The Appeal
The Continuing Influence of Lewis Carroll
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was one of the first, if not the first, children’s book for children. Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe were read by children but they were not written with children in mind. Since Alice everything has changed. Lewis Carroll’s strange dream landscape certainly influenced children’s writer Roald Dahl in his own black comedy surrealist plots. Steve Nallon’s Adventures in Wonderland pays tribute to the lasting influence of the tales by making references in the show to Harry Potter, The Borrowers, The Wizard of Oz, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Secret Garden and various other more recent children’ classics that all owe a debt to the mind of Lewis Carroll.
In "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", young Harry was following in Alice's footsteps when he became a living chess piece.
In the Alice books Lewis Carroll created two of the most enduring children’s stories of the last two hundred years. His influence though goes beyond children’s literature. Carroll is even sometimes credited as the first modernist, predating, for example, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake where language is reinvented in a distinctly Carroll-like fashion. Carroll has also been suggested as an early Surrealist and as a ‘father’ to the playwright Samuel Beckett.
Perhaps though it is in the very language we speak that Carroll has had the most pervasive influence. Second to Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll is the most quoted writer in the English language and has one of the largest entries in the Oxford Book of Quotations.
Off with his head!
Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today.
Large as life, and twice as natural!
What is the use of a book without pictures?
Curiouser and curiouser.
It was the best butter.
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
Sentence first – verdict afterwards.
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
Contrariwise.
Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
An un-birthday present!‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes – and ships – and sealing wax –
Of cabbages and kings.’
The very language we speak owes a debt to Lewis Carroll.
