Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

by Lewis Carroll

Perhaps as a result of this process, the books are intricately layered. There is the conscious, personal level, using incidents, characters, and places familiar to Alice Liddell and Dodgson’s immediate circle. Next there is the matrix of philosophy, mathematics, and linguistics––serious games for both child and adult readers. Then there is a wider world of references to Oxford and national personalities and politics––both the preoccupations of a singular mind, and the natural furniture of the mind of a well-educated Victorian scholar and gentleman. Finally, and more contentiously, there are passages which seem (notably in Through the Looking-Glass) to be very personal––conscious or unconscious manifestations of Dodgson’s psyche. As Derek Hudson put it, ‘the “Alice” books were in some degree an autobiographical miscellany, woven together with extraordinary skill: an Odyssey of the subconscious’.57 All of this suggests that whatever the books may be, they are scarcely ‘nonsense’, if nonsense is defined as occurring when the mind is unable to make an association: as Elizabeth Sewell pointed out, ‘nonsense … requires as few relations … as possible’.

It seems that the parts which constitute nonsense also constitute that of a mind/life.