the actual story was still all there unchanged, and it made a much better read. I don't think the language had been changed, it had just had passages removed.

I really don't think any of them would be published today. I am not sure why we hold them up as the paragon on children's literature, when there are so many much better books around now (amid all the crud of course)

[ConfuciousSayWhat]

There is also evidence to suggest he had chronic migraines and it's where the term "Alice in wonderland syndrome" came from. The author clearly had a lot wrong with him!

They are bizarre books. But I also can't tolerate Peter rabbit because of how it's written.

[RobinsAreTerritorialFuckers]

I don't particularly like the books, which is why I don't do what cory does I suppose, but I don't think it's wrong to say that conventions for writing back then were different. I struggle with the sheer verbiage of books from that period, and with the moralising. And I do think there's rather sickly strand of cutesyness about childhood, which is hard to get past. It's not just Lewis Carroll. I do see that this was just the fashion at the time, so I am not judging it.

But you compare them to Oscar Wilde's short stories, which are pretty much contemporary, and they're so different! The Selfish Giant still makes me a bit teary.

[MaddyHatter]

The age of consent at the time was 12.

[Benedikte2]

Lewis Carroll was a strange repressed rather lonely academic and there is no evidence at all that he abused anyone. The Victorians at that time had a different mind set and regarded children as sweet and innocent and sexless. He was by no means unique in photographing young girls virtually nude and the children's parents were fully aware of what he was doing and did not find it odd or objectionable.
He was the eldest of a large family and wrote many stories and poems to amuse his siblings.
The event that caused the Liddell's to break off contact was thought to have occurred when Alice grew up and he asked if he might court her. Lewis Carroll was considered to be their social inferior as well as much too old.
His books were a real breakthrough because up to then all children's books were written to edifying the young -- be good or you won't go to heaven etc. After him books started to be written to provide entertainment.
There is a lot of word play in Alice in Wonderland etc and a child needs to have a reasonable vocabulary to appreciate them. Not my favourite books but I can appreciate them as literature

[NikiSaintPhalle]

Any statement that Lewis Carroll was a paedophile is difficult to substantiate. A lot of modern claims that he was aren't taking account of the big Victorian cult of the child nude (which saw it as a symbol of innocence, whereas we nowadays are forced to consider children's bodies as potentially sexual - there were huge numbers of 19th/early 20thc greeting cards and the like with child nudes on them). And there's no suggestion LC did anything remotely improper with the children he photographed, who always had a parent present and were generally photographed outdoors in an Oxford college garden because the light was better.

Also, his descendants and executors seem destroyed a lot of his correspondence and diaries which dealt with an unmarried man's attraction to adult women to preserve his 'respectability', so nearly all of what is left relates to children precisely because that wasn't seen as problematic.

A lot of the claims depend on how you interpret missing diaries and the fact that LC seems to have fallen out with Alice Liddell's family for a while for which there are no papers. Some people claim he wanted to propose marriage to an 11 year old, others that he was attracted to one of the older sisters or the family governess, or that it was a political disagreement with their father.


I agree the photos of Alice are disturbing now, but were pretty unexceptional for their era, which had ideas about children - and with statutes we would now consider alarming around the low age at which you could be charged with a felony, and on the 'disorderly' sexuality of young girls, especially working-class ones.

I like Alice in W, but it was never aimed at modern four year olds!

[Helmetbymidnight]

I read it to the DC recently. We weren't impressed
I can see that it was revolutionary in its time but I found it just a sequence of bizarre events, very trippy. My fave bit was pig baby- That stayed with me.

[GoblinLittleOwl]

Alice in Wonderland isn't suitable for a four -year -old, but ten/eleven year olds really enjoy it. The illustrations frightened me as a child, and put me off the book for years.
But as for abridging The Secret Garden and The Railway Children -sacrilege!

[echelon]

Great post Allegra

I grew up reading the classics - read both Alice in wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by age 8.
Absolutely loved them both, and understood them fine.
Still have the books and read them to my own children. They still have the power to captivate and set the imagination afire.

[RobinsAreTerritorialFuckers]

The Victorians at that time had a different mind set and regarded children as sweet and innocent and sexless.

No, they didn't.

This is like saying 'oh, nice Mr Saville isn't to blame, back in the day people thought children were sexless and just loved the attention'.

Victorian pornography is eye-opening, and there is a lot of it. It makes quite clear that there was a thriving industry in under-age sex.

I have no idea whether Carroll was a paedophile in the modern sense of the word, or not. But to claim that he can't have been because there was a trend for sentimentalising naked children, is naive.

[NikiSaintPhalle]

I don't think anyone's claiming that, Robins. Or if they are, they're wrong. There was a publicly 'respectable' Victorian cult of the nude child, certainly - nowadays it's difficult to imagine photos of nude children being praised as art, or used on birthday cards, but they were - and an interest in depictions of a perceived childhood innocence that absolutely ran alongside a Victorian obsession with child sexuality, and the existence of a trade in underage girls. (Which Victorian social researcher managed to 'buy' a ten year old girl for sex for a newspaper report?) Julia Margaret Cameron photographed nude children in almost identical ways, and LC's photos are in line with a sentimental contemporary taste for Edenic pictures of children as angels, fairies or nymphs etc which doesn't deny the existence of an altogether more sinister interest in children.