Literary Analysis Notes
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
The concept of "childhood" was invented in the 18th century.
The middle classes began to value a child’s innocence and play.
Children were rarely mentioned in literary history.
Exceptions: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile and William Wordsworth’s The Prelude.
Charles Dickens placed children in the foreground of his stories in the 19th century, but only in books for adults.
Tales for children were often adaptations of adult stories or moral didactics.
Early 19th century:
The Brothers Grimm’s illustrated folktales were initially collected for adults.
Criticized for sexual and violent content, later adapted for children.
Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales (1835-37) lacked a moral, causing an outcry.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:
The laws of nature and society are subverted.
Time and space behave unpredictably.
Animals talk.
Fantasy evokes a child’s sense of threat in an adult world.
Late 19th and early 20th centuries: Golden age of children's literature due to increased literacy, commercial publishing growth, and recognition of a child’s creative potential.
New genres:
School story: Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) by Thomas Hughes.
Coming-of-age tale: Little Women (1868-69) by Louisa May Alcott.
Other classics: Heidi (1880-81) by Johanna Spyri and Peter Pan (1911) by JM Barrie.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is considered the first masterpiece for children in English.
A departure from the realism of the time.
July 1862: Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) told the story of Alice to Alice Liddell (age ten) and her sisters during a boat trip.
The story took shape as a handwritten book and then a publication under the Lewis Carroll pseudonym.
Story:
Alice, seven, falls down a rabbit hole into a surreal universe.
She navigates a world of strange creatures, attitudes, happenings, and linguistic logic.
The book's coherence stems from Alice's unorthodox logic.
She wonders if she is falling into the “Antipathies” (Antipodes) and whether she will appear ignorant when asking if she's in Australia or New Zealand.
Carroll captures a child’s frankness: “No, it’ll never do to ask; perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.”
Alice's concerns reflect common childhood issues:
Identity.
Rules of this peculiar world.
Regaining normality.
Her size being too big or too small.
Encounters:
The Caterpillar introduces new anxiety and contradiction.
The Queen's repeated calls for beheading add tension.
Characters:
Primarily animals.
Human characters besides Alice and her sister: Mad Hatter and the Duchess (the King and Queen of Hearts are playing cards).
Absence of parents.
Victorian adults might see the inversions of everyday life as liberating.
Nonsense offers a playground for the imagination and escape from social rules.
Alice doesn’t explicitly learn lessons but becomes more forthright.
She tells the Queen her sense of justice is “Stuff and nonsense!”
She dismisses the playing cards as inanimate, breaking the illusion.
Coda:
Alice’s sister dreams “after a fashion”.
She imagines Alice and the weird characters.
She envisions Alice growing up with a “simple and loving heart,” passing the story to a new generation.
Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson):
Born in 1832 in Cheshire, England.
Son of a clergyman.
First-class degree in mathematics from Christ Church, Oxford.
Lecturer from 1855 until his death.
Ordained as a deacon.
First published work: a poem on solitude in 1856.
Friends: John Ruskin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Photographer: portraits of Alfred Tennyson, Ellen Terry, and children.
Died in 1898 at 65 from pneumonia after influenza.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was very popular; Queen Victoria was an admirer.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
19th-century US writers reflected the varied, complex populations of their rapidly evolving nation.
Mark Twain set his story in the Mississippi Valley with a poor white boy narrator.
Used regional dialect, philosophical musings, and homespun wisdom.
Became one of the first authentic voices in American literature.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
Empowered generations of American writers to move literature from New England to local settings.
Radical "boy’s own" story.
Published after the American Civil War (1861-65) but set 40-50 years earlier when slavery persisted.
Huck's thoughts reflect contradictions in American society.
Literary context:
Before 1823: James Fenimore Cooper’s saga, the “Leatherstocking Tales,” offers conflicting views of life on the frontier.
1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe creates multiple vernacular voices in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, inflaming the anti-slavery debate.
After 1896: Sarah Orne Jewett vividly describes life in an isolated fishing village on the Maine coast in The Country of the Pointed Firs.
1939: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath mixes local color with social injustice during the Great Depression.
Narrative:
Huck is introduced as a character from Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
He feigns death to escape civilization and his abusive father.
He journeys down the Mississippi on a raft with Jim, a runaway slave.
They encounter brutal realities along the shore: lynch mobs, tricksters, murder.
Subversion:
Played out through Huck and Jim’s talks.
Jim, escaped from being sold, says: “Yes – en I’s rich now … I own myself, en I’s worth eight hundred dollars. I wished I had the money.”
Friendship:
Living on the raft, Huck and Jim develop a friendship.
Huck struggles with the idea of turning Jim in, remembering their time together: “we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing … somehow couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him…”
By the time Tom Sawyer appears, Huck’s emotional development is almost complete.
Impact:
Although condemned as “coarse” initially (1884), Huckleberry Finn injected new energy, style, and color into American writing.
Influenced writers from John Steinbeck to Junot Diaz.
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens):
Born on 30 November 1835.
Grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, the model for "St Petersburg" in Huckleberry Finn.
Left school at 12 after his father's death.
Worked as a typesetter, writer, and steamboat pilot.
Served as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi in 1857.
Civil War: prospected for silver in Nevada, then wrote for newspapers.
Married Olivia Langdon in 1870, settled in Connecticut, and had four children.
Bankrupted by poor investments but restored his finances through lecturing and writing.
Wrote 28 books and many short stories, letters, and sketches.
Died in 1910.