Order Tramadol Online Overnight Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a book that captures your imagination when you first read it as a child of ten, and continues to stir your delight and your intellect when you read it for the last time as a senior citizen of 99. There are very few books in English that appeal to such a range of adults and children, and that they never tire of. Or at least I don’t. Lewis Carroll’s Alice has never been out of print in the 160 years since its publication in 1865. The novel has been translated into 174 languages—including Latin and Esperanto. It appears on 65 different “Great Books” lists, including the Guardian’s list of the 100 best English novels and on the Observer’s 100 Greatest World Novels list. In Penguin Classics’ survey of its readers, Alice appeared as #42 among the 100 favorite novels, and on the BBC’s 2003 “Big Read” list, Alice came in at #30 among favorite books of the British nation. It was number 3 on Forbes’ list of “The 25 Greatest Kids Books of All Time,” and was ranked as #2 on the BBC’s “100 Greatest Children’s Books of All Time.” The novel’s sequel, Through the Looking Glass (1871), which continues Alice’s adventures in much the same manner, is on 14 different “Great Books” lists on its own, including the Book Depository’s “Best Books Ever” list, and Time magazine’s “The 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time.” There have been no fewer than eighteen film or television adaptations ofAlice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass, as well as at least two video games, two ballets and an opera, and Alice has appeared in popular music from, among others, Tom Waits and Jefferson Airplane. Alice’s popular and critical success make her two books an easy choice for #16 on my alphabetical list of “The 100 Most Lovable Books in the English Language.”
Tramadol Cheapest Online The story of the first novel’s inception is well known. It is told in the poem “All in the Golden Afternoon,” which Carroll included as the preface to the novel. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who published under the pen name “Lewis Carroll,” was an Oxford professor of mathematics and logic at Christ Church College. The Dean of the college, Dodgson’s friend Henry Liddell, had three daughters—thirteen-year-old Lorina Charlotte, ten-year old Alice Pleasance, and eight-year old Edith Mary—and on July 4, 1862, Dodgson and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth were rowing the girls on the Thames when the three demanded a story. And Dodgson responded with the story of Alice’s adventures underground. Two years later, having written out the story and personally illustrated it, he presented Alice with the handwritten copy of the text. Having decided to publish the book, Dodgson obtained the services of Punch cartoonist John Tenniel to create the 42 iconic illustrations so ineluctably identified with the novel.
The plot of the novel is quirky and episodic: in case you’ve forgotten or are one of the three people in the world unfamiliar with the story, it begins with a young girl, Alice, asleep in a meadow. She follows a White Rabbit down a rabbit hole, where she has a series of bizarre adventures, growing or shrinking in size, meeting a Caterpillar smoking a hookah, and a Cheshire Cat whose disembodied smile remains when the cat is gone, and attends an endless and absurd tea party. Later she plays croquet with the Red Queen, using flamingoes for mallets and hedgehogs for balls, and ultimately is called to testify in the trial of the Knave of Hearts for stealing the Queen’s tarts.
What could catapult this simple, intimate hand-made gift into the worldwide sensation that Alice in Wonderland became? I think there are three chief reasons for its popularity. The first is the way that it turned on its head the children’s book industry. Prior to Alice, children’s books were seen as a means to teach some moral or practical lesson. The popular Peter Parley books would teach children about geography or nature with a large dose of moral didacticism. Mary Martha Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family, an overtly religious text aimed at inculcating middle-class values, was the most popular children’s literature in England. Then along came Alice, whose chief goal is the expression on a kind of nihilistic literary nonsense, with anthropomorphic animals and mad tea parties. Dodgson even deliberately undercuts the classic didacticism of children’s publications: He parodies the famous Isaac Watts rhyme “How doth the Little Busy Bee,” an exhortation to hard work, with “How doth the little crocodile,” which praises deception and vanity. What could be more entertaining?
The second reason, and growing out of the first, is the character of Alice herself, who seems much more like a typical rebellious little schoolgirl than the goody-goody characters in those didactic children’s stories. Alice gets annoyed, angry, and especially curiouser and curiouser at the things she sees and hears and experiences in Wonderland. And she’s not afraid to let the grownups know about her feelings and opinions, or to call a spade a spade when she sees something that seems absurd. This is particularly true in the scenes with the Queen of Hearts, the irrational tyrant of Wonderland, whose response to anything that mildly displeases her, like Alice, is “Off with her head!” When she is called as a witness in the trial of the Knave of Hearts, Alice calls the Queen’s judgment “Stuff and nonsense!” And it is. How different is this from the behavior of the children in, say, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, in which children are to be seen and not heard, and in which the children of the family know that they should never speak among adults until they are spoken to—no matter how important what they have to say is!
The Queen is the chief authority figure in the book, but everybody in Wonderland is an adult in relation to Alice, and she defies their authority whenever she is so inclined. In the mad tea party scene, the March Hare insists that Alice “Take some more tea,” to which she replies “I’ve had nothing yet…so I can’t take more.”
“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”
“Nobody asked your opinion,” said Alice.
In addition to showing Alice’s disregard for the admonishments of the adult Hatter, this exchange also illustrates the third and, I should think, the most important reason the novel has remained popular, especially among admirers of language: Dodgson, a student of logic, was fascinated by language and its uses—logical or il-. This is nowhere more manifest than in the mad tea party, where the above exchange plays on the different connotations of the word “more.” More pertinent still is the following conversation:
“You should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”
“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’!”
“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’!”
“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’!”
Dodgson loved these kinds of logical quirks, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland abounds in them. This is part of the absurdity that pervades that book, which is the source of fun and entertainment for the mind. But if you read Alice by itself, you will get to the end and wonder: “Hey! There’s stuff that’s been left out here! Where is Humpty Dumpty? Where are Tweedledum and Tweedledee? And where on earth is the Jabberwock, or the Walrus and the Carpenter? Don‘t worry dear reader—they are not in Alice but in her sequel. In Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There Alice once again travels to a fantastic world, this one on the other side of a mirror, where everything is reversed, especially logic. As in the first book many of the characters in fact turned out to be playing cards, in this one many of the characters are pieces on a giant chessboard (including the domineering Red Queen, the timid White Queen, and the compassionate but inept White Knight), and the structure of the novel follows the moves of a chess game, with Alice’s motive to reach the eighth square and become a queen herself. On the way she meets other characters who seem personified nursery rhymes, like Humpty Dumpty and Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
As in the earlier book, this one is full of linguistic twists and logical absurdities, appropriate to a land where everything is reversed. Trying to keep up with the swiftly moving Queen, Alice is told “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” In her conversation with Humpty Dumpty Alice is told
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”
The question of what words mean pervades the books, where language seems notoriously ambiguous:
“The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.”
“It must come sometimes to ‘jam to-day,’” Alice objected.
“No, it can’t,” said the Queen. “It’s jam every other day: to-day isn’t any other day, you know.”
Of course, this question of meaning is particularly applicable to the famous “Jabberwocky” poem, which begins
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Later it is Humpty Dumpty (whose words mean what he wants them to) who helps Alice interpret the meaning of the nonsense words in this stanza, but can we trust him? Or should we emulate him, and make the words of the poem mean whatever we say they mean?
In short, you ought to revisit Alice if you can. It’s good for the brain. Remember what the Dormouse said: “Feed your head.”