Alice’s Adventures, published just five years before the 1870 Education Act introduced a national system of elementary schools for all children, is filled with earnest lessons reworked into nonsensical jabber. She initiates her adventures after dismissing the book her sister was reading “without pictures or conversations” as utterly uninteresting. “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do,” wrote Carroll. The first lines of Carroll’s story identify Alice as a particular class of child-one who, unlike most mid-Victorian children, spent her days in leisure and education. From the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837 to her death in 1901, what it meant to be a child transformed dramatically-a process that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland both marked and took in new directions by presenting a fresh example of active, questioning girlhood. Literary scholars have identified the existential themes of identity in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), but the question “Who in the world am I?” applied much more broadly to Victorian childhood overall. “‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” So reflects Alice after she has fallen down the rabbit hole and changed size, first “shutting up like a telescope” until she is only ten inches high, and then “opening out like the largest telescope that ever was,” prompting her to ponder disassociated thoughts of mailing boots to her feet by postal carrier.

Home Exhibition Highlights 2011-2015 The Age of Alice The Age of Alice: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Nonsense in Victorian EnglandĪlice and the Question of Victorian Childhood

Alice in wonderland model the klub 17