Alice In Wonderland Book Review

Alice in Wonderland – Book Review

Alice and Wonderland is a novel written by a man named Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into this fantasy ‘wonderland’. This novel tells us about Alice’s weird and wonderful adventures down the rabbit hole and the unusual characters she encounters. She follows a white rabbit that was talking to himself, wearing a waistcoat and had a pocket watch, down the rabbit hole. She fell a long time through this tunnel and fell into a hall of doors. On the table in the middle of the room for a tiny door, on the other side of the door is a garden that Alice wants to get to. On the table, Alice finds a bottle with ‘DRINK ME’ on it, this makes her small, but then she finds a cake, which says ‘EAT ME’ on it, which makes her grow until her head hit the ceiling. Thus begins the series of shape change for Alice. The shape change confuses Alice and she gets up set, she cries and floods the room. As she shrinks she is forced to swim in her own tears and is soon joined by a number of other animals. They get out of the water and the mouse tells a story to a caucus race to dry all of the animals off.. Once Alice is dry, she enters the garden where she goes into a house and drinks from the bottle to make herself grow again, but this makes her too big, too big that she cannot get out of the house. Animals start to gather to make her leave, they throw pebbles at her (which are in fact pieces of cake that she eats and shrinks). Another strange character she encounters is a caterpillar that is sitting on a mushroom, smoking a ‘hookah’. Now being a teenager in this generation, this has connotations of drugs and made me think is the caterpillar sitting encouraging her to ear the mushrooms and if that had a different meaning to it. The two sides of the mushroom will either make Alice shrink or grow. As she is walking through the garden, she comes across a cottage where a Fish-Footman delivers a invitation from the Queen to the Duchess to play croquet to a Frog-Footman. Alice enters the cottage to meet the Duchess, to then meet the mayhem that is going on in the cottage. The cook was making soup, making the air unbearable with pepper. There was a baby crying, so a concerned Alice takes it outside and it turns into a piglet. At this point in the book, I was asking myself what must have been going through Lewis Carroll’s mind for him to write something so random. The novel is so changeable that you can see how it would appeal to a child. Alice leaves the piglet and runs into the woods, until she comes upon a Cheshire cat that is grinning ear to ear, he doesn’t appear at all at first, his smile is the first thing that Alice sees. Alice moves on until she meets the mad Hatter and the March Hare, who are having a tea party with a sleeping mouse. Both of these characters are indisputably nutters and Alice finds them confusing because they ask in riddles to which there is no answer and pretend there is no room for her where that actually is. Alice got up and walked off, when she turned around the mad Hatter and March Hare were trying to put the mouse in the teapot. Alice comes across a tree that has a door going right into it and decides she would go through. She finds herself back in the hall of doors. She used the mushroom to go through the door that lead to the garden and went through, she found herself ‘among the bright flower-beds and the cool fountains’. In the garden the Queen is having a croquet game with flamingos for mallets and hedgehogs for ball, there were soldier’s doubles up and standing of their hands and feet to make the arches. Alice was invited to play, and it was the Queen’s orders, and whoever disobeyed the Queen was beheaded. At the end of the game, Alice was the only one not to be sentenced. There was then a trail to find out ‘Who stole the tarts’. The king assisted by the white rabbit runs the trail and Alice is in the jury box. Alice was asked to give evidence and she starts growing again, tipping over the jury box. The Queen asks to sentence the accused now and then have the verdict late, but Alice objected, and therefore is sentenced. She replies that nobody cares and that they are ‘just a pack of cards’. At his the pack of cards starts jumping at her face and she wakes up from her dream.
This is a humorous novel about Alice’s dream. Throughout this book there is a lack of a sensible plot, it is very erratic and unpredictable. Having seen the film as a child, I always thought hat the book was just for children, but after reading it for the first time now as a teenager, I see that there are concepts in this book that go far beyond what a child could imagine. The novel, being written by an adult makes me think how did he come up with such a story and they characters. Do they represent people in is life. After reading it, as I said before in my imagination it makes me think of drugs, the feeling I got from this book I would describe as ‘trippy’, as throughout the book there is an underlying theme of drugs. Examples of this are characters such as the caterpillar, sitting on a mushroom smoking a ‘hookah’. He was telling Alice to eat the mushroom and it would make her change, this made me think about the message of the effects of ‘magic mushrooms’, but considering it was written in 1886, I think it is probably just a coincidence. The whole atmosphere of the story is completely incoherent with reality. The Cheshire cat disappears only leaving his smile behind, the mad Hatter and the March Hare were out of their minds asking in riddles and trying to put the mouse in the teapot. I did some research about this and a Children’s Literature lecturer at Cardiff University, Dr Heather Worthington said "The notion that the surreal aspects of the text are the consequence of drug-fuelled dreams resonates with a culture, particularly perhaps in the 60s, 70s and 80s when LSD was widely-circulated and even now where recreational drugs are commonplace”. It seems that drugs had a heavy influence in this book, but was that just Lewis Carroll’s imagination? Whilst reading the book, to a child, their imagination takes them on a wonderful adventure through this colourful wonderland with these funny characters and catchy rhymes as an adult reading to them. But, to an adult it may seem like this piece of writing is satire. Mocking people from the Victorian age, or maybe it really is just a silly children’s book.