Down the rabbit hole

In a corner of the dining hall at Christ Church college, Oxford, hangs a portrait of a Victorian mathematician called Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. The painting is at home among the cast of faces that peer solemnly from the oak-clad walls (the Hogwarts dining hall was modelled on this one). This is how you would expect an Oxford don to look: stern, dour, wrapped in black robes. But it may not match your image of Dodgson. Because you know him better by his pen name, Lewis Carroll.

I’m at Christ Church to see the city’s 4th of July festivities. Oxford being Oxford, that historical date has different significance on this side of the pond. This is Alice’s Day, the city’s annual celebration of 4 July 1862, when Lewis Carroll took Alice Liddell and her sisters on a boating picnic and told them a story about a girl who tumbles down a rabbit hole and into a world called Wonderland. “To celebrate that first telling,” the event’s organisers explain, “Oxford turns into Wonderland for one magical day every year.” 

I walk around the city to hunt for traces of this transformation. After a few minutes my eyes adjust to the girls in blue dresses with white satin sashes, who dot the crowded shopping mall like red herrings in a Where’s Wally? book. Only one is the real Alice though, and eventually I spot her ascending an escalator in pursuit of the Mad Hatter and White Rabbit, tailed by a corseted Queen of Hearts. In the spirit of our “immersive” times, the ensemble strolls up to shoppers to berate or confound them. A woman takes a selfie with the Hatter as her child looks on.

Over at the Bodleian Library there are free talks by the Lewis Carroll Society. My hungry six-week-old baby won’t let me attend, but a glance at some of the titles – “Lewis Carroll, Darwin, and The Hunting of the Snark” – suggests a different approach to Carroll’s work. That long narrative poem which Carroll subtitled “An Agony, in Eight Fits” is his darkest work, probably written in response to his godson’s death from tuberculosis at the age of 22. It’s a far cry from face-painting and board games.

And there lies the Alice paradox. On the one hand, Carroll’s nonsense verse invites serious scholarly engagement (the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was a fan); on the other, the Disneyfication of the Alice stories has turned Carroll’s brilliant twists of logic into a series of stock figures: a grinning cat, an angry queen, a girl in a blue dress. Which raises the question of who Alice Day is for: young children and their families? Literary tourists? Oxford academics? All of the above, I suppose.

But I can’t help but feel a little disappointed about the ways the event sanitises not only the writing, but the history that troubles that “golden” afternoon of 1862: Carroll’s fetishistic relationship with Liddell and other prepubescent girls, who he photographed in provocative – and scantily clad – poses remains controversial; there’s little evidence that he did more than stage amateur photographs,  but given that the Alice’s Day celebrations revolve around the fabled boat trip, doesn’t the possibility cast a queasy pall? Certainly, Carroll’s writing deserves to be celebrated in all its strangeness, but I can’t help thinking Dodgson is best left in his dark corner of the Christ Church dining hall.

Illustration by Oscar Ingham/Observer Design