tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/topics/alice-in-wonderland-14042/articles
Alice in Wonderland – The Conversation
2021-02-16T18:52:59Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/152816
2021-02-16T18:52:59Z
2021-02-16T18:52:59Z
Guide to the classics: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — still for the heretics, dreamers and rebels
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/384162/original/file-20210215-17-1ytywl0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=12%2C0%2C948%2C659&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Walt Disney Animation Studios, Walt Disney Productions</span></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>Alice! A childish story take<br>
And with a gentle hand<br>
Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined<br>
In Memory’s mystic band,<br>
Like pilgrim’s withered wreath of flowers<br>
Plucked in a far-off land.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What is it that draws us back to <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24213.Alice_s_Adventures_in_Wonderland_Through_the_Looking_Glass?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=mQi4a9W3Eo&rank=1">Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland</a> (Alice for short), both individually and collectively? What is it that makes Alice, in the words of literary critic, Harold Bloom, “a kind of Scripture for us” — like Shakespeare?</p>
<p>For we are drawn back. Since the publication of Lewis Carroll’s story, in England in 1865, it has never been out of print and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland#cite_note-Bandersnatch2-4">has been translated into around 100 languages</a>.</p>
<p>There have been numerous movie adaptations and many other works inspired by the story. Perhaps the greatest is a little-known, 1971 short film by the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare encouraging children not to do drugs.</p>
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<p>One fears the film might not have had the desired effect: while the speed-addicted March Hare provides a salutary example of how poorly things can go on his drug of choice, the Mad Hatter’s performance on LSD is a little too compelling.</p>
<p>Beyond the page and screen, a quick Google search reveals Alice-inspired art — from graffiti to Dali — tattoos, music, video games and shops.</p>
<p>Alice has strong mainstream appeal; this was entrenched by Disney’s 1951 movie <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043274/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2">Alice in Wonderland</a> (which is also responsible for people getting the title of the book wrong). However, Alice has become iconic for many subcultures, especially those with darker proclivities. Try exploring “zombie Alice” or “goth Alice”, or watching the new Netflix series, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10795658/">Alice in Borderland</a>, which is set in Tokyo. (Alice is big in Japan).</p>
<p>And this brings us again to the beginning of the conversation (Alice reference here for the boffins): What draws us back?</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-the-secret-garden-and-the-healing-power-of-nature-132269">Guide to the Classics: The Secret Garden and the healing power of nature</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<h2>Striking a blow against the adult world</h2>
<p>The story begins with bored, seven-year-old Alice sitting on a riverbank with her older sister. Alice doesn’t care for the book her sister is reading because it doesn’t have pictures. She falls asleep and follows a dapper but flustered rabbit down a rabbit hole and into Wonderland.</p>
<p>In Wonderland she moves through a series of surreal vignettes in which she verbally tussles, but struggles to connect with, a stream of characters, such as the hookah-smoking Caterpillar, the Duchess, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and the Queen of Hearts.</p>
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<span class="caption">Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen of Hearts in Tim Burton’s 2010 film version of Alice in Wonderland.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Disney Enterprises Inc</span></span>
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<p>We are drawn back to the book by the first-rate banter between Alice and these memorable characters. Consider the following from the Mad Hatter’s tea party:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.<br>
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least — at least I mean what I say — that’s the same thing, you know.”<br>
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”<br>
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”<br>
“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”<br>
“It is the same thing with you,” said the Hatter[.]<br></p>
</blockquote>
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<p>Notably, many of the creatures Alice meets stand for the real adults in her life, in that they scold her, order her about, try to teach her morals and make her recite poetry.</p>
<p>It is this transformation of the adult world into a mad place and the elevation of the viewpoint of the child that also draw us back. When we read Alice, not as children, but as adults, we strike a blow against the adult world, which some of us, at least, have never quite adjusted to.</p>
<p>The Cheshire Cat provides the greatest indictment of Wonderland-as-adult-world when he says to Alice, “we’re all mad here”. The cat is the only creature in the book who connects with Alice. Mark this, reader: It is the one who can connect with children who is also able to see the world for what it is — mad!</p>
<h2>A champion of childhood</h2>
<p>The West does have a long history of romanticising childhood. Wordsworth, in his 1807 <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45536/ode-intimations-of-immortality-from-recollections-of-early-childhood">Immortality Ode</a>, writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Heaven lies about us in our infancy!<br>
Shades of the prison-house begin to close<br>
Upon the growing Boy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But even if the “romantic childhood” is a creation of bourgeois 19th century England — of the likes of Wordsworth and Carroll — it is a powerful and arguably noble notion. So let us follow it a little farther down the rabbit hole.</p>
<p>While Alice is the child-hero of the story because she pushes back against the mad adults in Wonderland, she herself is on the cusp of adulthood.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/384171/original/file-20210215-15-18f4e9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/384171/original/file-20210215-15-18f4e9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/384171/original/file-20210215-15-18f4e9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/384171/original/file-20210215-15-18f4e9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/384171/original/file-20210215-15-18f4e9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/384171/original/file-20210215-15-18f4e9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1223&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/384171/original/file-20210215-15-18f4e9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1223&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/384171/original/file-20210215-15-18f4e9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1223&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Alice Liddell, photographed in 1862.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>This tragedy is alluded to in the poem, dedicated to the real Alice — Alice Liddell — with which the book begins (the key stanza appears at the start of this article). </p>
<p>Liddell was, in her childhood, Carroll’s friend. The first version of Alice was told to Liddell and her two sisters in 1862 on a boat ride along the Thames in Oxford.</p>
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<span class="caption">A 1907 edition of the book.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>The tragedy of growing up is reinforced in the story itself. While Alice’s imagination is able to create Wonderland, it cannot sustain it. In the final scene in Wonderland, Alice is watching a trial where many of the characters are playing cards. Frustrated by the illogical trial, she shouts, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” and is transported back to the real world.</p>
<p>This leads us to think Wonderland itself is the hero of Alice: the champion of childhood. It is in Wonderland that time has stopped — as we learn at the Mad Hatter’s tea party — and where authority is impotent. Despite the Queen’s repeated edict, “Off with her/his head”, no one ever really dies.</p>
<h2>‘The Carroll myth’</h2>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lewis Carroll aged 23.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>However, beyond Alice and Wonderland is Carroll himself. As Karoline Leach writes, in her <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5719494-in-the-shadow-of-the-dreamchild?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=khYf6va89h&rank=1">remarkable book about “the Carroll myth”</a>, at the centre of Alice lies, “the image of Carroll; a haunting presence in the story, a shifting dreamy impression of golden afternoons, fustiness, mystery, oars dripping in sun-rippling water.”</p>
<p>Lewis Carroll is the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (not easy to say quickly, unlike “Lewis Carroll”), who taught mathematics at Oxford. </p>
<p>The “Carroll myth”, which was as appealing in the 19th century as it is now, is that Dodgson, through his alter ego Carroll, and his many (chaste) relationships with children, in particular, Alice Liddell, found a way back to the immortality of childhood that Wordsworth spoke about.</p>
<p>So, when we read Alice, we are ultimately communing with this mythical Carroll, and this is no small thing.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-orwells-1984-and-how-it-helps-us-understand-tyrannical-power-today-112066">Guide to the classics: Orwell's 1984 and how it helps us understand tyrannical power today</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Trolling pieties</h2>
<p>Beyond the banter and the homage to childhood, we are drawn back to Alice because it contains a timeless contribution to the 1860s version of our own culture wars. Where we have political correctness, the 19th century Anglophone world had its own buzz-killing piety, at times foisted upon children — and adults — through verse.</p>
<p>David Bates, a 19th century American poet, is likely responsible for the now thankfully forgotten poem, <a href="http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=2272#:%7E:text=Speak%20gently%2C%20kindly%2C%20to%20the,Without%20an%20unkind%20word!">Speak Gently</a> (“Speak gently to the little child!/Its love be sure to gain/Teach it in accents soft and mild:/It may not long remain.)</p>
<p>Carroll’s glorious parody, which is spoken in Chapter 6 by the Duchess, a negligent mother, is: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Speak roughly to your little boy,<br>
And beat him when he sneezes:<br>
He only does it to annoy,<br>
Because he knows it teases.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here, and in other Alice poems such as "You Are Old Father William”, Carroll is trolling all those for whom piety is a mask for power. And like the pious, the politically correct are more concerned with their own superiority than with doing good.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/384172/original/file-20210215-17-1goyj8s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/384172/original/file-20210215-17-1goyj8s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/384172/original/file-20210215-17-1goyj8s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/384172/original/file-20210215-17-1goyj8s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/384172/original/file-20210215-17-1goyj8s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/384172/original/file-20210215-17-1goyj8s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/384172/original/file-20210215-17-1goyj8s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/384172/original/file-20210215-17-1goyj8s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">An image from the 1951 film version of Carroll’s book.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Walt Disney Animation Studios, Walt Disney Productions</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To cement the link between then and now, it is worth quoting from <a href="https://youtu.be/_W_npyI7Xsw">Stephen Fry’s recent objection</a> to political correctness. It is as if Fry is providing us with the key to Alice and even to Carroll himself. “I wouldn’t class myself as a classical libertarian,” Fry says,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>but I do relish transgression, and I deeply and instinctively distrust conformity and orthodoxy. Progress is not achieved by preachers and guardians of morality but […] by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and sceptics.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We are drawn back to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland because when we read it, we become the heretics, dreamers and rebels who would change the world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/152816/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jamie Q Roberts does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
First published in 1865, Lewis Carroll’s children’s book has never been out of print. It continues to appeal to adults who prefer childhood.
Jamie Q Roberts, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/126246
2019-11-18T14:01:02Z
2019-11-18T14:01:02Z
Why do teachers make us read old stories?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300926/original/file-20191108-194650-13odlbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Teachers often assign older books.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/book-library-school-university-college-on-1444506608?src=bd16c503-99f0-4a1c-ba4a-9b2cf21e5301-1-6">vovidzha/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/curious-kids-us-74795">Curious Kids</a> is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to <a href="mailto:curiouskidsus@theconversation.com">CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com</a>.</em></p>
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<blockquote>
<p><strong>Why do teachers make us read old stories? Nathan, 12, Chicago, Illinois</strong></p>
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<p>There are probably as many reasons to read old stories as there are teachers.</p>
<p>Old stories are sometimes strange. They display beliefs, values and ways of life that the reader may not recognize.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://english.richmond.edu/faculty/egruner/">an English professor</a>, I believe that there is value in reading stories from decades or even centuries ago.</p>
<p>Teachers have their students read old stories to connect with the past and to learn about the present. They also have their students read old stories because they build students’ brains, help them develop empathy and are true, strange, delightful or fun. </p>
<h2>Connecting with the past and present</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300935/original/file-20191108-194641-19vyyru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300935/original/file-20191108-194641-19vyyru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300935/original/file-20191108-194641-19vyyru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300935/original/file-20191108-194641-19vyyru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300935/original/file-20191108-194641-19vyyru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300935/original/file-20191108-194641-19vyyru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1201&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300935/original/file-20191108-194641-19vyyru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1201&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300935/original/file-20191108-194641-19vyyru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1201&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">William Shakespeare wrote plays in the 1600s that are still read today.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare#/media/File:Title_page_William_Shakespeare's_First_Folio_1623.jpg">Martin Droeshout/Yale University</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>In Shakespeare’s <a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/full.html">“Romeo and Juliet</a>,” for example, teenagers speak a <a href="https://lingojam.com/EnglishtoShakespearean">language that’s almost completely unfamiliar</a> to modern readers. They fight duels. They get <a href="https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/family/marriage.html">married</a>. So that might seem to be really different from today. </p>
<p>And yet, Romeo and Juliet fall in love and make their parents mad, very much like many teens today. Ultimately, they commit suicide, something that <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/01/health/youth-injury-death-rate-cdc-study/index.html">far too many teens do today</a>. So Shakespeare’s play may be more relevant than it first seems.</p>
<p>Additionally, many modern stories are <a href="https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/57225/11-modern-retellings-classic-novels">based on older stories</a>. To name only one, Charlotte Brontë’s <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1260/1260-h/1260-h.htm">“Jane Eyre”</a> has turned up in so many novels since its original publication in 1848 that there are entire <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/191995/summary">articles</a> and <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=CmVQDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA189&dq=growing+up+empowered+by+jane&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjq2s_E3trlAhUBm-AKHcrtCHQQ6AEwAXoECAUQAg#v=onepage&q=growing%20up%20empowered%20by%20jane&f=false">book chapters</a> about its influence and importance.</p>
<p>For example, <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137539236">I found references to “Jane Eyre” lurking</a> in <a href="https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B000FC1T8U&tag=bing08-20&linkCode=kpp&reshareId=GG4QQ034GJ68KKBAB615&reshareChannel=system">“The Princess Diaries</a>,” <a href="https://stepheniemeyer.com/the-twilight-saga/">the “Twilight” series</a> and a variety of other novels. So reading the old story can enrich the experience of the new.</p>
<h2>Building brain and empathy</h2>
<p>Reading specialist <a href="https://www.maryannewolf.com">Maryanne Wolf</a> writes about the “special vocabulary in books that doesn’t appear in spoken language” in <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060933845/proust-and-the-squid/">“Proust and the Squid</a>.” This vocabulary – often more complex in older books – is a big part of what helps <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141021085524.htm">build brains</a>.</p>
<p>The sentence structure of older books can also make them difficult. Consider the opening of almost any fairy tale: “Once upon a time, in a very far-off country, there lived …”</p>
<p>None of us would actually speak like that, but older stories put the words in a different order, which makes the brain work harder. That kind of <a href="https://www.rd.com/culture/benefits-of-reading-books/">exercise builds brain capacity</a>.</p>
<p>Stories also make us feel. Indeed, <a href="http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2011/07/why-fiction-is-good-for-you/">they teach us empathy</a>. Readers get scared when they realize <a href="https://www.wizardingworld.com">Harry Potter</a> is in danger, excited when he learns to fly and happy, relieved or delighted when Harry and his friends defeat Voldemort.</p>
<p>Older stories, then, can provide a rich depth of feeling, by exposing readers to a broad range of experiences. Stories featuring characters <a href="https://scenicregional.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mirrors-Windows-and-Sliding-Glass-Doors.pdf">from a diverse range of backgrounds</a> or set in unfamiliar places can have a similar effect.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301648/original/file-20191113-77320-y64ze3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301648/original/file-20191113-77320-y64ze3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301648/original/file-20191113-77320-y64ze3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301648/original/file-20191113-77320-y64ze3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301648/original/file-20191113-77320-y64ze3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301648/original/file-20191113-77320-y64ze3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301648/original/file-20191113-77320-y64ze3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ has been retold many times.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:De_Alice's_Abenteuer_im_Wunderland_Carroll_pic_23_edited_1_of_2.png">John Tenniel/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<h2>Reading can be fun</h2>
<p>Old stories are sometimes just so weird that you can’t help but enjoy them. Or I can’t, anyway.</p>
<p>In Charles Dickens’ <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1400/1400-h/1400-h.htm">“Great Expectations</a>,” there’s a character whose last name is “Pumblechook.” Can you say it without smiling?</p>
<p>In Lewis Carroll’s <a href="http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/resources/chapters-script/alices-adventures-in-wonderland/">“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland</a>,” a cat disappears bit by bit, eventually leaving only its smile hanging in the air. Again, new stories are also lots of fun, but the fun in the older stories may turn up in those new stories.</p>
<p>For example, that cat returns in many <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781561458103">newer tales that aren’t even related</a> to Alice in Wonderland, so knowing the cat’s history can make reading that new story more pleasurable.</p>
<p>I won’t deny that some old stories <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/463520?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">contain offensive language</a> or <a href="https://isthmus.com/arts/books/laura-ingalls-wilder-little-house-reexamined/">reflect attitudes</a> that we may not want to embrace. But even those stories can teach readers to think critically.</p>
<p>Not every old story is good, but when your teacher asks you to read one, consider the possibility that you might build your brain, grow your feelings or have some fun. It’s worth a try, at least.</p>
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<p><em>Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to <a href="mailto:curiouskidsus@theconversation.com">CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com</a>. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.</em></p>
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<p>[ <em>You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=youresmart">You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/126246/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elisabeth Gruner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Stories like ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and ‘Jane Eyre’ are still relevant today.
Elisabeth Gruner, Associate Professor of English, University of Richmond
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/121282
2019-10-30T07:26:15Z
2019-10-30T07:26:15Z
Decades neglecting an ancient disease has triggered a health emergency around the world
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295801/original/file-20191007-121060-1qz2f8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A young girl is inoculated with typhoid, Texas, 1943.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Typhoid_inoculation2.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>New extensively drug-resistant variants of an ancient and deadly disease – typhoid fever – are <a href="https://www.who.int/csr/don/27-december-2018-typhoid-pakistan/en/">spreading</a> across international borders. Cases have been <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6405270/">reported</a> in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Iraq, Guatemala, UK, US, and Germany, as well as more recently in <a href="https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2019/211/6/first-reported-case-extensively-drug-resistant-typhoid-australia">Australia</a> and <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214250918302282">Canada</a>. In recent years, drug resistant and travel-associated typhoid variants have also been spreading through the <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/68/Supplement_2/S165/5371231">African continent</a>. Under-reporting and international surveillance gaps mean that drug-resistant typhoid is probably even more extensive than we think.</p>
<p>Causing fever, headache, abdominal pain and constipation or diarrhoea, typhoid is a bacterial disease. <em>Salmonella enterica serovar</em> Typhi – the organism behind typhoid – kills up to <a href="https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/typhoid-fever/">one in five patients</a> if left untreated. <em>S.</em> Typhi spreads from person to person in water and food, which have been contaminated by faeces. As a consequence, typhoid is often associated with inadequate sanitation and water systems, as well as with poor hygiene <a href="https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/typhoid-fever/">practices</a>.</p>
<p>The rapid rise of increasingly difficult to treat typhoid is a very worrying prospect. During an age of unparalleled international trade and travel, it is inevitable that any regional rise of antibiotic resistance will have global knock-on effects.</p>
<p>In Europe, Australia and North America isolated extensively drug-resistant variants (or XDR strains) were travel-related. Travellers had become infected while visiting Pakistan, where a large-scale outbreak of XDR typhoid is ongoing. Having caused at least 5,274 cases in the Sindh Province <a href="https://www.who.int/csr/don/27-december-2018-typhoid-pakistan/en/">since 2016</a>, the Pakistani XDR strain is proving resistant to all commonly available antibiotics except for one: azithromycin.</p>
<p>The coming years will likely see further travel-related resistant cases occur throughout the world. In Britain, strong demographic and historical ties to South-East Asia mean that about <a href="https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/typhoid-fever/">500 typhoid cases</a> (mostly travel-associated) are reported every year. In the US, at least <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/typhoid-fever/surveillance.html">309 cases occurred in 2015</a> with almost 80% of confirmed cases reporting a history of travel to endemic areas. In Germany, <a href="https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Infekt/EpidBull/Merkblaetter/Ratgeber_Typhus_Paratyphus.html">56 cases</a> were reported in 2018 – 96% of which were travel associated.</p>
<p>The return of typhoid is something of a shock to health systems in richer countries. Between the late 19th century and the 1950s, sanitary improvements, effective vaccines and antibiotics eliminated endemic typhoid from most high-income countries. But after a lifetime of relative security, the prospect of typhoid again causing death in high-income hospitals is no longer an outlandish idea. </p>
<p>So how did this happen? The answer is uncomfortable and tied up in the inward-looking nature of Western disease eradication campaigns over the last century. Because, contrary to popular conceptions of typhoid as a disease of the past, typhoid never really left. As our <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/issue/69/Supplement_5">new research</a> shows, because typhoid control often stopped at high-income borders, it became a neglected disease in other, poorer countries. This global neglect is now proving costly. </p>
<p>Controlling typhoid depends in part on new technologies to prevent, diagnose and treat the disease. But it is also crucial that we keep a clear eye on the past so that we are able to rewrite the policies that enabled typhoid’s resurgence – in other words, old mistakes should not be repeated.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><strong><em>This article is part of Conversation Insights</em></strong>
<br><em>The Insights team generates <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/insights-series-71218">long-form journalism</a> derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.</em> </p>
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<h2>Killer of paupers and kings</h2>
<p>Genomic analysis and archaeological evidence <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/cid/ciz556">makes it clear</a> that the disease has been circulating in human populations for millennia. </p>
<p>While we cannot make accurate retrospective diagnoses using written sources alone, typhoid has been referenced as the mysterious killer of princes, presidents and paupers around the world. Typhoid was also a renowned scourge of armies and war. During the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/boer_wars_01.shtml">Second Boer War</a> (1898-1902), the British Army reported more than <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/cid/ciz672">8,000 typhoid deaths</a>.</p>
<p>Despite its prominence, typhoid’s cause and mode of transmission remained a mystery. Many experts initially believed that typhoid was caused by “bad air” originating from decaying matter and pungent-smelling filth. There was also no clear way to distinguish typhoid from other contemporary fevers. Modern notions of typhoid as a disease with a distinct clinical picture, a mostly water and food-borne mode of transmission, and with a bacterial cause, only <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/cid/ciz610">gradually emerged</a> during the 19th century after repeated pandemics of cholera kick-started investigations into waterborne modes of transmission.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294857/original/file-20190930-194819-jvhx0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294857/original/file-20190930-194819-jvhx0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294857/original/file-20190930-194819-jvhx0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294857/original/file-20190930-194819-jvhx0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294857/original/file-20190930-194819-jvhx0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294857/original/file-20190930-194819-jvhx0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294857/original/file-20190930-194819-jvhx0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Bacilli of typhoid fever from a culture.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://wellcomecollection.org/works/qbq4wgrm">© Wellcome Collection</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>The emerging concept of typhoid as a distinct bacterial disease that could be carried by contaminated water and food was accompanied by a parallel revolution of sanitary infrastructure in Europe, North America and parts of Asia, Africa, South America and Oceania. New waterborne ideas of typhoid transmission subsequently played <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/cid/ciz610">an important role</a> in justifying ongoing expenditure on improved sewage and drinking water systems.</p>
<h2>Alice in Typhoidland</h2>
<p>For example, in the British university city of Oxford, sanitarians like <a href="https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-16640">Henry Liddell</a>, Dean of Christ Church College and father of Alice Liddell – the girl who inspired <a href="https://typhoidland.org/">Alice in Wonderland</a>, Lewis Carroll’s famous children’s book – used the spectre of typhoid to lobby for radical interventions into the city’s infrastructure and hydrology.</p>
<p>He did this with his close friend Henry Acland, professor of medicine, physician to the royal family (and alleged inspiration for the <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/who-was-who-in-alices-wonderland-1588168.html">White Rabbit</a>).</p>
<p>Liddell, whose wife had nearly died from typhoid in London, also oversaw improvements of his college’s grounds and sanitary infrastructure. This included redirecting the <a href="https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol4/pp284-295">Trill Mill Stream</a> – an open sewer – underground in 1863, the same year that Carroll began to write his first iconic book.</p>
<p>Although initial sanitary progress in Oxford was slow, growing public criticism, new government credits and scandals like the death of three undergraduates from typhoid encouraged city and university authorities to take decisive action during the 1870s. Within little over a decade, they constructed a new sewage system, closed down leaking cesspools, stopped pumping drinking water from below the main sewer outlet and created an affordable rate-financed and municipally-owned filtered drink water supply.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294846/original/file-20190930-194824-jcw8kt.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294846/original/file-20190930-194824-jcw8kt.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294846/original/file-20190930-194824-jcw8kt.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=718&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294846/original/file-20190930-194824-jcw8kt.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=718&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294846/original/file-20190930-194824-jcw8kt.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=718&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294846/original/file-20190930-194824-jcw8kt.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294846/original/file-20190930-194824-jcw8kt.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294846/original/file-20190930-194824-jcw8kt.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John Tenniel, Alice Rows the Sheep. This river was allegedly based on Trill Mill Stream.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/John_Tenniel_Alice_Rows_the_Sheep.jpeg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The case of Oxford is far from unique. By the turn of the century, high-income cities across the world were investing substantial amounts of money in their water and sanitary infrastructures. While early interventions were often hit-and-miss and could vary significantly between cities, there is a <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/cid/ciz610">clear correlation</a> between rising expenditure on the provision of safe water services and declining mortality from waterborne diseases like typhoid.</p>
<h2>From prevention to eradication</h2>
<p>New technologies further aided attempts to curb what was increasingly described as a preventable disease. In 1897, Maidstone became the first British town to have its entire water supply <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/advent-and-use-chlorination-purify-water-great-britain-and-united-states">treated with chlorine</a>. </p>
<p>Vaccination emerged as another way to protect populations in areas without sanitary infrastructure. Devised by German and British researchers in 1896, early typhoid vaccines consisted of killed typhoid strains and were among the first bacterial vaccines. During the Second Boer War, British troops leaving the fold of “civilisation” could opt for inoculation against typhoid. This first roll-out of heat-killed vaccines was marred by quality problems and adverse side effects that made early vaccination extremely unpleasant. But by World War I, <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/cid/ciz672">all major powers</a> used improved bacterial typhoid vaccines to effectively protect troops and travellers.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294859/original/file-20190930-194832-1hr7ngv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294859/original/file-20190930-194832-1hr7ngv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294859/original/file-20190930-194832-1hr7ngv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294859/original/file-20190930-194832-1hr7ngv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294859/original/file-20190930-194832-1hr7ngv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294859/original/file-20190930-194832-1hr7ngv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294859/original/file-20190930-194832-1hr7ngv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anti-typhoid vaccination in World War I.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://wellcomecollection.org/works/yy2bdqh4">© Wellcome Collection</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Typhoid’s emerging status as a preventable disease was celebrated as a great success story of “rational Western science”. It also led to calls to move from prevention to eradication. Leading the hunt was the new profession of bacteriology.</p>
<p>This research soon showed that typhoid was far more complex than initially thought. Although its mode of transmission via water and contaminated food was becoming increasingly clear, it emerged that the bacterium could also be excreted by seemingly healthy people. So-called asymptomatic – or healthy – carriers have no symptoms but can still excrete <em>S.</em> Typhi through their faeces for years after the initial infection.</p>
<p>This concept of <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20934644">healthy carriers</a>, advanced by the German bacteriologist <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20934644">Robert Koch in 1902</a>, significantly complicated hopes for typhoid eradication. How was one supposed to deal with seemingly healthy members of the community, whose typhoid-contaminated faeces could put others at risk?</p>
<p>Answers reflected prevailing socio-cultural values. While most typhoid carriers were allowed to remain in their communities if they agreed to follow precautionary hygiene measures (abstaining from working in food preparation and waterworks), some were forcibly detained and isolated. Decisions about who could be trusted and who had to be isolated were far from neutral and reflected contemporary concerns about immigration, racism, chauvinist gender norms and rising militarism.</p>
<p>For example in Germany, bacteriologists tried to “cleanse” military deployment zones identified for an attack on France by testing communities, creating lists of carriers, and placing some in mandatory isolation from around <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/cid/ciz672">1904 onward</a>. While communities in the centre of the Reich mostly escaped this practice, Prussian experts had few qualms about implementing mandatory isolation in the Franco-German periphery on the grounds of military need. During World War I, German soldiers were routinely screened for typhoid and strict controls were set up to stop potential carriers – like soldiers or displaced civilians – from infecting civilian populations in Germany. Once again not everybody was treated equally, with certain groups like Eastern Jews being disproportionately accused of carrying diseases of “filth” like typhoid.</p>
<p>In the United States, Irish immigrant Mary Mallon (who became known as “<a href="https://www.pastmedicalhistory.co.uk/the-terrible-tale-of-typhoid-mary/">Typhoid Mary</a>”) became the most prominent typhoid carrier to be detained after infecting the families she cooked for. Mallon was quarantined between 1907 and 1910 and again between 1915 and her death in 1936 after breaching the terms of her initial release and working as a cook under an assumed name.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295800/original/file-20191007-121088-1yyldz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295800/original/file-20191007-121088-1yyldz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295800/original/file-20191007-121088-1yyldz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295800/original/file-20191007-121088-1yyldz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295800/original/file-20191007-121088-1yyldz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295800/original/file-20191007-121088-1yyldz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295800/original/file-20191007-121088-1yyldz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295800/original/file-20191007-121088-1yyldz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An illustration that appeared in 1909 in The New York American.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mallon-Mary_01.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>British authorities, meanwhile, <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7528045.stm">detained</a> predominantly female carriers deemed mentally incapable of upholding sanitary standards in the Long Grove Asylum in Epsom between 1907 and 1992. Doubts about the women’s alleged insanity subsequently emerged.</p>
<p>But with typhoid continuing to decline in high-income countries, such treatment of carriers rarely made headlines. By the end of World War II, there was instead growing optimism about the prospect of eventual typhoid elimination. In Europe and North America, functioning sanitation systems, chlorination, fine-grained national surveillance for typhoid outbreaks and carriers by public health authorities, vaccines, and the advent of <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4923770/">effective therapies</a> for both typhoid victims (chloromycetin, 1948) and carriers (ampicillin, 1961) had turned the once feared disease into a negligible health threat.</p>
<p>Although individual outbreaks on ocean liners, in resorts, and <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-26957972">occasionally towns</a>, continued to attract public interest, typhoid was increasingly portrayed as a disease of the past, one which had been defeated with heroic sanitary and medical interventions. During an age of widespread confidence in the imminent scientific defeat of infectious disease, there seemed little reason to fear its return.</p>
<h2>An infectious divide</h2>
<p>This confidence was misplaced. While typhoid had almost vanished from high-income countries, it remained endemic in other parts of the world.</p>
<p>Over the next half century, the resulting infectious divide was reinforced by a relative neglect of international campaigns to tackle typhoid. Sustained large-scale investment in the supply of safe drinking water, safe sewage disposal, and basic healthcare services would have gone a long way to curb not only typhoid but many other diseases in the Global South. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295797/original/file-20191007-121071-104bx2y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295797/original/file-20191007-121071-104bx2y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295797/original/file-20191007-121071-104bx2y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295797/original/file-20191007-121071-104bx2y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295797/original/file-20191007-121071-104bx2y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295797/original/file-20191007-121071-104bx2y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295797/original/file-20191007-121071-104bx2y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The various ways that a water well may become infected by typhoid fever bacteria, 1939.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ForskeligeVeje_ad_hvilkenBroen_kan_inficeres_medTyfusbaciller.png#/media/File:ForskeligeVeje_ad_hvilkenBroen_kan_inficeres_medTyfusbaciller.png">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But actual investment often remained ad hoc, uncoordinated, and insufficient. Instead, many rich countries focused on protecting their own populations. They prioritised vaccines, antibiotics and put surveillance-based biosecurity regimes in place, designed to stop typhoid from crossing back into high-income countries via travellers and migrants. This strategy was cheap in the short term but very costly in the long term.</p>
<p>Although governments and non-governmental organisations on both sides of the Iron Curtain provided infrastructural and medical aid to allies in the so-called “developing world” during the Cold War era, typhoid did not feature high on the international agenda and was frequently superseded by other, more prominent, or fast-burning diseases like malaria and smallpox. Meanwhile, a mix of population growth, resource constraints and inadequate access to water, sanitation and health infrastructures created perfect breeding grounds for typhoid in the Global South. This also led to an over-reliance on comparatively cheap antibiotics to keep the disease in check. The result was an evolutionary surge of <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061128092129.htm">increasingly antibiotic-resistant</a> typhoid strains.</p>
<p>This surge had been predicted. Resistance against the first antibiotic treatment for typhoid, chloramphenicol, had been reported <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2937522/">within two years</a> of the antibiotic’s first use against typhoid in 1948. Individual strains had also <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/cid/ciz556">proven resistant</a> against ampicillin within years of its 1961 launch. </p>
<h2>Typhoid outbreaks increase</h2>
<p>In 1967, researchers in <a href="https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/docserver/fulltext/jmm/44/5/medmicro-44-5-317.pdf?expires=1564494207&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=31E60BE5B768AAF0B328A26781086CC8">Israel and Greece</a> reported the isolation of typhoid strains with transferable chloramphenicol resistance. In the same year, British experts analysing typhoid strains from Kuwait detected transferable resistance not only against chloramphenicol but also against ampicillin and the tetracyclines. Five years later, an explosive typhoid outbreak that infected more than 10,000 people in Mexico City was resistant to <a href="https://cmr.asm.org/content/28/4/901">several antibiotics</a> including chloramphenicol – but fortunately not ampicillin. India and Vietnam reported parallel outbreaks.</p>
<p>Western responses to the outbreaks were ad hoc, again focusing on biosecurity measures like traveller surveillance and vaccination rather than on concerted international campaigns to combat the factors driving the surge of resistant typhoid in low-income areas.</p>
<p>In response to the outbreaks in India and Mexico, Western media commentators accused local populations of relying on antibiotics too much and using drugs inappropriately. Rarely addressed were the underlying factors, such as insufficient access to affordable healthcare, clean drinking water and effective sewerage systems – or the fact that many of the drugs in use had been exported by Western producers. </p>
<p>The prioritisation of national biosecurity over collective responsibility was echoed in government policies. Western countries and non-governmental organisations provided limited laboratory, sanitation, and medical aid in response to natural disasters and acute outbreaks. But international support remained inadequate to compensate for existing financial, infrastructural, and organisational constraints or to keep up with population growth and rapid urbanisation in endemic areas. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, concerns about the import of resistant “foreign strains” encouraged governments to devote significant resources to monitoring borders, travellers, and migratory populations for typhoid. Resulting monitoring efforts remained influenced by culturally ingrained stereotypes of typhoid as a disease of uncivilised people. In response to the Mexican outbreak, US public health officials not only focused on monitoring non-American strains and intensifying the community surveillance of people with “Hispanic surnames” but also <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/cid/ciz556">highlighted risk factors</a> like alleged “Hispanic hygiene habits” even though no empirical research was conducted to test whether these culturally-biased associations were true.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294855/original/file-20190930-194873-1nsf70.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294855/original/file-20190930-194873-1nsf70.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294855/original/file-20190930-194873-1nsf70.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294855/original/file-20190930-194873-1nsf70.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294855/original/file-20190930-194873-1nsf70.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294855/original/file-20190930-194873-1nsf70.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294855/original/file-20190930-194873-1nsf70.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Antibiotics are in widespread use in agriculture.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rat007/Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Continued neglect</h2>
<p>The neglect of international efforts to combat typhoid on a global level carried over into the 1980s. This neglect was facilitated by international disease surveillance networks with <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/cid/ciz611">large coverage gaps</a> in areas outside the Global North. It was also the result of overconfidence in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3726393">newly available treatments</a>.</p>
<p>Marked by political and economic instability, the following two decades experienced a rollback of healthcare provision. This happened in large parts of the Soviet sphere and also in Western-affiliated “developing countries” undergoing World Bank monitored programmes to implement free market policies. Without access to effective and affordable healthcare and sanitary services, local populations frequently turned to cheaper antibiotics to control disease.</p>
<p>The result was a further global surge of antimicrobial resistance right at a time when an increasing number of international drug companies began to withdraw investment in new antibiotic development due to <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26971595">a lack of profitability</a>. In 1988, a typhoid outbreak <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8406648">in Kashmir</a> proved resistant to all three first-line antibiotics. Similar outbreaks were soon reported from Shanghai, Pakistan, and the Mekong Delta. New genetic sequencing revealed that a large part of rising antibiotic resistance was associated with the spread of a specific haplotype (a distinct group of genes clustered together on a single inherited chromosome). </p>
<p>Designated “H58”, organisms with this haplotype were undergoing a significant population expansion and conferred bacterial resistance not only against older first-line drugs but increasingly against new reserve antibiotics (like the fluoroquinolones and cephalosporins). By the late 1990s, the majority of strains isolated from a large-scale outbreak involving thousands of patients in formerly Soviet Tajikistan proved resistant to the fluoroquinolones. Sporadic cephalosporin resistance was reported from the <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/cid/ciz556">early 2000s onwards</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294639/original/file-20190928-185407-jkzuj1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/294639/original/file-20190928-185407-jkzuj1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294639/original/file-20190928-185407-jkzuj1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294639/original/file-20190928-185407-jkzuj1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294639/original/file-20190928-185407-jkzuj1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294639/original/file-20190928-185407-jkzuj1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/294639/original/file-20190928-185407-jkzuj1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Wellcome-Sanger Map: Population structure of the <em>S.</em> Typhi H58 lineage.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">PATH</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The current Pakistani <a href="https://www.sanger.ac.uk/news/view/typhoid-outbreak-genetic-cause-extensive-drug-resistance-found">outbreak of XDR typhoid</a>, which began in 2016, is caused by a variant of H58 that is resistant to all antibiotics (except azithromycin) commonly used against typhoid. Total pan-resistance to locally available drugs may only be one mutation away.</p>
<h2>A new generation of vaccines</h2>
<p>This uneven history shows the limitations of making policy on a national or regional level when it comes to curbing border-crossing threats. Whether we choose to justify action out of ethical considerations of collective responsibility or out of enlightened self-interest, the global threat posed by XDR typhoid and the conditions producing multiple resistant pathogens like it will only be overcome by more – and not less – international involvement.</p>
<p>Fortunately, a new generation of vaccines could now provide a crucial cornerstone for new international efforts for typhoid control. New typhoid “Vi conjugate vaccines” (TCVs) have overcome <a href="http://www.gavi.org/library/news/press-releases/2017/millions-of-children-set-to-be-protected-against-typhoid-fever/">many hurdles</a>. One of these vaccines (Typbar-TCV®) only requires a single dose, is approved for children of six months and older (previous vaccines weren’t suitable for children under two) and was recently licensed in India, Nepal, Cambodia, and Nigeria. Other advanced TCV candidates are in manufacture and development. </p>
<p>These vaccines are no longer primarily designed to protect foreign travellers and limit acute outbreaks. They are also no longer being developed in areas of the world that need them the least; <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/cid/ciz483">Typbar-TCV</a> was developed and manufactured by the Indian company Bharat Biotec.</p>
<p>And in another twist of history that takes us back to Alice in Wonderland’s Oxford, Typbar-TCV was not tested on Indian but on British populations. In 2017, around 100 closely-observed participants drank live typhoid bacteria to test the vaccine for safety and efficacy. The carefully controlled Oxford “outbreak” is the largest recently recorded typhoid outbreak in the UK and provided critical data for the WHO’s decision <a href="https://www.who.int/immunization/newsroom/press/who_recommends_use_first_typhoid_conjugate_vaccine/en/">to recommend</a> the vaccine in 2018. This situation is a reversal of the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5617553/">current trend</a> for vaccines created in high-income countries but <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/cid/ciz630">tested</a> in low and middle-income countries. </p>
<p>The long-term implications of this geographic shift of vaccine development are significant. As Samir Saha at the Child Health Research Foundation at Dhaka, Bangladesh, <a href="https://www.jhsph.edu/ivac/2018/03/27/the-new-typhoid-conjugate-vaccine-marks-the-dawn-of-a-unique-beginning/">describes</a> it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We Bangladeshis, like any other low middle-income countries, usually receive a vaccine after 20-25 years of its introduction in the developed world – pneumococcal vaccines took 20 years and <a href="https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/hib/">Hib</a> vaccine took 25 years to travel here. This is the first time that a vaccine will be first introduced in a country where it is needed the most. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>A bio-social problem</h2>
<p>The arrival of the new vaccines is fantastic news during a time of failing antibiotics. But their roll-out will have to be accompanied by other measures if we are to move towards sustainable control of <a href="https://www.publichealthontario.ca/en/diseases-and-conditions/infectious-diseases/enteric-foodborne-diseases">diseases</a> that cause intestinal illnesses in low-income countries. As the long history of typhoid makes clear, effective health strategies have to integrate all available aspects of typhoid control.</p>
<p>Since around 1900, vaccines have played an important role in protecting travelling populations and military personnel <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4607109/">from typhoid</a>. But wider control has always also depended on the provision of robust drinking water and waste-water systems to prevent typhoid from spreading, an effective surveillance network to monitor typhoid incidence and the targeted provision of effective high-quality drugs to treat the disease. Over-reliance on any one intervention has repeatedly undermined wider control efforts. </p>
<p>At the same time, control efforts have to take place at multiple levels. Not only is there ample proof that ambitions for typhoid control cannot be limited to high-income countries alone, there is also strong evidence highlighting the importance of collaborations between local institutions for typhoid control. While 20th-century aid efforts primarily targeted nation states, a close look at the early “heroic age” of typhoid control reveals the importance of municipal and local actor coalitions in developing effective locally-tailored sanitary solutions. The provision of cheap affordable credit to facilitate initiatives with local buy-in was equally important. </p>
<p>Like any disease, typhoid is a complex phenomenon, driven by a bacteria but also the peculiarities of societal structures. Passing from one human to another over millennia, <em>Salmonella</em> Typhi has not only perfectly adapted to our living habits and environments but also bears the imprint of our antimicrobial interventions in its genetic code. Controlling it will require both biological and social interventions.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
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<p><em>For you: more from our <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/insights-series-71218?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">Insights series</a>:</em></p>
<ul>
<li><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/for-a-sustainable-future-we-need-to-reconnect-with-what-were-eating-and-each-other-123490?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">For a sustainable future, we need to reconnect with what we’re eating – and each other</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/they-put-a-few-coins-in-your-hands-to-drop-a-baby-in-you-265-stories-of-haitian-children-abandoned-by-un-fathers-114854?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">‘They put a few coins in your hands to drop a baby in you’ – 265 stories of Haitian children abandoned by UN fathers</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/the-new-right-how-a-frenchman-born-150-years-ago-inspired-the-extreme-nationalism-behind-brexit-and-donald-trump-117277?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">The New Right: how a Frenchman born 150 years ago inspired the extreme nationalism behind Brexit and Donald Trump</a></em></p></li>
</ul>
<p><em>To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/the-daily-newsletter-2?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK"><strong>Subscribe to our newsletter</strong></a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/121282/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Claas Kirchhelle receives funding from the New Venture Fund and the Wellcome Trust (University Award, University College Dublin 2020-2025). </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Samantha Vanderslott receives funding from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and the New Venture Fund. She is also a steering committee member for the Vaccination Acceptance Research Network (VARN).</span></em></p>
We’ve known how to control typhoid for over 100 years. The rapid current increase of drug-resistant variants in both rich and poor countries is down to decades of short-sighted global health policies.
Claas Kirchhelle, Lecturer in the History of Medicine, University College Dublin
Samantha Vanderslott, Postdoctoral Researcher in Social Sciences, University of Oxford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/120133
2019-07-17T23:02:50Z
2019-07-17T23:02:50Z
Mathematics is about wonder, creativity and fun, so let’s teach it that way
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/284141/original/file-20190715-173355-10cjyhl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C79%2C994%2C534&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Why don't students say math is imaginative? Here, the White Rabbit character originally from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, written under mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's pen name, Lewis Carroll. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Alice in Wonderland enthusiasts recently celebrated the story’s anniversary with creative events like playing with <a href="https://www.storymuseum.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/alices-day/">puzzles and time</a> — and future Alice <a href="https://londonist.com/london/museums-and-galleries/alice-in-wonderland-exhibition-v-and-a-2020">exhibits are in the works</a>. The original 1865 children’s book <em>Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland</em>, sprung from a mathematician’s imagination, continues to inspire exploration and fun. </p>
<p>But is a connection between math and creativity captured in schools? Much discussion across the western world from both experts and the public has emphasized the need to <a href="https://www.nctm.org/Store/Products/Catalyzing-Change-in-High-School-Mathematics/">revitalize high school mathematics</a>: critics say the experience is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/opinion/sunday/fix-high-school-education.html">boring</a> or <a href="https://qz.com/377742/this-school-in-norway-abandoned-teaching-subjects-40-years-ago/">not meaningful to most students</a>. Experts concerned with the public interest and decision-making say students need skills in <a href="https://cca-reports.ca/reports/some-assembly-required-stem-skills-and-canadas-economic-productivity/">critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration</a>. </p>
<p>Mathematicians, philosophers and educators are also concerned with the excitement and energy of creative expression, with invention, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40248373">with wonder</a> and even with what might be called <a href="https://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2548/Whitehead-Alfred-North-1861-1947.html">the romance of learning</a>. </p>
<p>Mathematics has all the attributes of the paragraph above, and so it seems to me that <a href="https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci8020056">what’s missing from high school math is mathematics itself</a>.</p>
<p>I am now working with colleagues at Queen’s University and the University of Ottawa to develop <a href="http://www.rabbitmath.ca">RabbitMath,</a> a senior level high-school math curriculum designed to enable students to work together creatively with a high level of personal engagement. My preparation for this has been 40 years of working with teachers in high-school classrooms. </p>
<p>In partnership with grades 11 and 12 math teachers, we will be piloting this curriculum over the next few years.</p>
<h2>Mathematical novels</h2>
<p>When students study literature, drama or the creative arts in high school, the curriculum centres on what can be called sophisticated works of art, created in response to life’s struggles and triumphs. </p>
<p>But currently in school mathematics, this is rarely the case: students are not connected to the larger imaginative projects through which professional mathematicians confront the world’s problems or explore the world’s mysteries. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/284191/original/file-20190715-173351-drn82p.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/284191/original/file-20190715-173351-drn82p.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284191/original/file-20190715-173351-drn82p.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284191/original/file-20190715-173351-drn82p.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284191/original/file-20190715-173351-drn82p.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284191/original/file-20190715-173351-drn82p.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284191/original/file-20190715-173351-drn82p.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The author, Peter Taylor, right, at a Lisgar Collegiate Institute Grade 11 math classroom in Ottawa, 2018.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Ann Arden)</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Mathematician Jo Boaler from the Stanford Graduate School of Education says that a <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-ca/Mathematical+Mindsets%3A+Unleashing+Students%27+Potential+through+Creative+Math%2C+Inspiring+Messages+and+Innovative+Teaching-p-9780470894521">“wide gulf between real mathematics and school mathematics is at the heart of the math problems we face in school education.”</a></p>
<p>Of the subject of mathematics, Boaler notes that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Students will typically say it is a subject of calculations, procedures, or rules. But when we ask mathematicians what math is, they will say it is the study of patterns that is an aesthetic, creative, and beautiful subject. Why are these descriptions so different?” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>She points out the same gulf isn’t seen if people ask students and English-literature professors what literature is about. </p>
<p>In the process of constructing the RabbitMath curriculum, problems or activities are included when team members find them engaging and a challenge to their intellect and imagination. Following the analogy with literature, we call the models we are working with mathematical novels. </p>
<p>For example, one project invites students to work with ocean tides. It would hard to find a dramatic cycle as majestic as the effect of that sublime distant moon on the powerful tidal action in the Bay of Fundy.</p>
<h2>Student engagement</h2>
<p>In the 1970s, the extraordinary mathematician and computer scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Seymour Papert, noticed that in art class, students, just as mature artists, are involved in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/0020739700030306">personally meaningful work</a>. Papert’s objective was to be able to say the same of a mathematics student.</p>
<p>I had a parallel experience in 2013 when I was the internal reviewer for the Drama program at Queen’s. I marvelled at students’ creative passion as they prepared to stage a performance. And they weren’t all actors: they were singers, musicians, writers, composers, directors and technicians.</p>
<p>In Papert’s curriculum model, students with diverse abilities and interests <a href="https://flm-journal.org/index.php?do=details&lang=en&vol=37&num=2&pages=25-29&ArtID=1146">work together on projects</a>, whereby they collaborate on problems, strategies and outcomes. </p>
<p>As a pioneering computer scientist, Papert understood that students could directly access the processes of design and construction through digital technology. Papert used his computer system LOGO for this technical interface. LOGO was limited in its scope, but Papert’s idea was way ahead of its time. </p>
<p>Students in the RabbitMath classroom will work together using the programming language Python to construct diagrams and animations to better understand their experiments with springs and tires, mirrors and music. They will produce videos that can explain to their classmates the workings of a sophisticated structure.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/284162/original/file-20190715-173342-15mge07.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/284162/original/file-20190715-173342-15mge07.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=228&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284162/original/file-20190715-173342-15mge07.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=228&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284162/original/file-20190715-173342-15mge07.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=228&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284162/original/file-20190715-173342-15mge07.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=286&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284162/original/file-20190715-173342-15mge07.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=286&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/284162/original/file-20190715-173342-15mge07.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=286&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">RabbitMath focuses on the analysis of complex structures. Students studying the curriculum will be involved presenting mathematical ‘stories.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(RabbitMath image by Skyepaphora)</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Today, technology, the internet, computer algebra systems and mathematical programming provide possibilities for immediate engagement in processes of design and construction — exactly what Papert wanted. The platform for RabbitMath is the <a href="https://jupyter.org/">Jupyter Notebook</a>, a direct descendant of LOGO.</p>
<h2>Technical skill</h2>
<p>For too many years, real progress in school mathematics education has been hamstrung by a ridiculous confrontation between so-called “traditional” and “discovery” math. The former is concerned with technical facility and the latter is about skills of inquiry and investigation.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ontario-math-has-always-covered-the-basics-115445">Ontario math has always covered 'the basics'</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>There is no conflict between the two; in fact they support each other rather well. Every sophisticated human endeavour, from conducting a symphony orchestra to putting a satellite into orbit, understands the complementary nature of technical facility and creative investigation. </p>
<p>Stanford University Graduate School of Education mathematician Keith Devlin advises parents to ensure their child has mastery of what he calls number sense, “<a href="https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27097">fluidity and flexibility with numbers, a sense of what numbers mean, and an ability to use mental mathematics to negotiate the world and make comparisons</a>.” But for students embarking on careers in science, technology or engineering, that is not enough, he says. They need a deep understanding of both those procedures and the concepts they rely on — the capacity to analyze and work with complex systems.</p>
<p>A high-school math class is a rich ecosystem of differing abilities, capacities, objectives and temperaments. </p>
<p>The educator’s goal must be to enable a diverse mix of students to work together in a math class as creatively and intensely as students in the drama program, or to bring the same personal passion as they might to writing fiction.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/120133/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Taylor receives funding from: The Mathematics Knowledge Network; The Fields Institute;The Canadian Mathematical Society; The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
</span></em></p>
Mathematician Peter Taylor taught high school math to prepare to develop a new ‘RabbitMath’ curriculum that emphasizes collaborative creativity and learning to work with complex systems.
Peter Taylor, Professor, Queen's University, Ontario
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/64694
2016-09-01T09:09:15Z
2016-09-01T09:09:15Z
Many parents won’t read their children scary stories – but perhaps we shouldn’t blame them
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136098/original/image-20160831-30768-19budnh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gwoeii/Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>As a children’s literature scholar, I’m filled with horror by the results of a <a href="https://www.thebookpeople.co.uk/blog/index.php/2016/08/09/the-baddest-book-characters/">recent survey</a> indicating that over a third of parents avoid reading frightening stories to their children. And as a parent of two small children, the study makes my heart sink and – in the manner of <a href="http://peterandjaneblog.blogspot.co.uk">blogging mother</a> Gill Sims – reach for the gin.</p>
<p>What exactly counts as frightening in a children’s book is a fairly moot point. Parents in the study named the Wicked Witch of the West and Red Riding Hood’s grandmother-gobbling wolf as fitting the bill.</p>
<p>Of course, it must vary from child to child. When I told my six-year-old what I was writing last night (i.e. this), he promptly decided against the poisonous animals section of Creaturepedia for fear of it giving him nightmares – we read about the spiky critters instead. Ernest the Moose, on the other hand, who is so large that his squirrel friend has to construct a fold-out page so that he can fit in his own book, is a source of huge amusement to my three-year-old – but possibly claustrophobia-inducing in another (more empathetic) child. Personally, I find the Cat In The Hat pretty sinister. And the Babar books are also deeply disturbing – in their representation of racial politics.</p>
<p>Fear is a moveable feast, temporally, geographically and culturally. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/alice-in-wonderland-14042">Alice of Wonderland fame</a> may be widely regarded as the epitome of innocence and delight but she almost never laughs, is fairly constantly belittled and berated, and spends a good deal of time more or less explicitly contemplating life after death. Reader after reader reports being scared out of their wits by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Tenniel">John Tenniel’s iconic illustrations</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136139/original/image-20160831-30790-1hv5sd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136139/original/image-20160831-30790-1hv5sd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136139/original/image-20160831-30790-1hv5sd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136139/original/image-20160831-30790-1hv5sd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136139/original/image-20160831-30790-1hv5sd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136139/original/image-20160831-30790-1hv5sd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=618&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136139/original/image-20160831-30790-1hv5sd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=618&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136139/original/image-20160831-30790-1hv5sd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=618&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">From John Tenniel’s Alice in Wonderland.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Tenniel_-_Illustration_from_The_Nursery_Alice_(1890)_-_c06543_08.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>All the (good) deaths and funerals that permeate 19th-century literature must be more troubling in today’s secular society than they would have been at the time. The classic example that does the rounds of the children’s literature world is Mary Martha Sherwood’s <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29725/29725-h/29725-h.htm">History of the Fairchild Family</a> (1818-1847), famously featuring a father escorting his children to a hanging in order to teach them about the consequences of fraternal discord. Today, even quite young Francophone children can read stories about <a href="http://www.ricochet-jeunes.org/livres/livre/3106-reves-amers">child slavery</a> and <a href="http://www.ricochet-jeunes.org/livres/livre/4171-alerte-au-cyclone">deathly hurricanes</a> and (in picture book form) <a href="http://www.leseditionsdelabagnole.com/fete-morts/dany-laferriere/livre/9782923342276">the day of the dead</a>.</p>
<p>There is certainly no shortage of dark and difficult material in children’s books, even for the very young. Having spent a good deal of my scholarly career on books for children featuring journeys to hell and back (not to mention slavery and sexualised treasure maps), and having recently examined a doctoral thesis on physical, sexual and psychological abuse in French children’s literature, I know that there are no taboos; that nothing is off–limits in books for the young.</p>
<p>And the scholar in me knows that it’s important for children to encounter difficult and challenging material, to confront their fears and anxieties in the space of the book. Quite apart from anything else, being afraid or horrified or disgusted can, in the closed, reassuring world of narrative, be a thrilling and deeply pleasurable experience. </p>
<p>Even when it’s not enjoyable, it’s still vitally important. The inevitable comparison is with forms of physical activity, and, in a health and safety obsessed, no blame no gain culture, the dangers of wrapping children up in cotton wool. Kids need to get stung and fall out of trees if they’re going to build the resources to deal with all the various bumps and knocks and traumas that their lives will throw at them.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136145/original/image-20160831-30768-ccqrm9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136145/original/image-20160831-30768-ccqrm9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136145/original/image-20160831-30768-ccqrm9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136145/original/image-20160831-30768-ccqrm9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136145/original/image-20160831-30768-ccqrm9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136145/original/image-20160831-30768-ccqrm9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136145/original/image-20160831-30768-ccqrm9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136145/original/image-20160831-30768-ccqrm9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gobbled grandmothers too much after an exhausting day?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WalterCrane-Little_Red_Riding_Hood-4.png">Walter Crane, Little Red Riding Hood.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And I know all this. But as a parent, and especially as a tired working one (what other kind is there?) I can’t help feeling that this study is yet another stick with which to beat already battered and bruised parents. At the end of a long day, having just seen the evening news with all the woes of the world on view, almost the last thing I want to do is deal with death and darkness and destruction when I read my children their bedtime stories. What I want is to be close to them and to share something stupid or funny or beautiful before they sleep. </p>
<p>Perhaps I’m putting my own needs before theirs. Perhaps it will be different when – if! – they read alone. But for the time being, it seems to me that what matters most is the intimacy that reading can generate. A sense of shared pleasure and contact and connection.</p>
<p>There are obviously plenty of other times in the day when books can be pored over. But I’d bet that few really frightening books for children are owned by parents today. Certainly, even in the fairly progressive, cosmopolitan and (I like to think) cultured world my children are growing up in, it’s fairly unimaginable to offer a “difficult” or frightening book to a child as a birthday or Christmas present. There are definitely books I’ve picked up and put back down again, shuddering at what Johnnie’s parents would think about marking their much-loved infant’s birthday with a picture book about the plight of child refugees.</p>
<p>Because of this, tons of ultra anodyne books are littering the homes of flustered and frenetic families today. Children’s books are big business and publishers both cater to and stoke parental anxieties and protectionism. Big companies take punts on “difficult” books less and less, and it’s left to small, imperilled independents to fill these crucial gaps.</p>
<p>And this is one of the many, many, reasons why we should support small publishing initiatives like <a href="http://towerblockbooks.com">Tower Block Books</a>, and why public libraries and independent reading in schools must, categorically, be protected. Books are certainly gifts to the next generation, but they’re not just for Christmas (or birthdays). Parents, publishers and politicians all have their part to play. Children need to encounter all manner of books from all manner of sources dealing with all of the multifarious experiences of life. Children need the books that parents like me can’t themselves always face.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64694/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kiera Vaclavik does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A recent survey suggests that a third of UK parents avoid reading their children scary stories. Is this a worrying trend?
Kiera Vaclavik, Professor of Children's Literature & Childhood Culture, Queen Mary University of London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/60136
2016-05-31T11:55:31Z
2016-05-31T11:55:31Z
Alice in the asylum: Wonderland and the real mad tea parties of the Victorians
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124325/original/image-20160527-864-hb1eb2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© 2016 Disney Enterprises, Inc.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Textbook case of female hysteria!” concludes a creepily grinning lab-coated medical professional in Disney’s anxiously anticipated new animated Alice film, Alice Through The Looking Glass.</p>
<p>It’s certainly not the first time Alice has been linked with madness. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFrs5UGB-ns">American McGee’s Alice video games</a> start off in an asylum, and many early reviews point out the <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/03/29/alice_is_hysterical_in_a_through_the_looking_glass_trailer.html">similarity</a> of the Alice sequel to Disney’s 1985 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089908/">Return to Oz</a>, in which Alice’s American counterpart Dorothy is likewise transferred to a rather Victorian-looking madhouse for her fantastical dreams.</p>
<p>The connection doesn’t come from nowhere. Lewis Carroll’s <a href="http://lewiscarrollsociety.org.uk/pages/aboutcharlesdodgson/works/alice.html">original novels</a> are littered with references to madness, many of which have acquired a life of their own, especially the Mad Hatter’s tea party. There is <a href="http://briansibleysblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/the-independence-of-alice.html">barely a politician in recent history</a> that has not been recast as one of its participants and adorned with an oversized hat labelled 10/6. And it’s in this spirit that Disney’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/may/26/alice-through-the-looking-glass-review">Alice Through the Looking Glass</a> kicks us off into a new adventure: Alice, having escaped the asylum through a large mirror, must save the Hatter by going back in time.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xWQxAcUSdOU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Madness has been a popular topic ever since the infamous <a href="https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/disability-history/1050-1485/from-bethlehem-to-bedlam/">Bethlem Asylum</a> opened its doors to visitors in the 17th century. Then, crowds flocked to ogle at its terrifying conditions.</p>
<p>In turn, asylum inmates went round the houses to sing, often still covered in the straw they slept on, creating a stereotype that lives on in Alice. Carroll’s Mad Hatter sings the nonsensical “Twinkle, twinkle little bat”. And “to have straw on one’s head” marked not only William Shakespeare’s King Lear as mad, but also John Tenniel’s depiction of Carroll’s <a href="https://frankendodo.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/tea-party.jpg">March Hare</a>.</p>
<p>With the industrial revolution, and the extremely poor working conditions that came with it, populations in so-called “pauper lunatic asylums” for the working class sky-rocketed. Asylum patients usually reflected the local industries, and most frequently included workers of the shoe and textile industries, weavers, tailors, and (you guessed it) hatters. Although patients were then far more often overworked, consumptive or starved, than <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/may/26/alice-through-the-looking-glass-review">affected by mercury-poisoning</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124334/original/image-20160527-883-1x017g0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124334/original/image-20160527-883-1x017g0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124334/original/image-20160527-883-1x017g0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124334/original/image-20160527-883-1x017g0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124334/original/image-20160527-883-1x017g0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124334/original/image-20160527-883-1x017g0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124334/original/image-20160527-883-1x017g0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tenniel’s March Hare.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Tenniel_-_Illustration_from_The_Nursery_Alice_(1890)_-_c03757_07.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Asylum tea parties</h2>
<p>One of the officers of the Lunacy Commission, the body for asylum supervision, was, in fact, Lewis Carroll’s uncle Robert Wilfred Skeffington Lutwidge, whose work offers stunning insights into the madness in Alice. Instead of incarceration and straitjackets, progressive Victorian psychiatrists trialled the so-called “non-restraint system”. Introducing farming and gardening, needlework and mending to keep inmates occupied, they even sold produce to generate extra income for their institutions.</p>
<p>Dances and concerts were held for entertainment, and presented to the outside world as spectacles. Visitors admired the re-socialisation of those previously thought incurable – as even Charles Dickens <a href="https://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/%7Ematsuoka/CD-Dance.html">reported</a>. Such activities mirrored the customs and morals of Victorian high society: they even included tea parties. A report from the York Retreat, an institution run by an early pioneer of the non-restraint method, Samuel Tuke, is not altogether dissimilar to Carroll’s tea party:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The female superintendent […] occasionally gives a general invitation to the patients, to a tea party. All who attend, dress in their best clothes, and vie with each other in politeness and propriety. The best fare is provided, and the visitors are treated with all the attention of strangers […] The patients control, in a wonderful degree, their different propensities; and the scene is at once curious, and affectingly gratifying.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Carroll himself visited such an asylum at least once, and, as I explored in a recent <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13555502.2016.1167767">article</a>, had plenty of contact with psychiatric professionals.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124335/original/image-20160527-864-18x05n1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124335/original/image-20160527-864-18x05n1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124335/original/image-20160527-864-18x05n1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124335/original/image-20160527-864-18x05n1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124335/original/image-20160527-864-18x05n1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124335/original/image-20160527-864-18x05n1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124335/original/image-20160527-864-18x05n1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Classic hysteria’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© 2016 Disney Enterprises, Inc.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘All mad here?’</h2>
<p>Modern historians, such as Elaine Showalter in her book <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v09/n19/andrew-scull/dazeland">The Female Malady</a>, have framed these then progressive methods more critically, illuminating how they were instigated by men from the upper strata of society and imposed gender and class norms, treating the mentally ill like children.</p>
<p>To Carroll, these tensions offered the potential for moral criticism. Alice undermines the rigid, patronising <a href="https://theconversation.com/alices-adventures-in-cyberspace-lewis-carrolls-creation-turns-150-49764">moral structures of the Victorian adult world</a>, dismissing them as “nothing but a pack of cards”. To Disney scriptwriter Linda Woolverton, they provide the stuff her gender criticism is made of. <a href="http://uk.ign.com/articles/2016/05/26/linda-woolverton-on-adapting-alice-through-the-looking-glass-live-action-vs-animation">Re-introducing Alice</a> as a business-minded sea captain, she “did a lot of research on Victorian mores, on how young girls were supposed to behave, and then did exactly the opposite”. </p>
<p>And madness, as a threat to any “rational” status quo, comes in handy. In the Victorian age of science and empiricism, madness was felt as a threat to rationality. Dreaming was feared by some prominent Victorian psychologists as a pre-stage of madness; the line between waking, dreaming, and madness was blurred (Wonderland is, of course, a dream). </p>
<p>In Carroll’s looking glass, this border is embodied in the mirror. Like the lens of the eye that separates the manifest, rational world, from the world of our mind, transcending the looking glass transports us into an immaterial world, a space where the impossible becomes possible – including time travel, overturning gender norms and professional and social restrictions.</p>
<p>Female hysteria was believed to originate from an over-stimulation of the imagination, the creative mental faculty taking over. So the mental state of Alice in no way originated in the <a href="http://www.lewiscarroll.org/faq/">consumption of psychedelic drugs</a>, as much as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvJK6Xe_Mrg">Pink’s version of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit</a> may hint at it. </p>
<p>But it is perhaps this historical link with madness, as a literary device to challenge social norms, that makes Alice relevant to us in the 21st century. The greatest potential of Disney’s newest Alice adventure certainly lies in its attempt to redefine identities and challenge the restrictiveness of past and existing systems. With this in mind, we <em>are</em> probably all mad here.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/60136/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Franziska Kohlt is affiliated with The Lewis Carroll Society. </span></em></p>
Madness allows us to challenge the stereotypes of the rational world.
Franziska Kohlt, PhD Candidate & Teaching Assistant, University of Oxford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/49764
2015-11-26T16:55:30Z
2015-11-26T16:55:30Z
Alice’s adventures in cyberspace: Lewis Carroll’s creation turns 150
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103190/original/image-20151125-23833-y6fplt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A drawing from Lewis Carroll's manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground, written between 1862-64.
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.bl.uk/press/images?page=2&inViewer=imgID9600A1A7-E7AA-407B-9AE4-8EF605E10849#sthash.bEAbj2ZT.dpuf">© The British Library Board</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the past 150 years Lewis Carroll’s Alice has undergone innumerable transformations. Instantly popular, she quickly escaped her original novelistic environment, appearing in Victorian Punch caricatures, on <a href="http://www.bdcmuseum.org.uk/explore/item/64077/">magic lantern slides</a> and <a href="http://cache3.asset-cache.net/gc/463956005-alice-and-the-dormouse-1887-a-photograph-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=GkZZ8bf5zL1ZiijUmxa7QdjqQlDzvN8Q%2F%2B9MFZcOksD%2BkCiKVpVsdWBR39sIDHKE%2BKkXHLwq%2BpxkZBr6cDi98w%3D%3D">on stage</a>. Only five years after Carroll’s death, Alice in Wonderland had already been made into a short <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJoW1Xqndzs">silent film</a>. </p>
<p>Ever since, her pioneering success in multimedia has continued: Alice escapes the whirl of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043274/">Disney</a>’s colourful and sugar-coated animated Wonderland (1951), navigates Jonathan Miller’s mesmerising monochrome <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060089/">Alice</a> (1966), and even conquers Jan Švankmajer’s stop-motion surrealist <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095715/?ref_=nm_knf_i2">experiment</a> (1988). In the spirit of the original dizzying dream-venture, Alice is always trailblazing through new and uncharted territory, always embracing new possibilities, her adventures always somewhat unsettling. </p>
<p>This sentiment has also characterised her ventures into the dawn of the 21st century, conquering cyberspace in a set of <a href="http://www.ea.com/alice">video games</a> by the master of the digital Gothic fairy-tale, American McGee. These games strike a distinctly darker note: set after the death of Alice Liddell’s family in a house fire, the now teenaged Alice lives in a Victorian London asylum.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103178/original/image-20151125-23864-zit6yj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103178/original/image-20151125-23864-zit6yj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103178/original/image-20151125-23864-zit6yj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103178/original/image-20151125-23864-zit6yj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103178/original/image-20151125-23864-zit6yj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103178/original/image-20151125-23864-zit6yj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103178/original/image-20151125-23864-zit6yj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">American McGee’s Alice Madness Returns.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/emalord/8075134024/in/album-72157631739690584/">emalord/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Here, in the hands of a mesmerist-come-psychiatrist, she struggles to regain memory of the incident. Navigating her post-traumatic hallucinatory spells in wonderland, Alice fuses past and present. Players embark on a journey to recover fragments of her lost memories in an upset psychological dreamscape, which disintegrates the deeper they penetrate into Alice’s mind.</p>
<h2>Alice Reloaded</h2>
<p>McGee’s and Carroll’s stories might at first seem unlike, but one can teach us a lot about the other. Whether configured as dream or visions of madness, Alice’s imaginations react, in fantastical manner, to actual historical realities. </p>
<p>Carroll’s Alice is a story written by an Oxford don for the dean’s daughter. In her dream this Victorian girl gains the agency to question the power dynamics of her environment. Her vision turns popular Victorian morality poems and the etiquette of the tea-party into “uncommon nonsense”, questioning the genuineness of their underlying morality.</p>
<p>McGee latches on to this subversive potential. Industrial corruption is a major theme of the game, for instance. His Hatter and Hare turn into steampunk horror owners of a tea factory, enslaving and mechanically enhancing wonderland creatures. Industry appears as a new religion overriding the individual, visually embodied in a gigantic polluting train shaped like a Gothic cathedral – a take on Victorian history that hits home even almost two centuries after the Victorians. The player helps Alice to uncover these atrocities.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103182/original/image-20151125-23816-10btou9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103182/original/image-20151125-23816-10btou9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103182/original/image-20151125-23816-10btou9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103182/original/image-20151125-23816-10btou9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103182/original/image-20151125-23816-10btou9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103182/original/image-20151125-23816-10btou9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103182/original/image-20151125-23816-10btou9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Industrial hell.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/emalord/8082553121/in/album-72157631739690584/">emalord/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Further adventures</h2>
<p>Many modern scholars <a href="https://theconversation.com/after-150-years-we-still-havent-solved-the-puzzle-of-alice-in-wonderland-44049">have acknowledged</a> the significance of Carroll’s classic as a watershed moment in the history of children’s literature. Carroll’s heroine, unlike those of other dream-journeys, does not progress by obeying moral agendas. She actively questions the static doctrines of the parodied adult figures of Wonderland, acting according to her own will. </p>
<p>In doing so, Alice puts a magnifying glass to reality, enlarging fragments of it to terrifying dimensions. She becomes a subversive interpreter of the world, a conqueror ascending to a position to dismiss a Royal court as “nothing but a pack of cards”. It is this core element of Alice’s appeal to modern audiences that McGee has focused on in his games. </p>
<p>McGee understands Alice as someone who has conquered both the physical and the mindspace. Envisaged as a trilogy from the start, he takes the notion of Alice as a explorer of psychology further in his most recent instalment, a series of short films rather than a game. In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWRhH2Zw8no">Alice: Otherlands</a> (2015) Alice hops from her mind into others, peering into the creative genius that drove the 19th century. In films of diverse styles she explores the minds of scientist Edison, of painter Vincent van Gogh, composer Richard Wagner, or of science fiction writer <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RoOnfC2Cao">Jules Verne</a>, and accompanies them on their extraordinary journeys of artistic invention. Alice, once again becomes our guide and interpreter, this time to the process of transforming reality into vision, into art, itself. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7RoOnfC2Cao?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>Underground icon and pioneer</h2>
<p>Often criticised for the dark tone of his adaptation, McGee confidently explained to me <a href="http://lewiscarrollsociety.org.uk/store/">in an interview</a> that he never “decided” that Alice should become a “gothy” character. Instead, he believes, “we were all aware of it, subconsciously”, noting “she was already a captain, an icon of that feeling” of “underground culture”. She literally and figuratively navigates what Donald Rackin <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/460819?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">has called</a> “the comic horror-vision of the chaotic land beneath the man-made groundwork of Western thought and convention.”</p>
<p>Alice is always somehow “us”, but not “them”. She acts as a mediator. McGee is on side with Carroll creating an empowered heroine, a “beautiful, powerful, and interesting person” – appealing to us <a href="https://theconversation.com/dressing-down-the-rabbit-hole-how-to-become-alice-in-wonderland-40398">aesthetically</a> and intellectually. We were always somehow part of what was inherently conceived as an interactive story. It was, after all, the reader who had to turn the page to make Tenniel’s illustration of the Cheshire Cat disappear. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103192/original/image-20151125-23816-aylo3y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103192/original/image-20151125-23816-aylo3y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103192/original/image-20151125-23816-aylo3y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103192/original/image-20151125-23816-aylo3y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103192/original/image-20151125-23816-aylo3y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103192/original/image-20151125-23816-aylo3y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103192/original/image-20151125-23816-aylo3y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The original Cheshire Cat, disappearing …</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Perhaps one of the reasons Alice remains so successful is the timelessly powerful narrative pattern of making sense of the world through the eyes of a questioning outsider. And in this vein, McGee, like many before him, follows Carroll’s footsteps endowing the “reader” of his tale with agency.</p>
<p>In a century in which interactive digital media offers novel ways of drawing in the “reader”, we not only discover with Alice, we can become Alice, and discover yet unknown realities underlying our own lands that make us wonder. So here’s to the next 150 years of Alice.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49764/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Franziska Kohlt is affiliated with The University of Oxford and The Lewis Carroll Society. </span></em></p>
Alice has always trail-blazed through new and uncharted territory, and this is no less true of her ventures into the 21st century.
Franziska Kohlt, PhD Candidate & Teaching Assistant in Literature and Science, University of Oxford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/49739
2015-10-26T00:22:01Z
2015-10-26T00:22:01Z
Alice in Wonderland at 150: Why fantasy stories about girls transcend time
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99587/original/image-20151025-18454-1bwqn8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Nursery Alice, illustrated by John Tenniel.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://i.ytimg.com/vi/2YG8ybByVF8/maxresdefault.jpg">Jane Burdon Morris/YouTube</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s <a href="http://www.alice150.com/">150 years </a>since an Oxford mathematics don published the most important work of children’s literature and one of the most influential books of all time.</p>
<p>The origins of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in a story that Charles Dodgson told 10-year-old <a href="http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/resources/background/alice-liddell/">Alice Liddell</a> and her two sisters while rowing along the Thames in 1862 are well known. What is less understood is why it has become such an enduring cultural touchstone across the globe.</p>
<p>Many popular stories can be distilled to the basic structure of a male hero undertaking a quest. In 1949, Joseph Campbell described the common features of the <a href="http://theconversation.com/are-you-monomythic-joseph-campbell-and-the-heros-journey-27074">“monomyth” or hero’s journey</a> that are evident in stories from those of Buddha and Jesus to Luke Skywalker.</p>
<p>Contrary to the dominance of heroic tales of men, there are several iconic narratives of pre-pubescent girls journeying through dream-like fantastic realms that have become enduring phenomena.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99588/original/image-20151026-18440-1mi3ffs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99588/original/image-20151026-18440-1mi3ffs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99588/original/image-20151026-18440-1mi3ffs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99588/original/image-20151026-18440-1mi3ffs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99588/original/image-20151026-18440-1mi3ffs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99588/original/image-20151026-18440-1mi3ffs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99588/original/image-20151026-18440-1mi3ffs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In W.W. Denslow’s illustrations and L. Frank Baum’s original text, Dorothy is a much younger girl (with silver shoes instead of ruby slippers).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like the ubiquitous Alice, Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz has gained a life of her own beyond L. Frank Baum’s books. The Kansas orphan’s journey into Oz is, if anything, better known through the MGM film starring Judy Garland. The film transforms Dorothy’s journey into nothing but a dream— like Alice’s— inspired by a cyclone-induced blow to the head.</p>
<p>The stories of Alice, Dorothy and more recent girl protagonists in popular fantasies, such as Sarah’s encounters with the Goblin King in the 1986 film Labyrinth, are strongly inflected by fairy-tale tradition. Campbell himself <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=xn5pY3z5Kf4C&pg=PA243&lpg=PA243&dq=%22had+to+go+to+the+fairy+tales%22+joseph+campbell&source=bl&ots=-8JWic4Mb1&sig=VclS6Tz3LaQG2-1XyMz3VcK2WLY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAmoVChMIsamTtrDdyAIVhDKmCh2NQQh4#v=onepage&q=%22had%">later acknowledged</a> that he “had to go to the fairy tales” in order to bring any semblance of female heroism into The Hero with a Thousand Faces.</p>
<p>As fairy tale scholar Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario explains throughout <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07491409.2004.10162465">her work</a>, fairy tales are most often about girls on the cusp of maturation and marriage.</p>
<p>In their original book incarnations, however, both Alice and Dorothy are very young girls: Alice is just seven and Dorothy is <a href="http://newwwoz.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/the-characters-of-oz-dorothy-gale.html">estimated to be eight</a>. Carroll was notoriously fascinated by pre-pubescent girls, whom he often <a href="http://www.photography-news.com/2015/01/lewis-carrolls-haunting-photographs-of.html">photographed</a> in staged poses.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99592/original/image-20151026-18458-1o5kza8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99592/original/image-20151026-18458-1o5kza8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99592/original/image-20151026-18458-1o5kza8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99592/original/image-20151026-18458-1o5kza8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99592/original/image-20151026-18458-1o5kza8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99592/original/image-20151026-18458-1o5kza8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99592/original/image-20151026-18458-1o5kza8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alice Liddell as a beggar-maid, as photographed by Lewis Carroll.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The young ages of Alice and Dorothy free them from involvement in a romance plot. In girls’ fiction from the early twentieth century, it was common for adventurous heroines become hastily engaged in the final pages of a novel.</p>
<p>Even more importantly, as girls, Alice and Dorothy occupy a transitional borderland between childhood and adulthood. This also seems to make them more attuned to crossing the boundaries between fantasy and reality. </p>
<p>Whether this capacity derives from the combination of negative assessments of children and females as less rational in comparison with adults and males, or marks girls out as more perceptive and empathetic, is debatable.</p>
<p>What is clear is that these girl heroines take different paths to characters on the typical male hero’s journey. Even within fantastic literature, where anything is possible, there are clear gendered distinctions for protagonists.</p>
<p>As my Deakin colleague <a href="https://deakin.academia.edu/LenisePrater">Lenise Prater</a> pointed out to me in an important scholarly dialogue on this topic (a Facebook chat thread), female hero quests in fantasy tend to encompass an internal quest that takes place in a dreamscape. In contrast, male heroes enter into literal fantasy worlds; their adventures are supposed to be “real” with the space of the story.</p>
<p>The dreamy adventures of Alice work through or play with some of her waking interests and anxieties. As in Carroll’s text, Tim Burton’s film adaptation explicitly signals that Wonderland is a purely imaginary place. Alice suffers from nightmares about Wonderland as a child, and <a href="http://moviecultists.com/wp-content/uploads/screenplays/alice-in-wonderland.pdf">her father reminds her</a> that dreams cannot harm her and she can “always wake up”.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99594/original/image-20151026-18458-f527qe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99594/original/image-20151026-18458-f527qe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99594/original/image-20151026-18458-f527qe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99594/original/image-20151026-18458-f527qe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99594/original/image-20151026-18458-f527qe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=981&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99594/original/image-20151026-18458-f527qe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=981&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/99594/original/image-20151026-18458-f527qe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=981&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Judy Garland with her co-stars in a publicity still.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The MGM Oz film changes Dorothy’s journey into a dream through its casting of the same actors in roles in both sepia-toned Kansas and Technicolor Oz. (Farmhands Hunk, Hickory and Zeke appear as the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion, while neighbour Almira Gulch proves all dog-haters must surely be green-skinned witches.)</p>
<p>As lone questers, girl characters are the most vulnerable and physically weak. Despite their powerlessness in conventional respects, heroines such as Alice and Dorothy are able to survive the dangers posed by people and supernatural beings who possess advantages that are not available to them (adult authority and magic chief among them).</p>
<p>The lives of both Alice and Dorothy beyond their original books by Carroll and Baum suggest a cultural investment in stories about the most vulnerable of people. Alice and Dorothy experience the most amazing of journeys, in which they triumph over the highest forms of authority and power, from queens to witches.</p>
<p>It is reassuring that these stories about girls, who are often overlooked because of their age and gender, are almost universally known. Nevertheless, imagine the possibilities if our most iconic girl characters did not always have to “wake up” at the end of their adventures.</p>
<p>_<em>Michelle Smith will be chairing the Making Public Histories seminar on <a href="http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/whats-on/making-public-histories-seminar-series-melbournes-alice">“Melbourne’s Alice”</a> at the State Library of Victoria on 26 November 2015. _</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49739/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Smith has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>
It’s 150 years since an Oxford mathematics don published the most important work of children’s literature and one of the most influential books of all time. The origins of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland…
Michelle Smith, Research fellow in English Literature, Deakin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/44060
2015-07-04T01:03:09Z
2015-07-04T01:03:09Z
From avatars to apps: why we still love to go down the rabbit hole with Alice
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87374/original/image-20150703-20487-15fdy61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Playtime in Wonderland.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Children-play-on-alice-in-wonderland-sculpture-central-park-new-york-3.jpg">Pratyeka/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Few in the English-speaking world (and even the non-English-speaking world) are unfamiliar with Alice and her encounters with nonsense and play in Wonderland, whether through the original texts, or their many adaptations. Alice has walked across pages, stages, and screens; she is playable and played. </p>
<p>This timeless text speaks to all - adult, child, reader and player. The adaptability of Lewis Carroll’s language, the openness of its storyworld and the malleable nature of Alice’s character all beckon us to return to Wonderland in its many different guises.</p>
<p>From its publication in 1865, Carroll’s masterwork was a transmedia text – a story which could take many different forms. Its original telling was oral; the story was related by Carroll to the eponymous Alice Liddell and her sisters during a boat outing. The books retain this, as do many of the later adaptations: it is Carroll’s play with language – sounds, rhythms, and amorphous meanings – that sustains all of Wonderland.</p>
<p>The fun of Alice’s adventures is mostly found in the language itself, which emphasises the nonsensical nature of Wonderland and its mad characters. Carroll invents portmanteaus like “slithy” (a combination of “slimy” and “lithe”), creates absurd associations using rhyme and alliteration (as in <a href="http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/walrus.html">“The Walrus and the Carpenter”</a>), and jumbles up literal and figurative meanings (like the “caucus race” and the “clotheshorse”).</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87368/original/image-20150703-20493-4vi6rr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87368/original/image-20150703-20493-4vi6rr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=853&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87368/original/image-20150703-20493-4vi6rr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=853&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87368/original/image-20150703-20493-4vi6rr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=853&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87368/original/image-20150703-20493-4vi6rr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1072&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87368/original/image-20150703-20493-4vi6rr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1072&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87368/original/image-20150703-20493-4vi6rr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1072&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alice’s second incarnation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/misopocky/8094521102/sizes/l">misopocky/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The nonsense and play were a revelation to Victorian England; a society defined by rules, decorum and moral tales. The books flew off the shelves, and were quickly followed by stage adaptations. As each new technology emerged – film, radio, television, and digital media – Alice and Wonderland leaped into new life, from silent films to tablet apps, with varying degrees of success.</p>
<p>Walt Disney’s 1951 animated version – although a flop at the time – is now often regarded as a classic, and is perhaps the adaptation that modern audiences are most familiar with. Yet in his attempt to recreate the success of MGM’s <a href="http://www.filmsite.org/wiza.html">The Wizard of Oz</a>, Disney changed a fundamental aspect of the source work: he shoe-horned Alice’s sequence of non sequitur adventures into a formulaic film narrative. Perhaps this explains its initial lack of success, as well as that of later adaptations such as ABC’s recent TV series <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2802008/?ref_=nv_sr_5">Once Upon a Time in Wonderland</a>.</p>
<h2>Sandbox Wonderland</h2>
<p>Where Alice has proven rather successful as source material, however, is in realms where wordplay, riddles, and nonsense are free to gallop at will: roleplay, games, and cosplay. Sandbox, or open world games (such as <a href="http://www.thesims.com/">The Sims</a>, <a href="http://secondlife.com/">Second Life</a>, and <a href="http://minecraft.net">Minecraft</a>), invite the player to explore, engage in adventures, encounter new players and characters, and interact with them according to the rules of the gameworld (or lack thereof).</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87049/original/image-20150701-27131-1elk9ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87049/original/image-20150701-27131-1elk9ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87049/original/image-20150701-27131-1elk9ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87049/original/image-20150701-27131-1elk9ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87049/original/image-20150701-27131-1elk9ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87049/original/image-20150701-27131-1elk9ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87049/original/image-20150701-27131-1elk9ss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Otakuthon Alice and the Chesire Cat.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Wonderland itself is a sandbox of wordplay, nonsense, and fanciful characters, a world that cycles through literary, literal, and metaphorical games. It’s no surprise, then, that gamers have followed Alice down the rabbit hole for decades. From Japan and Korea to the UK and the US, Alice has played through <a href="http://msmemorial.if-legends.org/games.htm/wonder.php">text adventures</a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272444/">visual novels</a>, <a href="http://au.pc.gamespy.com/pc/american-mcgees-alice/">horror games</a>, and plain old <a href="https://www.mobygames.com/game/alice-in-wonderland___">video games</a>.</p>
<p>It’s only a short hop from sandbox games to sandbox software. Alice has loaned her name and her sense of play to the educational softwares <a href="http://www.alice.org/index.php">Alice</a> and <a href="http://www.inanimatealice.com">Inanimate Alice</a>. Her appeal to children and adults alike makes learning object-oriented programming and multimedia design fun and welcoming, encouraging experimentation and play with tools often seen as daunting and dull. The very elements – nonsense and play – that relieved Victorians from the doldrums of their rule-oriented society today relieves learners from the tedium of rote programming.</p>
<h2>Alice the Avatar</h2>
<p>What also helps Alice appeal to children and adults, players and learners, is her innate lack of a singular identity. Her one-size-fits-all character – never changing, never growing – can fit almost anyone. She is innocent and completely naïve to the rules of Wonderland; yet she is knowledgeable, frustrated at the subversion of the court. She is weak, failing to comprehend the oddities of the mad tea party; yet she is powerful and capable of working through the assorted language puzzles.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87369/original/image-20150703-20475-1qhpjd3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87369/original/image-20150703-20475-1qhpjd3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87369/original/image-20150703-20475-1qhpjd3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87369/original/image-20150703-20475-1qhpjd3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87369/original/image-20150703-20475-1qhpjd3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87369/original/image-20150703-20475-1qhpjd3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87369/original/image-20150703-20475-1qhpjd3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An unnerving question.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/spam/3355004619/sizes/l">Smath./Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The caterpillar repeatedly asks Alice; “Who are you?”, but Alice is generally unable to achieve a sense of her own self. While “Where am I?” is the central question of other fantasy stories such as <em>The Wizard of Oz</em> and_ The Chronicles of Narnia_,_ Alice in Wonderland_ cycles around the question of identity. </p>
<p>Alice is a figure in transition, between child and adult, learner and learned, apprentice and master. Her struggle in a world where language twists the rules and games cannot be won make her universal. We all relate to her experiences of being lost, misunderstanding and being misunderstood, and chasing shifting goalposts. In reality, these experiences are frustrating and stressful; in Wonderland they leave us, our parents and our children delighted.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/44060/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lyle Skains has received funding from HEFCW's Strategic Insight Programme.</span></em></p>
As Carroll’s classic turns 150, it’s time to reflect on what pulls us back to Wonderland.
Lyle Skains, Lecturer in Writing, Bangor University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/44049
2015-07-03T14:09:02Z
2015-07-03T14:09:02Z
After 150 years, we still haven’t solved the puzzle of Alice in Wonderland
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87342/original/image-20150703-20493-1aeooun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Making sense of madness.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_i_Eventyrland#/media/File:John_Tenniel_-_Illustration_from_The_Nursery_Alice_(1890)_-_c03757_07.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Alice is turning 150 this year, yet we still love to read about (or watch) this curious little girl’s adventures in Wonderland again and again. There’s something about this book that has made it a timeless classic, a fascinating story which has reached far beyond the children of the mid-19th century, for whom it was first written. </p>
<p>Part of the reason is that <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-h/11-h.htm">Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland</a> was a turning point in children’s literature. Earlier books and stories for children tended to have a strict focus on moral education and improvement. Most books were there to teach you how to be a good little boy or girl, rather than entertain or excite your imagination. But Lewis Carroll changed all that. </p>
<h2>Alice knows best</h2>
<p>Instead of instructing the child, Carroll centres his narrative on a young girl who lectures adults, in a world where everything is topsy-turvy. Alice dishes out advice on manners right, left and centre, and reprimands the inhabitants of Wonderland for rudeness and general madness. She knows best – the adults are unreliable, illogical and somewhat insane. This is a complete reversal of the way children and adults were portrayed in earlier literature.</p>
<p>The outcome is hilarious: the book’s irreverent humour appeals to the anarchic nature of the child. For example, well-respected verse of the time is ruthlessly parodied. The Mad Hatter recites “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! / How I wonder what you’re at!”, while Alice manages to perform a comical rendition of Robert Southe’s “<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/03/poem-week-lewis-carroll-robert-southey">The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them</a>”. </p>
<p>Carroll uses his narrative to mock the Victorian education system. Alice uses long words she doesn’t understand because they seem important. At school, the Mock Turtle has learned “Reeling and Writhing” and the “different branches of Arithmetic”: “Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision”. Word-play, nonsense, humour, parody, and role-reversals: these are staple ingredients of children’s books today, thanks to Carroll.</p>
<h2>(Mis)interpreting the mystery</h2>
<p>The reasons for Alice’s success abroad are a bit more complex, but they may be related to perceptions about the quintessential Britishness of the book. Wonderland has a queen, tea parties, games of croquet, and domestic servants. The nostalgic view of an idealised Victorian society is surely part of its attraction. These are some of the same ingredients that have made <a href="http://www.itv.com/downtonabbey">Downton Abbey</a> or the <a href="http://harrypotter.bloomsbury.com/uk/">Harry Potter</a> series so successful around the world.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87310/original/image-20150703-20484-17jyy8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87310/original/image-20150703-20484-17jyy8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87310/original/image-20150703-20484-17jyy8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87310/original/image-20150703-20484-17jyy8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87310/original/image-20150703-20484-17jyy8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1008&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87310/original/image-20150703-20484-17jyy8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1008&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87310/original/image-20150703-20484-17jyy8o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1008&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A bad influence?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%88%B1%E4%B8%BD%E4%B8%9D%E6%A2%A6%E6%B8%B8%E4%BB%99%E5%A2%83#/media/File:Alice_05a-1116x1492.jpg">Wikimedia commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But, perhaps most intriguingly, there is a lingering suggestion that the book has a dark underside. It has often been suggested the many magic foods that Alice consumes in Wonderland could be <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19254839">allusions to drugs</a>. She does eat from a magic mushroom, after all, while conversing with a hookah-smoking caterpillar. This is a pop culture interpretation, based on the way the surreal sequences of the book were perceived by later generations – notably the hippie culture of the 1960s and 70s – rather than any hard evidence. But it is a reading persists to this day, as demonstrated by the opening scenes of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2003/02/26/the_matrix_1999_review.shtml">The Matrix</a>. </p>
<p>Slightly more worrying were the doubts and aspersions cast on Lewis Carroll’s interest in Alice Liddell, the little girl for whom the story was originally told. Lewis did take <a href="http://www.photography-news.com/2015/01/lewis-carrolls-haunting-photographs-of.html">photographs of young girls</a>, which we might look at suspiciously today. Despite the fact that <a href="http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/editions/the-story-of-alice-lewis-carroll-and-the-secret-history-of-wonderland/9781473510999">recent scholarship</a> has proved such suspicions to be unfounded, the rumours <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/bbc/11368772/BBC-investigates-whether-Lewis-Carroll-was-repressed-paedophile-after-nude-photo-discovery.html">keep coming back</a>. </p>
<h2>Always a puzzle</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87308/original/image-20150703-20481-jao7xu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87308/original/image-20150703-20481-jao7xu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=617&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87308/original/image-20150703-20481-jao7xu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=617&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87308/original/image-20150703-20481-jao7xu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=617&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87308/original/image-20150703-20481-jao7xu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87308/original/image-20150703-20481-jao7xu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87308/original/image-20150703-20481-jao7xu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Unlocking a deeper meaning.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alice_par_John_Tenniel_03.png">Wikimedia commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Other readers go deeper into the text, in search of meaning. <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/3826513?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">On one reading</a>, the “dream” framework of the story is a metaphor for the journey inwards, towards the uncontrolled urges of the subconscious. After all, Alice seems to threaten to eat many of the characters in Wonderland, perhaps reflecting Freud’s <a href="http://www.britannica.com/topic/oral-stage">oral stage</a> of psychosexual development. And she is continually asked, “who are you?”, to which she does not always have a clear answer. </p>
<p>Or, it could be an allegory for the tumultuous process of growing up, represented by Alice literally waking up to reality at the end of the story. The search for a “deeper” meaning is made all the more captivating by the apparent meaninglessness of Alice’s strange and nonsensical encounters. </p>
<p>Ultimately, Alice in Wonderland is a wonderful example of an “open text” – a text that can mean what you want it to mean, depending on your perspective. It has become folklore, a meme that we love to reproduce. It is a story ambivalent enough to allow a multitude of interpretations. Fairy tales survive because they are versatile: they mean different things in different contexts. Alice in Wonderland has become a sort of modern fairy tale, and it will no doubt continue being adapted and interpreted for many more years to come. </p>
<p>As we wish happy 150th birthday to Alice, it’s also worth remembering that this is a story by a mathematician. I’m sure Carroll would have loved to know that his book remains a puzzle, which so many people are still trying to solve.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/44049/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dimitra Fimi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Carroll’s pivotal children’s classic offers a timeless mystery for generations to come.
Dimitra Fimi, Lecturer in English, Cardiff Metropolitan University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/40398
2015-04-29T05:11:44Z
2015-04-29T05:11:44Z
Dressing down the rabbit hole – how to become Alice in Wonderland
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/79611/original/image-20150428-3062-hsscfb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Fearne Cotton photographed for a Wonderland-inspired magazine shoot, 2006. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Ellis Parrinder</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The blue dress, the blonde hair, the white apron and the sense of adventure: Alice in Wonderland has certainly leapt free of Lewis Carroll’s pages into our imaginations, onto our screens and stages and beyond. These days, it’s a fairly common occurrence to “be Alice”. </p>
<p>As a series of images and objects in the V&A Museum of Childhood’s upcoming exhibition, <a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/moc/exhibitions-and-displays/the-alice-look/">The Alice Look</a> makes clear, people from across the world and all walks of life regularly dress as Alice for parties or Halloween, high-end photo shoots or even (their own) weddings. </p>
<p>Countless others wear garments adorned by Alice or associated with that unmistakable “Wonderland aesthetic” (think rabbits, playing cards, teacups, pocket watches). For the most part, this is a relatively superficial affair, lasting an evening or couple of days at most. But in some cases, a much more enduring and profound engagement with the character takes place. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/79621/original/image-20150428-3048-7944b8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/79621/original/image-20150428-3048-7944b8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79621/original/image-20150428-3048-7944b8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79621/original/image-20150428-3048-7944b8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79621/original/image-20150428-3048-7944b8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79621/original/image-20150428-3048-7944b8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79621/original/image-20150428-3048-7944b8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Poster advertising ladies boots manufactured by T Elliot & Sons, 1960s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Victoria and Albert Museum, London</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I recently met four such women who, over a sustained period, have lived, breathed and worked to actually become Alice. Fiona Fullerton was there, star of the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068190/">1972 feature film</a> directed by William Sterling. Then there was soprano Fflur Wyn, who is due to reprise her lead role in Opera Holland Park’s <a href="http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/subsites/investecoperahollandpark/alicetheopera.aspx">production</a> this summer, and Royal Ballet principal dancer Lauren Cuthbertson, for whom Christopher Wheeldon <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/lauren-cuthbertson-royal-ballets-first-alice-dances-into-prima-ballerina-wonderland-2226774.html">created the role of Alice</a> in 2011. Lastly, Lucy Farrett – who is one of the actresses in the <a href="http://www.alice-underground.com/">immersive theatre extravaganza</a> currently being performed in the Vaults under Waterloo station.</p>
<h2>Demanding Alice</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/79618/original/image-20150428-3062-rcw7cn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/79618/original/image-20150428-3062-rcw7cn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/79618/original/image-20150428-3062-rcw7cn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=883&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79618/original/image-20150428-3062-rcw7cn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=883&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79618/original/image-20150428-3062-rcw7cn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=883&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79618/original/image-20150428-3062-rcw7cn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1110&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79618/original/image-20150428-3062-rcw7cn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1110&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79618/original/image-20150428-3062-rcw7cn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1110&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sir John Tenniel illustration, 1886.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What quickly emerges in conversation with these women is the sheer physical strain of the role. There’s an impressive degree of multi-tasking involved: being Alice encompasses acting as well as dancing, puppetry and singing. Carroll himself was fully aware of the demands of the part, writing in an 1888 letter that it is “about as hard a one as a child ever took”, and observing with appropriately mathematical exactitude that it involved speaking no less that “215 times!” </p>
<p>Lauren Cuthbertson also quantified the gruelling nature of her version of the part: the terrible realisation that Act One involved dancing some 14 scenes back-to-back with no rest except a couple of rapid costume changes – and the 38 bruises which emerged in the aftermath of the first ever performance. In her open-air performance, Fflur Wyn endured the torments of multiple layers of costume under an unusually co-operative but fierce summer sun. </p>
<p>In the Vaults production, Alice is a deliberately fleeting presence, but the nature of the show still means that Farrett must deliver the same lines no less than 36 times… per evening! And if, for Fiona Fullerton, filming seems to have been a fun-filled series of interactions with British acting royalty, cycling merrily around Shepperton studios, it nevertheless involved three months away from home, trying to keep up with schoolwork whilst lodging in a provincial hotel filled to the rafters with elderly residents. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CXONhMCk4Wk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>Navigating age</h2>
<p>The demands of the role are such that it is highly unusual for children to play the role of Alice, who is just seven years old in the original text. </p>
<p>It seems certain that Carroll would have looked askance at the tendency to cast adults in the role. He once wrote of 30-year-old Ellen Terry (in a different production): “The gush of animal spirits of a light-hearted girl is beyond her now, poor thing! She can give a very clever imitation of it, but that is all.” </p>
<p>Many productions help bridge the gap between character and performer by making Alice older, frequently doubling her age or more. But a considerable age difference often still remains. Navigating between the pitfalls of excessive maturity and panto parody is surely one of the biggest challenges for performers and producers of Wonderland today. It’s perhaps made easier by the fact that performing freshness and innocence remains such a staple requirement for women on stage and screen – and beyond – today. </p>
<p>Fuzziness around the age issue is compounded in modern productions by the fact that the visual cues which enabled Victorian readers and audiences to immediately recognise Alice as a little girl (hair down, hem just below the knee, short sleeves) no longer pertain. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/79584/original/image-20150428-3093-3bxai8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/79584/original/image-20150428-3093-3bxai8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79584/original/image-20150428-3093-3bxai8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79584/original/image-20150428-3093-3bxai8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79584/original/image-20150428-3093-3bxai8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=626&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79584/original/image-20150428-3093-3bxai8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=626&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79584/original/image-20150428-3093-3bxai8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=626&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alice in Wonderland cotton chintz, C F A Voysey, 1920s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Victoria and Albert Museum, London</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Blue and white</h2>
<p>Tenniel’s original illustrations nevertheless serve as the model for countless Alice costumes including those of Fullerton and Wyn which, despite the 30 years separating them, differ from each other very little at all. </p>
<p>To set themselves apart, other productions deliberately eschew this classic Alice look of full-skirted blue dress and white pinafore. The Alice of the Vaults production, for example, wears a turquoise-green, neo-Victorian shabby-chic dress devoid of pinafore – although with key elements of Wonderland iconography such as a small gold pocket watch. </p>
<p>Similarly, in the Royal Ballet production, Cuthbertson wore, not blue, but lilac (perhaps in tribute to the first coloured Macmillan edition which adopted this colour). She also sported a short dark bob modelled not on Tenniel’s Alice but the real-life Alice (Liddell) for whom the book was initially produced.</p>
<p>Relatively minor modifications to colour and style notwithstanding, Alice’s appearance in each of these productions retains a distinct flavour of olde-worlde otherness and nostalgia. This is a point underlined by the fact that on the night we met, each of the Alices without exception appeared in a costume which has long dominated the female wardrobe but is still to make inroads into Alice’s look: namely, trousers. </p>
<p>It’s obvious that despite being widely hailed by critics and pundits in this anniversary year as a feisty, go-getting feminist icon, Alice has nevertheless remained – not unlike Lansley’s Alice trapped behind the looking-glass – in a considerably constrained conception of femininity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/40398/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kiera Vaclavik is the curator of 'The Alice Look' exhibition at the V&A Museum of Childhood. She receives funding from the Arts & Humanities Research Council. The views expressed in this article are her own.</span></em></p>
Meet four women who have lived, breathed and worked to actually become Alice.
Kiera Vaclavik, Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/38042
2015-02-26T00:20:21Z
2015-02-26T00:20:21Z
Be open to the impossible: Alice in Wonderland turns 150
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73024/original/image-20150225-1814-1r15h8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Mia Wasikowska looks down the rabbit hole in Tim Burton's 2010 film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Disney Enterprises/Imagenet/Leah Gallo</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The star of Melbourne’s White Night 2015, held last weekend, was Alice. Tributes to her adventures were colourfully projected across buildings along Flinders Street, and formed a fantastical animation on Flinders Station, while the façade of the State Library had a sliding showcase of artistic interpretations of the story, including John Tenniel’s original illustrations. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73029/original/image-20150225-1807-13pn31m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73029/original/image-20150225-1807-13pn31m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73029/original/image-20150225-1807-13pn31m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73029/original/image-20150225-1807-13pn31m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73029/original/image-20150225-1807-13pn31m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73029/original/image-20150225-1807-13pn31m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73029/original/image-20150225-1807-13pn31m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73029/original/image-20150225-1807-13pn31m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alice in Wonderland, 1903.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Dalgarno</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Entering the rabbit hole (actually, the library doors), a 3-D dreamscape was created on the Dome’s ceiling, set to an electro-pop soundtrack. And the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (<a href="https://www.acmi.net.au/">ACMI</a>) showed a film adaptation from 1903, a sophisticated production at approximately 12 minutes running time. </p>
<p>Considering “wonderland” is such a key term for describing the White Night experience, it seemed as if Alice in Wonderland was the perfect partner – and this year the partnership was perfectly timed.</p>
<p>2015 is the year we get to celebrate 150 years of Wonderland. It was 1865 that Alice’s adventure was first published for the general public, having started as an oral tale in 1863, told to entertain three young sisters. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73022/original/image-20150225-1780-1tsliz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73022/original/image-20150225-1780-1tsliz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73022/original/image-20150225-1780-1tsliz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73022/original/image-20150225-1780-1tsliz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73022/original/image-20150225-1780-1tsliz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1187&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73022/original/image-20150225-1780-1tsliz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1187&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73022/original/image-20150225-1780-1tsliz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1187&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An illustrated page from the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Carroll first wrote the story down in 1864, as a keepsake for his child-friend, Alice Liddell. The story was then called Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, and with publication, this was changed to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. </p>
<p>150 years later, Wonderland is no longer simply a children’s story. It is films, theatre productions, songs, video games, and theme park rides, and forms the spine of <a href="http://aliceinaworldofwonderlands.com/book.html">thousands of literary adaptations</a>, printed in more than 170 languages. </p>
<p>I can’t remember the first time I encountered Wonderland, but the story has been with me from a young age, in various incarnations. </p>
<p>Disney’s 1951 film had as strong an impact on me as Carroll’s original story. Looking to my experience, it is likely one which parallels the experiences of other readers and viewers of Wonderland. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KLIqErnQCuw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for Alice in Wonderland (1951).</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Wonderland moved out of copyright in 1907, which means writers and illustrators have had over a century in which to create new versions of the story and characters. It is now a part of our collective memory and cultural history, even for those who have never engaged with the original text. </p>
<p>Adaptations are now such a substantial part of the world of Wonderland that the story stands as one of the most adapted in literature.</p>
<p>The original story, with its fantastical world and characters, lends itself to flexibility. Wonderland has remained popular with readers, and a result from this combination of fantasy and enduring popularity, is that the story has remained a similarly popular choice with adapters from all mediums. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73021/original/image-20150225-1765-4ezb85.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73021/original/image-20150225-1765-4ezb85.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73021/original/image-20150225-1765-4ezb85.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=705&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73021/original/image-20150225-1765-4ezb85.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=705&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73021/original/image-20150225-1765-4ezb85.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=705&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73021/original/image-20150225-1765-4ezb85.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=886&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73021/original/image-20150225-1765-4ezb85.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=886&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73021/original/image-20150225-1765-4ezb85.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=886&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The cover of the Nursery Alice.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>White Night 2015 showed how fixed Wonderland is in popular culture: that the organisers of the event knew enough attendees would feel connected to the story for them to cast Alice in a new leading role. It also showed the brilliant form celebrations of Carroll’s story can take. </p>
<p>The diversity of these tributes testifies to not only the creativity of their creators, but the extraordinary story Lewis Carroll created. What a thrill then to see what will come next. </p>
<p>For those interested in keeping track of global celebrations, two of the largest Lewis Carroll Societies are working alongside Carroll scholars and enthusiasts to <a href="http://lewiscarrollresources.net/2015/index.html">track events scheduled </a> throughout 2015. Some 91 events are planned so far, and over 100 publications, not counting the new literary adaptations publishers are planning. </p>
<p>For Melbourne, surely the next major celebration will occur as part of the <a href="http://www.emergingwritersfestival.org.au/">Emerging Writers’ Festival</a>, in May, and the <a href="http://www.mwf.com.au/mwf-2015/">Melbourne Writers Festival</a> in August, (hint hint). </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73023/original/image-20150225-1828-pqvnpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73023/original/image-20150225-1828-pqvnpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73023/original/image-20150225-1828-pqvnpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73023/original/image-20150225-1828-pqvnpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73023/original/image-20150225-1828-pqvnpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73023/original/image-20150225-1828-pqvnpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73023/original/image-20150225-1828-pqvnpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/73023/original/image-20150225-1828-pqvnpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alice in Wonderland as street art.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Céline/Flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To calculate the contribution Carroll’s story has made to English literature and popular culture would be a mammoth undertaking, as Wonderland grew roots which moved the story into unexpected places. It can seem almost impossible to believe that this children’s story can be positioned behind only the collected works of Shakespeare and the Bible as the most widely quoted book in the Western world. </p>
<p>One impression the Alice books left on readers however, is to be open to the idea of the impossible:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I ca’n’t believe that!” said Alice.<br>
“Ca’n’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”<br>
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”<br>
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>My current research is on Alice and some of the literary adaptations which make up such a large component of the Alice industry. This year is exciting for me, but for so many others as well. This anniversary provides all of us who love the story, a space to talk, read, see, and marvel at what Wonderland has become. </p>
<p>What Lewis Carroll created deserves to be celebrated. Here’s to Alice!</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38042/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rebecca Ciezarek does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
This year is the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland – and the story shows no signs of running out of steam.
Rebecca Ciezarek, PhD candidate in Children's Literature, Victoria University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/35442
2014-12-12T16:49:57Z
2014-12-12T16:49:57Z
The tale of squirrelling away books that sparked a nutty row over children’s literature
<p>Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, was an ardent defender of children’s literature, believing the works of Beatrix Potter to be equal to “the greatest English prose writers that have lived”.</p>
<p>One wonders therefore what he would have made of the <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/article4294862.ece">rather unedifying row</a> between the executors of his estate and the Rosenbach Museum and Library, to which he bequeathed his collection of rare books, including several volumes by Potter, on his death in 2012. His executors are refusing to hand them over, arguing that they are “merely” children’s books.</p>
<p>Thus the death of one of the great children’s writers of our generation has forced a court to seek a legal answer to a literary question, about which Sendak was surely never in doubt. </p>
<h2>Alice in lawyerland</h2>
<p>My <a href="http://www.aliceinwonderland.qmul.ac.uk/">own research</a> on Lewis Carroll’s protean and enduringly youthful heroine, Alice, has brought me into close contact with Carroll collectors whose houses are often filled from floor to ceiling with Alice editions and all manner of more or less related articles. While some have already made decisions about where to house their collections after their deaths, others are mulling over the possibilities. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/67109/original/image-20141212-6048-1c4dph9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/67109/original/image-20141212-6048-1c4dph9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/67109/original/image-20141212-6048-1c4dph9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67109/original/image-20141212-6048-1c4dph9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67109/original/image-20141212-6048-1c4dph9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67109/original/image-20141212-6048-1c4dph9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67109/original/image-20141212-6048-1c4dph9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67109/original/image-20141212-6048-1c4dph9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Where the Wild Things Are.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/vaivenarp/4431519295/in/photolist-5BdmfH-iLrfBG-48Nk8D-7KAGi6-6xVzJB-8mTHDk-6eyW8L-7o491A-5qx1kA-78GoSy-9ZyAKG-hkfc8-7ZVXgh-hkfes-9ZXNgo-ehxtQy-6cpVEv-9yHG2o-7bt66k-5wBrkF-7rUmB9-7bZbwq-8rjWaD-btmZz7-nvKt3s-oXgLKM-8rJ7WE-bUREi1-bUREnY-bUREeG-79ceG5-uXLEU-7bFKza-8tN7c9-44CGZk-dUkN4N-7bZcp5-7bZbY7-dUfc1Z-ahv1NW-78S8Bw-bUQ2T1-7snhFU-dUkNGG-dUkNeE-bvrkrF-6xVzJt-84vmbU-8rYYPM-882Vh2">Andrea Rodriguez Pabon</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the light of the Sendak case, they would be well advised to pay close attention to the fine print and terminology of their bequests (not to mention the character of their executors). Are they leaving collections of children’s literature? Or simply of literature? </p>
<p>The literary merit of children’s books is regularly cast into doubt. What’s interesting and ironic about the wrangle over Sendak’s Potter books is that it brings into the frame both their cultural and their monetary value. It’s in the interests of the estate to hang on to them.</p>
<h2>Big business for small people</h2>
<p>Books for small people are indeed a very big business, one of the only parts of the global publishing industry to remain in relatively fine fettle, to not only survive but to flourish in recent years. </p>
<p>New works are being produced at a staggering rate and often to exceptionally high standards. At the same time, older works of a fairly substantial list of Victorian and Edwardian writers and illustrators, and all their associated items, are highly prized and sought after: just this week <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-30400219">a Pooh drawing sold for a six-figure sum</a>. </p>
<p>Classic children’s literature, such as Pooh and Potter, abounds on publishers’ lists and indeed often effectively finances new works. Interestingly, “classic” children’s literature tends to be the children’s books that adults often like, buy, and collect. </p>
<p>If the “literature” part of “children’s literature” is often called into question, the “children’s” part is no less problematic. Definitions of children’s literature inevitably crumble, made complicated by “crossover” books for adults and children – and by books which were for adults but flip into the children’s category (such as Gulliver’s Travels) and vice versa (arguably any of the children’s classics mentioned here). </p>
<p>This body of works, however designated, can of course become fossilised, reactionary and dripping with twee Olde Worlde nostalgia. It’s often the stuff of endless, unimaginative re-editions. But it can also be cutting-edge and revolutionary – it can and does inspire new generations in new ways. </p>
<p>The ever increasing avalanche of events and products scheduled for the <a href="http://lewiscarrollresources.net/2015/">150th anniversary</a> of the first publication of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 2015 makes this abundantly clear. Yes, there will be lots of (not always particularly innovative) new editions, but there will be others designed by Dame Vivienne Westwood, not to mention concerts and tattoo chains and exhibitions galore. </p>
<h2>But is it art?</h2>
<p>Classic children’s literature is, then, a particularly popular form of literature. For some, those two things still make uncomfortable bedfellows. Mass appeal is compounded by utilitarianism which, in the realm of creativity, has been regarded with withering disdain at best for the last century and a half. Asking whether children’s classics are on a par with literary classics, or a distinct subspecies, whether they are really literature, is akin to the question: “is it really art?” And it plays on many of the same prejudices and sensitivities. </p>
<p>In the literary firmament, children’s literature – classic or otherwise – still tends to be seen as a minor constellation at best. But as with contemporary art, it will always depend on who is asking, when, and why.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/35442/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kiera Vaclavik receives funding from the Arts & Humanities Research Council.</span></em></p>
Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, was an ardent defender of children’s literature, believing the works of Beatrix Potter to be equal to “the greatest English prose writers that have…
Kiera Vaclavik, Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.