Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

At the conclusion of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , Lewis Carroll contrasts fantasy with reality, and childhood with adulthood. Alice's elder sister reclines alone in the grass and imagines that the noises she hears are not the everyday sounds of the countryside, but rather the fading strains of Wonderland itself. As she drifts into a dream-like state of contemplation, she imagines what the story of Wonderland will mean to Alice in her adult years: she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days. This passage illustrates several important ways in which the Victorians tended to define childhood and to understand the purposes of children's fiction. Perhaps most importantly, Carroll makes a clear demarcation between child and adult-adulthood is the “after-time,” which implies that childhood (here Alice's “own child-life”) is the most important phase of life. Becoming an adult seems to involve ... log in or subscribe to read full text