Hello little girl

I loved Alice in Won­der­land and Alice Through the Looking-Glass when I was a child. I had won­der­ful old cop­ies of each, with cov­ers that resembled marble. Inside, the books were filled with the most beau­ti­ful pic­tures, painted in col­ours that made them almost leap out from the page. The volumes were pub­lished in the early part of the last cen­tury, and had been passed down through my mother’s side of the fam­ily. They were ori­gin­ally a present to my great-grandmother in 1903 — the front page of each book had the ori­ginal mes­sages to her, writ­ten in verse by her father. It seems that he ima­gined him­self to be a bit of a poet — a trait that seems to exist in our fam­ily to this day, in case you hadn’t noticed.

From about eight years old, I became cap­tiv­ated by these magical tales. I spent many hours draw­ing huge pic­tures of scenes from the books, apply­ing my vivid ima­gin­a­tion to char­ac­ter­isa­tions of Alice, the Cheshire Cat, the White Rab­bit and the Mad Hat­ter in particular.

Of course, with grow­ing up comes the loss of child­hood inno­cence. I was shattered when I began to learn that Alice’s adven­tures may have had some­thing to do with Lewis Carroll’s own fas­cin­a­tion with Alice Lid­dell, the seven-year-old girl to whom he read his stor­ies. I put the books back on the “fam­ily” book­shelves, rather than the book­case in my own bed­room, and for­got about them.

About five years ago, I went through a phase of try­ing to ‘reclaim’ cer­tain books — books that, at one time or another, I had loved, but had since been spoilt for me in vari­ous ways. Usu­ally, this was because of over-analysis by Eng­lish teach­ers dur­ing my years at school. They would claim to be able to explain the reas­on­ing behind every single sen­tence, includ­ing the motiv­a­tion of the author and what they had for break­fast on the day they wrote a par­tic­u­lar chapter.

In some cases, reac­quaint­ing myself with the books actu­ally worked — sep­ar­ated from the dron­ing voice of sixth-form tutor Mrs Mul­lett (yes, that was her real name), Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure was once again revealed as a tra­gic and emo­tion­ally dis­turb­ing story. But the Alice books were bey­ond me. As much as I loved the per­sonal his­tory con­tained in the volumes — touch­ing the worn pages and gaz­ing at the beau­ti­ful images — I couldn’t rid myself of the unpleas­ant facts about Lewis Carroll.

Katie Roi­phe, writ­ing in The Guard­ian, tries to put an object­ive and thor­oughly mod­ern spin on the back­ground to Carroll’s obsession:

“To me, there is a nobil­ity in a self-restraint so force­ful that it spews out stut­ter­ing tor­toises and talk­ing chess pieces rather than focus on the mat­ter at hand. There is some­thing touch­ing about a man who fights the hard­est fight in the world: his own desire. You can feel the loneli­ness on the page. You can the feel the long­ing in the pho­to­graphs. You can wit­ness the self-contempt in his diar­ies. How can one not feel sym­pathy for a man who writes in his diary, ‘I pray to God to give me a new heart’, but is stuck, in spite of his aston­ish­ing powers of inven­tion, his bril­liance, his immor­tal wit, with the one he has.”

I don’t know. Some­how, the harsh real­ity of our soci­ety no longer allows me to see things in this way. My mind is too full of the dis­turb­ing images and stor­ies we see and read in the news. Why can’t I think in the same way as Katie Roi­phe does about a friend­ship between a middle-aged vicar and a sweet seven-year-old girl? Does the real world have to change the way in which we think about fantasy, as well as everything else?

For now, I’m afraid the Alice volumes will be stay­ing on the fam­ily bookshelves.