Alice in Wonderland door Lewis Carroll

The adventures of Alice in wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

It´s a book about a little imaginative girl of seven that makes a whole world up when she falls asleep on her sisters' lap in a park. She undergoes weird height changes, by eating special cakes and drinking weird potions.

 “… when her eye fell upon a little bottle that stood near the looking- glass. There was no label this time with the words `DRINK ME,' but nevertheless she uncorked it and put it to her lips. `I know SOMETHING interesting is sure to happen,' she said to herself, `whenever I eat or drink anything; so I'll just see what this bottle does. I do hope it'll make me grow large again, for really I'm quite tired of being such a tiny little thing!'” 1

In this made-up world, she also meets a lot of colorful people from talking animals to a living card deck.

While dreaming, Alice sees a white rabbit with a fob watch, going through a rabbit hole, she decides to follow him. This is how she gets into this special world.

In her world Alice meets , all sorts of birds, a Cheshire cat, the jolly Tweedledum and Tweedldee, a mad hatter and his friends Dormouse and March hare, a caterpillar who smokes a hookah and the king and queen of hearts. She is always quirky, innocent and unknowing even when everything she sees on her wild adventure makes no sense at all.

The only main character in this book is Alice herself, because as young children often do, they think that the world revolves around themselves. The book is printed with lovely pictures that compliments the text. Because of that we know that Alice has long blond strands of hair and is dressed according to her time.

“I'm sure I'm not Ada for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn't go in ringlets at all.” 2

 She wears a dress and if she dirties her dress, her nanny will be very cross with her. Alice wants to know everything about everything and she likes to talk bluntly about her life, because of that her conversations don´t always go for the best.

`And who is Dinah, if I might venture to ask the question?' said the Lory.

Alice replied eagerly, for she was always ready to talk about her pet: `Dinah 's our cat. And she's such a capital one for catching mice you can't think! And oh, I wish you could see her after the birds! Why, she'll eat a little bird as soon as look at it!' This speech caused a remarkable sensation among the party. Some of the birds hurried off at once” 3

She is quite wise for her age or sounds so, when she uses words like longitude and latitude. To understand the world she dreamed for herself she goes through errors and fails.

Lewis Carroll based his work on elements out of his environment, for example in the foreword of the book it is mentioned that he was inspired to write Alice in wonderland because of a girl he knew, Alice Liddell. The story has elements of things that are pretty common in the 1890's, the same time as he lived. This is enforced when Alice talks of her nanny, it was normal for a wealthy family in that time to have a nanny care for their children.

Conclusion

I, Jasmine, struggled a bit while reading Alice in Wonderland. It took some time for me to get used to the fact that abnormal happenings were quite normal in this book. I did like the characters even those who appeared only once. For example the fawn Alice met for only a moment in the wood where things lose their name. The poems were a little too long for my taste.  Altogether I wouldn't want to read it for a second time.