Having studied just round the road from Lewis Carroll’s home,we were surrounded by Alice stuff.Plenty of books reckon that it is either an acid trip or a description of Alice’s journey through puberty.
Being as Mr.Carroll seemed to enjoy taking pictures of young ladies(oddly enough only up to about 13 as then he thought people would think it was strange,and the young girls’ mothers were always present and never complained 
) it seems likely
I am fairly sure that it’s not a acid trip, as acid wasn’t invented until after the book was written. Let me hunt down a cite…
http://www.streetdrugs.org/lsd.htm
LSD synthesized in 1938.
(/hijack) :eek: I noticed that the cite also says LSD has been concealed in my favorite candy, Sweet Tarts!)(/end hijack)
It looks like, according to this site, that Alice was published in 1865! Even I didn’t know it was that old.
Mind you the caterpillar had a hookah
Since the question is about a writer and his work, I’ll move this thread to our arts forum, Cafe Society.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
Oh brother. I think people are so insistent that Alice In Wonderland must be the result of an acid trip because these same people no longer have any imagination. It was a clever work designed for children with active brains. Why is that so hard to understand?
There is little evidence that the author was much into drugs. However, he could well have got some inspirations from drug users he knew. As someone mentioned, the caterpillar had a hookah. And, Alice does take potions.
However, very unlikely psychedelic drugs were the inspiration. Psilocybe mushrooms weren’t known (at least widely) as a psychoactive until the latter 20th century. I seriously doubt much peyote ever made it from the US to the UK in the 19th century. Opium is however known to induce mystical states, and was around in the UK at that time. And, at that time recreational drug use (as opposed to serious, obvious abuse) was quite socially acceptable. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes having a fondness for cocaine. While today in this WoD era the idea of depicting use of such drugs, or using them as inspiration, in a children’s story would be scandolous, in the day of Lewis Carroll incorporating such references wouldn’t have been seen as odd. Attitudes toward drugs have changed a LOT since then.
I read an analysis of it once that theorized that it was a journey into madness.
Along the way of her journey, Alice tries over and over again to figure out the rules for this new state of reality, “wonderland”. She is continually confused by the changes from what she knows to what she experiences there. Everything is different, and she can’t even recite familiar nursery rhymes without having them change to suit this new reality.
Finally, in the scene where she says, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” she has accepted the new reality, and gained control over it. It’s no longer madness to her because she has gone mad herself.
It was an old book, probably out of print now. I tried to find it on Amazon, but no luck. I don’t recall the name. It would be nice to read it again. It was very interesting.
Much as people are forever reading stuff into The Wizard of Oz, there are always those who’ll impose some particular foible onto the Alice books.
The best commentary on them remains Martin Gardner’s much reprinted classic edition, The Annotated Alice (1960). What’s very striking is that, while speculating about various possible references in the texts, Gardner’s notes are actually rather sparing. Consequently, when he does speculate, it’s interesting, even if one’s not entirely convinced by the particular suggestion.
As for the nude photographs, when the Cohen biography came out, Gardner reviewed it (for The New Yorker?) and concluded that they were disturbing. I tend to agree, though I likewise doubt he ever actually did anything to the girls other than photograph them.
Ummm…you may be wrong about that.
The Victorians had access to, and knew of, a number of hallucinogenic substances, including a selection of mushrooms.
LINK
I’m pretty certain that Carroll could have got whatever he wanted in this line.
Just to calm you down and keep you from swearing off Sweet Tarts in case you don’t already know this; people put LSD on Sweet Tarts and then eat them themselves. They don’t drop it on them and then put them back on the shelf :).
I see it as a metaphor for childhood.
When you’re a kid, everything is way bigger than you. The people around you do things that are incomprehensible, and when they explain themselves, that doesn’t always make much more sense.
You’re given bizarre instructions and expected to follow them, although they don’t seem to have any reason behind them. People come in and out of your life in unexpected ways, and you’re often not sure who they were or how you’re supposed to respond.
Even the physical laws of the universe are things you’re still learning about and mastering, and they can still surprise you (why are red crayons cold while the red stove is hot?)
And of course, Alice was such a complete departure from the traditional kids’ books, in which moral children are rewarded and bad children are punished, that it was and remains mesmerizing in its indifference to the rules of morality, the rules of common sense, the rules of logic, and the rules that govern the universe.
As a guy who is webmaster of no less than 2 websites about the psychedelic drug dextromethorphan, I really should have known better. 
I was thinking about psilocybe cubensis, which is the “magic mushroom” popular since the 1960s. However, I failed to consider the Liberty Cap or fly agaric mushrooms. It just seems too much a coincidence that the caterpillar smoking a hookah sits on a mushroom, and Alice grows larger and smaller by eating that mushroom. Note that for Lewis Carroll to incorporate this in his book wouldn’t require that he have ever personally consumed these mushrooms. He could have merely heard of them from people that did take them and describe the effects. This seems the most plausible explanation here.
I’d always thought it may have been written under the influence of Absinthe. It is supposedly a hallucinogenic liquor that’s been around since the early 1800’s. Many artists of that era reportedly used it.
Except it wasn’t written, at least not originally. It was made up on the spot, for the most part.
It wasn’t written down at the time? Was it written in stages through oral tradition like the greek myths?
I know I’m missing something here.
Dang, I forgot to add. Replace ‘written’ with spoken, made-up, imagined, thought-of and/or seen…in my first post.
From what I recall, in the National Geographic tribute article a number of years ago, it’s full of mathematical formulae. Each bit of nonsense is part of the mathematics. It’s also full of nonsensical things to please his audience, a child named Alice. Don’t remember her full name, but one of the nonsense poems he wrote in one of the books spells her full name with the first letter of each line.
He was in love with her, but being only a poor scholar (and clergyman?) she was above his station, and when he timidly asked if her parents might entertain the possibility that he might one day consider courting her when she grew up fully, they forbid the very idea. (Tortureous phrase, but that’s how delicate an inquiry the article implied he made, very indirect and subtle.)
She was half grown at the time, and in those days, it wasn’t uncommon for a man to wait many years for a girl to become a woman so he could court her. This, according to the article I referred to. It might also be about a trip into madness as well. I wonder if it isn’t full of sly digs at the society of the time though. I think to better understand it a more full study of the society the author lived in should be done.
On a tangent, has anyone else played American McGee’s Alice? Good game. Good plot. Love the voice of the Cheshire cat, and the animation on him.
Recreational drug users always seem to have a lot of trouble accepting that people can write incredibly strange stuff without using drugs at all. Read a biography of Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland makes perfect sense. He was undoubtedly a bizarre guy, but an opium or absinthe user? Hallucinogens? Uh, no.
Apparently, Alice in Wonderland was originally made up on the spot and told to the real-life Alice in a few stages, just like the stories some parents make up, and was only redacted into a book later.