by JEFF JACOBY
In : The Boston Globe, July 1, 1999, Thursday
It is the most notable boat ride in the history of literature.On July 4, 1862, Charles L. Dodgson, a mathematics scholar at Oxford, wentrowing on the Thames in the company of the Rev. Robinson Duckworth, a fellowOxonian, and the three lovely Liddell sisters - 13-year-old Lorina, 10-year-oldAlice, and 8-year-old Edith. The trip began at Folly Bridge near Oxfordand went as far as the village of Godstow, about 3 miles upstream. Therethey stopped for tea, and as they lay in the shade, Dodgson - we know himbetter by his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll - began to spin the tale of Alice'sadventures underground.
"I distinctly remember . . . how, in a desperate attemptto strike out some new line of fairy-lore," Carroll would later write,"I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit hole, to begin with, withoutthe least idea what was to happen afterwards."
We know what Alice found at the bottom of that rabbithole - the frantic white rabbit in the waistcoat and kid gloves, the bottlelabeled "Drink Me," the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the ugly Dutchess andthe grinning Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter's tea party and the decapitatingQueen of Hearts. But on that July 4th it was all brand-new, and Alice Liddellcouldn't get enough of it.
"Oh, Mr. Dodgson," she pleaded that night, whenhe took her and her sisters back home, "I wish you would write out Alice'sadventures for me."A few months later, he began to do so and by February 1863had completed a handwritten draft of about 18,000 words. He showed it tohis friend, the poet and novelist George MacDonald, who in turn sharedit with his family. The reviews were enthusiastic: Six-year-old GrevilleMacDonald told his mother he "wished there were 60,000 volumes of it."Encouraged, Carroll kept reworking and expanding the manuscript. Earlyin 1864 he invited John Tenniel, the leading cartoonist for Punch, to illustrateit. In June 1865, the Clarendon Press printed the first 2,000 copies of"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." It has never gone out of print.
Of course it has never been just a children's book, either.Queen Victoria, the story goes, was delighted with Carroll's first "Alice"masterpiece, and sent word that she would be grateful to get a copy ofhis next book as soon as it was published. What she received was "Condensationof Determinants," a dense mathematical tome. The sequel Victoria was hopingfor appeared in 1871. "Through the Looking-Glass" was as wonderful as "Alice'sAdventures in Wonderland" and proved equally as beloved. In its first 12months, it sold 25,000 copies; it, too, will be in print forever.
Of the two, "Through the Looking-Glass" is the more remarkable.At one level it is a fantasy chess game, filled with make-believe charactersand comical dialogue yet closely following the rules of chess. At anotherlevel it is an extended improvisation on the theme of mirror images andlogical inversion. Examples abound: Alice finds that to approach the RedQueen she must walk away from her; to serve the Looking-Glass cake, shehands it around first, then slices it; the White King has two messengers,"one to come, and one to go"; the White Queen lives backward in time -first she puts on a bandage, then she screams, then she pricks her finger.
At still another level, "Through the Looking-Glass" isan allusive splash through some of deepest waters of metaphysics. Whenthe Tweedle brothers tell Alice that she is nothing but an character inthe Red King's dream - "If that there King was to wake," Tweedledum says,"you'd go out - bang! - just like a candle!" - they are lining up withBishop Berkeley, the English philosopher who held that matter does notexist unless it is observed. Humpty Dumpty's arrogant claim that "whenI use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more norless" echoes a semantic argument dating back to the Middle Ages, the viewthat universal terms have no objective meaning outside the mind. And onon top of it all, "Through the Looking-Glass" contains the greatest nonsensepoem in the English language. " 'Twas brillig," begins "Jabberwocky,"