A flamingo for a croquet mallet, white roses being frantically painted red, and the lingering, disembodied smile of a Cheshire Cat. These are the unforgettable images Lewis Carroll gifted the world in his tales of Alice, strange and wondrous stories that continue to captivate both children and adults. They are woven into the fabric of English-language culture, quoted with a frequency that speaks to their deep resonance. Let's follow that ever-late white rabbit to understand how the magical, and sometimes unsettling, world of Alice is constructed.

The Man Behind the Looking-Glass

The mind behind this fantasy belonged to Charles Dodgson, a man of seeming contradictions. By profession, he was a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford and a clergyman; writing was merely a cherished hobby. It’s often said that Dodgson’s mathematical thinking was ahead of its time, which may be why his formal works on algebra and geometry failed to gain traction among his peers. As the third of eleven children, he became an expert at entertaining his younger siblings, a skill that came naturally to a born storyteller. His imagination was a constant wellspring of ideas, but it was always anchored by a deep fascination with logic. This unique fusion of fantasy and structure would become the very foundation of Alice's adventures.

The "Alice" of the books was inspired by a real child, Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean at one of Oxford's colleges. While she may not have tumbled down any actual rabbit holes, her spirit and presence made such an impression on Dodgson that he dedicated two books to her. He was a close friend of the Liddell family, often spending time with the children. According to one story, he even considered asking for Alice’s hand in marriage once she came of age. The affection was mutual; Alice and her sisters loved visiting their older friend to listen to his impromptu tales.

One summer day in 1862, during a boat trip, Dodgson spun a story for the girls about a girl's journey into a subterranean world. The Liddell sisters were so enchanted they begged him to write it down. The manuscript, passed among friends, eventually found its way to a reader who convinced Dodgson to publish it. In 1865, the world was introduced to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. For the real Alice Liddell, who lived into her 80s, the manuscript that bore her name became a lifeline. It brought her fame and, after her husband's death left her in financial difficulty, she sold the original copy at a Sotheby's auction for what was then an astronomical sum. After passing through several hands, this priceless piece of literary history now resides in the British Library, accessible to all.

A World Built on Paradox

One of the defining features of Alice's world is the instability of space, time, and even physical form. This surreal quality draws comparisons to the works of writers like Franz Kafka. Yet, everything that happens to the heroine operates on the paradoxical logic of a dream—and we mustn't forget that at the end of the first book, she awakens. From this perspective, the world is inherently unstable.

But if we set aside the dream framework for a moment, Alice has entered a parallel, magical dimension where the laws of our reality simply don't apply. What seems absurd to Alice is perfectly normal to the inhabitants. In fact, it is our reality that appears absurd from their point of view. A few years before writing the book, Dodgson himself mused on this very idea, questioning whether the bizarre things we do in dreams might qualify as insanity in waking life. He wondered if, perhaps, insanity could be defined as the inability to distinguish between the two states.

This pushes the story beyond simple absurdity and into the realm of surrealism. There is logic in Wonderland, but it's a peculiar logic, motivated by the unique rules of its specific time and space. While the world seems full of paradoxes, the oddities often possess an almost primitive internal structure. This is perfectly illustrated in Alice’s dialogue with the Cheshire Cat. When she asks for directions, the cat astutely points out that if she has no destination in mind, then any path will do. It’s a moment of profound, if unconventional, wisdom.

When Words Create Worlds

Much of the celebrated madness in the book stems from a masterful play on the English language. Readers unfamiliar with its idioms and expressions miss a layer of genius, as Dodgson's wordplay often drives the plot and gives birth to entire characters.

The Hatter, for instance, is one of the most iconic figures. His character is a living embodiment of the proverb “mad as a hatter.” This saying has a dark historical basis: hat-makers in the 19th century used mercury in the process of making felt, and prolonged exposure often led to neurological damage, causing tremors and erratic behavior. The March Hare shares a similar origin, born from the expression “mad as a March hare,” which alludes to the frantic behavior of hares during their spring breeding season. The Cheshire Cat itself emerges from the old saying “to grin like a Cheshire cat.”

Even the Mock Turtle is a brilliant pun. Mock turtle soup was a popular, cheaper Victorian dish made from veal to imitate the much more expensive green turtle soup. Thus, in the book, Alice encounters a creature with the body of a turtle but the head of a calf. Other characters, like Humpty Dumpty or the Lion and the Unicorn, are lifted directly from popular nursery rhymes and songs, further rooting the fantasy in shared cultural knowledge.

Reflections of Reality and Science

Beyond language, the story is filled with allusions to history and even scientific theories. Many historians see in the tyrannical Queen of Hearts a blend of two English monarchs: Queen Victoria, known for her intense devotion to her husband, Prince Albert, and Margaret of Anjou, a key figure in the Wars of the Roses. The Queen's gardeners frantically painting white roses red is a direct nod to the heraldic colors of the warring houses of Lancaster (red rose) and York (white rose).

This technique of inversion, or reversal, is central to Carroll’s method, particularly in Through the Looking-Glass. Reality is flipped, as if in a mirror, where right becomes left and logic operates backwards. The Queen's declaration of “sentence first—verdict afterwards!” is a prime example.

Some have even speculated that Carroll anticipated major scientific concepts. The moments when Alice rapidly changes size have been interpreted as an illustration of a hypothesis about an expanding or contracting universe. Her fear of shrinking away into nothingness seems to parallel the ideas of physicists who theorized about the conservation of matter. Furthermore, her fall down the rabbit hole, described as a long and slow descent, has been compared to Albert Einstein's thought experiment of a person falling in an elevator, a concept he used to explain principles of general relativity. And the Red Queen’s famous advice from the second book—“it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place”—is now a recognized evolutionary principle.

Ultimately, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are texts where the conscious and unconscious mind work in tandem. It is a place where fantasy and logic enter into a profound dialogue, inviting us to become active co-creators with the author. The story has echoed through our culture, inspiring countless works of art, from The Matrix to modern fashion. Everyone finds something of their own in Alice's adventures, a reflection of their own questions and curiosities. That is why she is impossible to forget. Sometimes, we all wonder whether the world has gone mad, or if we simply wish to dive after the white rabbit ourselves, into the boundless pages of a beloved book.

References

• Gardner, Martin. The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition. W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.
  This edition is an indispensable guide to understanding the intricate layers of Carroll's work. Gardner provides extensive notes that explain the mathematical puzzles, logical paradoxes, wordplay, and Victorian-era social and historical references embedded in the texts. For example, his notes on Chapter VII, "A Mad Tea-Party," detail the origins of the "mad as a hatter" idiom and the logical fallacies present in the characters' dialogue (pp. 75-85).
• Cohen, Morton N. Lewis Carroll: A Biography. Vintage Books, 1996.
  This comprehensive biography offers deep insight into the life of Charles Dodgson. It explores his academic career at Oxford, his complex personality, his struggles with a stammer (believed to be the origin of his self-caricature as the Dodo bird), and his profound friendship with the Liddell family. The book provides the essential real-world context that shaped the creation of the Alice books, grounding the fantasy in the author's lived experience.
• Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, Columbia University Press, 1990.
  In this significant work of philosophy, Deleuze dedicates several chapters (or "series") to analyzing Lewis Carroll's Alice stories. He uses them as a primary example to explore concepts of sense, nonsense, paradox, and the nature of events. Deleuze argues that Wonderland is not a world of chaos but one that operates on a different, yet coherent, logic. This reference confirms the article's assertion that the books are more than mere absurdity and contain a complex internal structure that has fascinated thinkers for generations (particularly Series 4-6, pp. 22-38).