Alice in Wonderland - by Lewis Carroll

I must admit that I had expectations going into this book that it would be something worthy of having survived its 150 years.  However, most of the time I was wondering just that, "why do people love this book so much and how has it survived so long?"

Because in my opinion it was this book is reflective of that awkward attempt at humor that you sometimes find amidst the British.  I don't mean that to insult, in fact I sympathize with the person who has difficulty relaxing and making with the funny and maybe even the foolish.  Some British humor is fantastic, perhaps for this very fact that they are serious but have learned to make fun of themselves for it.  Some British, and now I would call Lewis Carroll among them, make a haphazard path towards comedy/absurdity/fantasy/experimentation.  I argue this because Alice begins without much substance, life, or purpose.  I suspect that Carroll meant for this to mirror the aimlessness of childhood.  There is a strong desire for the path to reveal itself to you, but you are waiting for a lot of necessary ingredients first (some education, some space from your parents, maturity, a growing circle of experience, etc.)  And that's where Alice is - she is napping under a tree and the scene is full of ennui, sluggishness, sludge, and malaise.

However, and this is less obvious, I think Carroll only could have used a child as a vehicle for writing this story.  This is because he has no idea how he wants to experiment and grow beyond his own limitations, and as such he is very similar to a child. But he hides behind Alice, letting her ignorance and naivete be obvious whereas his is not.  I was annoyed with this approach even though I understood it.  I think it creates a poor relationship between writer and character and hurts the book.

That said, the book's vignettes became better and better as the story wore on.  I thought the last two chapters had a rhythm that really fit the story (sorry, I can't explain it any better than that, ha, because my writing skills are not so excellent!).  And I wonder if Through the Looking Glass isn't an even better book.

So while I don't necessarily believe this book is a classic based on the merit of its story and writing, there are other reasons that books are considered "classic."  One of these reasons is that what it did it did first and I think that's the answer to why Alice has lasted so long.

Children's literature, believe it or not, has not always been the raging business it is today.  Once upon a time, no one worried about what children would read and to write for children was to dumb down ideas and why not wait for the children to grow up into adult, fully-formed ideas instead?  And there might be something to be said for that argument - but that's another story.

This book was apparently one of the first to write to a child audience.  Also, it's fantastical elements were not common to books either at that point in time.  So as with a book like The Interpretation of Dreams - which was written to be a scientific text but has been dismissed by the scientific community and now is read as a relic of its time - you can argue that Alice's content is not worth it's reputation.  But both books were seminal texts - they went first and for that we remember them.