Lewis Carroll’s works Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There are by many people considered nonsense books for children. Of course, they are, but they are also much more. Lewis Carroll had a great talent of intertwining nonsense and logic, and therefore creating sense within nonsense. If you look past the nonsense you can find a new meaning other than the one you found completing your third grade book report. You find that the books are full of references and parallel aspects of Victorian Society such as topics of etiquette, education, and prejudice, and through these topic’s is shown a child’s ability to survive in a hostile world. By this last statement I am referring to Cohen’s comment that “Wonderland” (published in1865) captures “the disappointments, fears, and bewilderment that all children encounter in their dealings with authoritarian, pompous and mystifying adults” which Wonderland seems to have no deficiency of.
Throughout the story Carroll portrays his views on the education of the times. He make’s “morals and tales of obedience”(Brown,May Lee) seem nonsensical by the character of the Duchess and Alice’s preoccupation with her lessons. The Duc
“I’m afraid I haven’t got one,” Alice said in a frightened tone: “there wasn’t a ticket office where I came from.”(Through the Looking Glass, 129-130) “
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