The real story behind Lewis Carroll and Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland
English writer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson using the pseudonym Lewis Carroll wrote a classical novel in 1865 entitled Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The story is filled with metaphors and literary experts consider it to belong to the nonsense genre.
Imagery dots the whole story and it has sometimes been dulled with Carroll’s recreational use of laudanum. The classic though gained so much acclaim that Disney Animations created an animated cartoon about the story and became a kid’s classic.
The real story about Alice Liddell, Dodgson’s basis for the heroine
Alice Pleasance Liddell was a real-life girl who lived in London during the 1860’s. She became the basis of Carroll’s character in his story because of her and her sister’s insistence that Carroll tells them a story. History tells how Carroll along with a colleague took the Liddell sisters, Lorina, Edith, and Alice down the river Thames for a picnic and a rowing trip. His experiences with the family would become the basis of Alice in Wonderland.
Carroll had different interests aside from writing stories. He was also a mathematician, an inventor, and was known to be into photography. He had a fondness of taking full-frontal nude pictures of children especially young girls. Liddell and her sisters were subject to some of his photos which still survived to this day. History is not quite sure about why Liddell and Dodgson went separate ways, but it is believed that the older man wanted to take the 12-year old Liddell as his wife to which her parents refused.
Allegories behind the story of Alice in Wonderland
The story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the subsequent book Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There has been questioned through the years because of its bizarre characters and storyline. Some people attribute the nonsensical story to Carroll’s incessant use of opium and his fanatical inclination to child affinity and nudity.
Critics have linked Carroll’s fantasy book to sex where psychoanalytical interpreters strongly suggest the allegorical meaning of certain scenarios from the story. Drugs is also faintly concealed in the entire story as Alice takes certain pills to either increase or reduce in size, something which has been analogous to Carroll’s opium use.