Cоntents intrоductiоn chapter I. The life and work of Lewis Carroll

Conclusion on chapter.I
The story, with considerable additions, was published in 1865 under the now familiar title, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It received poor reviews, but sold well and has never been out of print since.
The poems recorded here are all taken from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, apart from ‘Jabberwocky’, which appeared in the sequel Through the Looking-glass, and ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ which was published on its own in 1876. The Alice poems parody the improving literature familiar to children of the time, but now almost forgotten. ‘You are Old, Father William’, for example, mocks the verse of Robert Southey, the tone of which can be judged from its ending:
“I am cheerful, young man”, Father William replied
“Let the cause thy attention engage
In the days of my youth I remembered my God
And he hath not forgotten my age”
Early in the story, Alice, in her confusion at growing small then tall, begins to lose her sense of self: in an effort to grasp something familiar and reassuring she tries to recite the poem by Isaac Watts, ‘Against Idleness and Mischief:
How doth the little bumble bee
Improve the shining hour…
Which delightfully of course comes out all wrong, echoing the rhythm and form of the original, but turning it to nonsense.
For reasons which are not known, Dodgson’s friendship with the Liddell family ended abruptly after another boat trip in 1863. He died of pneumonia in Guildford in 1898.
CHAPTER II. Analysis of content and events of Alice in wonderland
2.1. The essence of Alice in wonderland
Many people have seen Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a prime example of the limit-breaking book from the old tradition illuminating the new one. They also consider it being a tale of the “variations on the debate of gender” and that it’s “continually astonishing us with its modernity”. From the looks of it, the story about Alice falling through a rabbit hole and finding herself in a silly and nonsense world, is fairly guileless as a tale. The underlying story, the one about a girl maturing away from home in what seems to be a world ruled by chaos and nonsense, is quite a frightening one. All the time, Alice finds herself confronted in different situations involving various different and curious animals being all alone. She hasn’t got any help at all from home or the world outside of Wonderland. Lewis Carroll describes the fall into the rabbit hole as very long and he mentions bookshelves on the sides of the hole. Perhaps it is an escape into literature he hints at. Carroll is an expert at puns and irony. The part with the mad tea party is one of the best examples of this. There’s a lot of humour in the first Alice book, but in the second the mood gets a bit darker and more melancholic. The theme with Alice growing and shrinking into different sizes could reflect the ups and downs of adolescence with young people sometimes feeling adult and sometimes quite the opposite. The hesitation so typical of adolescent girls is reflected in Alice’s thoughts: “She generally gave herself good advice (though she very seldom followed it).” Many short comments point to teenage recklessness, restlessness and anxiety in all its different forms.
Alice’s father would have dined at the High Table with other senior members of the college. After dinner the senior members did not drop down amongst the undergraduates but went through a panelled door to the left of the spot where Liddell’s portrait is now hanging. Behind this door is a very narrow spiral staircase which descends to the senior common room, then to a corridor which emerges in Tom Quad. Dean Liddell would use the staircase and appear in Tom Quad on his way home to the Deanery. So it is said that it was the inspiration for the Rabbit Hole.
However, as the spiral staircase behind the High Table in Hall was built in 1906, this claim can be doubted.
At the time Carroll wrote “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, state sanctioned executions were a subject of public controversy and heated debate in England. The Queen of Heart’s impulsive and absurd calls for beheadings may therefore be a way of ridiculing this longstanding practice of executions, and represent Carroll’s opinion on the matter .