greatbooks

• The concept of "childhood" was only invented in the 18th century when the middle classes began to see the value of a child's innocence and play
• For most of the literary history, children were rarely mentioned, occasionally appearing in such works as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile and William Wordsworth's The Prelude
• In the 19th century, Charles Dickens sometimes placed children in the foreground of his stories, but only in books for adults
• Most tales written for, as opposed to about, children were adaptations of adult stories or moral didactic
• In the early 19th century, The Brothers Grimm's illustrated folktales, collected initially for adults, were criticized as being unsuitable for young people because of their sexual and violent content – later editions were adapted to be more child-friendly
• Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote his Fairy Tales (1835-37) specifically for children, caused an outcry by failing to include a moral
• In Wonderland, the laws of both nature and society are turned on their heads: time and space behave unpredictably; animals talk; at tea parties and games, anything might happen
• The child's sense of threat in an adult world is evoked through fantasy
• In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, writing for children enjoyed a golden age, founded on increasing literacy, the growth of commercial publishing, and recognition of the creative potential of a child's world
• New genres


  • Tom Brown's School Days (1857)
  • Little Women (1868-69)
  • Heidi (1880-81)
  • Peter Pan (1911)
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is one of the most influential books of this flowering
• Regarded as the first masterpiece for children in English, its fantastical story is a marked departure from the prevailing realism of literature at the time
• Charles Dodgson, a young mathematics don, went rowing with a male friend and three young sisters on the Thames near Oxford and told a story of a girl named Alice


  July day in 1862
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland took shape, appearing as a handwritten book, and then as a publication under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll
• In the story, seven-yeatr0old Alice falls down a rabbit hole and finds herself in a surreal universe
• Alice negotiates alone a world of strange creatures, strange attitudes, strange happenings, and strange linguistics logic
• Part of the book's coherence comes from the fact that Alice herself entertains unorthodox logic
• Alice always wonders: about who she is, what are the rules of this peculiar world, and how she is to regain normality, common issues of childhood
• Her bewilderment at first focuses on her being the wrong size, either too big or too small to do as she wants
• After she meets the Caterpillar, new anxiety arises the challenge of repeatedly, often rudely, contradicted
• Towards the end, with the Queen's repeated plea for a beheading, the possibility of violence adds to the tension
• The characters that Alice meets are mostly animals
• Apart from Alice and her sister, who features before and after the adventure, the only human characters are the Mad Hatter and the Duchess, since the King and Queen of Hearts are playing cards
• Parents do not make an appearance, nor is there any reference to them
• The inversions of everyday life that imprison Alice might also, at the same time, be seen as liberating by Victorian adults accustomed to the convention
• One of the attractions of nonsense is that it offers a playground for the imagination, and arguably for the satisfaction of subliminal needs, including occasional escape from social rules
• Alice does not refer at the end to have learned any lessons from her adventures
• However, she does, in the course of the book, become more forthright, and by the time of the trial scene near the end, she is capable of saying to the Queen that her perverse sense of justice is "Stuff and nonsense!"
• Her final act, by which time she is child-sized again, is to insist that the playing cards are just that – inanimate things – after which they fly into the air
• By force of character, she has punctured the illusion
• The coda, featuring Alice's older sister, is beautifully judged
• It starts with her dreaming "after a fashion," since a fully-fledged dream would be less subtle than this elusive mind-state
• First, she affectionately imagines Alice herself; then, the weird characters Alice has been describing pass in front of her
• Finally, she imagines Alice turning into a "grown woman," but keeping the "simple and loving heart" of her childhood, and passing on the story of Wonderland to a new generation
• With little history to speak of and few literary traditions to anchor them, US writers in the 19th century were engaged in holding up a mirror to the varied, complex populations of their rapidly evolving nation
• Mark Twain's Huck Finn relates his adventures in regional dialect, salted with philosophical musings and homespun wisdom, and along the way becomes one of the first authentic voices in American literature
• What is it The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that led Ernest Hemingway to declare it to be the starting point for all American literature?
• Twain's novel was published after the American Civil War (1861-65) but is set 40-50 years earlier when slaveholding persisted in the South, and settlers were scrabbling for land in the West
• Huck's original thoughts reflect the numerous contradictions at the heart of American society
• The Pioneers, the first of James Fenimore Cooper's saga, the "Leatherstocking Tales," offers conflicting views of life on the frontier in one of the first original US novels

  1823