Day4 《爱丽丝漫游仙境》何以风靡世界？（前言 下）外教原文朗读

Introduction: Lewis Carroll and the Alice Books（下）

by Morton N. Cohen

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderlandwas widely reviewed and earned almost unconditionally good notices. Dodgson catalogued the reviews in his diary, and he was able to list a total of nineteen that appeared between November 12, 1865, and October 1, 1866. The earlier ones, especially those that appeared before Christmas, would have had the most effect. The one in theReader appeared on November 12: “From Messrs. Macmillan and Co. comes a glorious artistic treasure”— it begins—“a book to put on one’s shelf as an antidote to a fit of the blues… sure to be run after as one of the most popular works of its class.” On November 25 thePress reported thatAlice was written in “a simple and attractive style, and… while suited for very young children, is nevertheless more elaborately ‘got up’” than the other books under review. “… the illustrations, by Tenniel, are beautiful,” it continues, and then goes on to summarize the story. “It is most amusingly written”—the notice concludes—“and a child, when once the tale has been commenced, will long to hear the whole of this wondrous narrative.”

The notice in thePublisher’s Circular appeared on December 8: “Among the two hundred books for children which have been sent to us this year, the most original and most charming isAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, illustrated with no less than forty-two pictures by John Tenniel. What the great advocates for the progress of scientific knowledge will say to this book it is difficult to imagine. It is a piece of delicious nonsense—the story of a simple loving child, who allows her imagination to paint fairy-like pictures…. Mr. Tenniel has helped little Alice with his best pictures which we have seen for many a day.” On December 12, theBookseller reported that it was “delighted... a more original fairy tale… it has not lately been our good fortune to read.” It continues and predicts that all boys and girls will be “impatient to possess the book.” TheGuardian, on December 13, reported that “the story… is absolute nonsense; but nonsense so graceful and so full of humour that one can hardly help reading it through. The illustrations… are, if anything, still better than the story; together they furnish children with materials for many a hearty laugh, which older children may very easily share.”

Before the end of 1865 other notices appeared in theIllustrated London News, theIllustrated Times, thePall Mall Gazette, theSpectator, theLondon Review, theStar, theChristmas Bookseller, andThe Times. In 1886, theMonthly Packet, John Bull, theLiterary Churchman, theSunderland Herald,Aunt Judy’s Magazine, and theContemporary Review noticed the book.

With his first children’s book receiving good notices and selling tolerably well, Dodgson might logically have begun to think that he should put more of his energies into writing children’s books professionally. But it took quite a while for him even to consider doing another. Perhaps the travail over scrapping the first impression ofAlice turned him from the thought, perhaps the demands of college affairs kept him too busy. But when Macmillan wrote to suggest that another three thousand copies ofAliceshould be printed to supply the demand, Dodgson must have begun to think about writing more. Still he was hesitant. In a letter to Alexander Macmillan nine months after the second impression ofAlice appeared, on August 24, 1866, he wrote: “It will probably be some time before I again indulge in paper and print. I have, however, a floating idea of writing a sort of sequel to Alice, and if it ever comes to anything, I intend to consult you at the very outset, so as to have the thing properly managed from the beginning.”

But nothing happened. A year and a half later, he broke the silence about a second book in a letter to a friend dated December 15. 1867, and even then he merely noted that “Alice’s visit to Looking-Glass House is getting on pretty well.” A month after that, he wrote in his diary that over the Christmas vacation “I have… added a few pages to the second volume of Alice,” and on February 6, 1867, he made a fat statement about it when he wrote to his publisher: “I am hoping before long to complete another book about ‘Alice’…. You would not, I presume, object to publish the book, if it should ever reach completion.”

A major obstacle still stood in Dodgson’s way, however. Once again, he needed an illustrator. Tenniel was an obvious choice, particularly as his illustrations had been so highly praised, and Dodgson knew that it would be hard to find anyone as good. He made the approach, but the answer was an immediate and unconditional “no”: Tenniel was too busy. Dodgson tried to find another suitable artist: Richard Doyle, Sir Joseph Noel Paton, and even W. S. Gilbert, whose “Bab Ballads” were then appearing with his own illustrations in the humour magazineFun. But for various reasons, none of these illustrators could come to the rescue. In fact, two and a half years passed before Dodgson finally convinced Tenniel to illustrateThrough the Looking-Glass, and even then, the artist consented to do them only “at such time as he can find.”

Dodgson sent his publisher the first chapter to his looking-glass story on January 12, 1869, but two more years passed before he finished writing it. And further delays were inevitable. For one thing, Tenniel had not yet done all the pictures. “Through the Looking-Glass… lingers on, though the text is ready,” Dodgson wrote in August 1871, adding, “I have only received twenty-seven pictures.” And four days after that, he wrote to Tenniel “accepting the melancholy… fact that we cannot getThrough the Looking-Glass out by Michaelmas.”

Even after Tenniel supplied the drawing of the Jabberwock for a frontispiece, Dodgson was so worried that the monster would frighten his young readers that he sent copies of the drawing to thirty mothers asking their opinion of the picture. They must have confirmed his own fears, for he substituted a drawing of the White Knight in the front of the book. Carrying out all these precautionary measures took time. Finally, in November 1871 Dodgson was able to breathe a sigh of relief and write in his diary that “‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ is now printing off rapidly.” Although the title page bears the publication date 1872,Through the Looking-Glass appeared as a Christmas book for 1871, six years after the appearance of the second impression ofAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Looking-Glass was an immediate success, both critically and commercially. Macmillan began by printing nine thousand copies, as opposed to the much smaller number of the firstAlice. But even so, he had to print an additional six thousand immediately. On January 27, 1872, seven weeks after the book appeared, Dodgson wrote in his diary: “My birthday was signalised by hearing from… Macmillan that they have now sold 15000Looking-Glasses and have orders for 500 more.” By 1893 Macmillan had printed sixty thousand. By 1898, when Dodgson died, Macmillan had printed over one hundred and fifty thousand copies ofAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland and over one hundred thousand copies ofLooking-Glass.

Neither book has ever gone out of print; both have, in fact, become firm bulwarks of society, not only in the English-speaking world, but everywhere else as well. Short of the Bible, no other book is so widely and so frequently translated or quoted as these two.

There must be some explanation for this popularity and for the intense interest of the life of the author. Let us consider him first. At a hasty glance he does seem to be impenetrably mysterious. But a closer look at Charles Lutwidge Dodgson the man reveals much. He was fairly tall, slender, shy, and handsome; he usually dressed in black. In addition to being an Oxford mathematics don, he was an ordained clergyman with a stammer. He was a reserved, conservative, formal, retiring bachelor, and he nurtured a special interest in little girls. But how could a bachelor living in a monastic institution comprehend the child’s mind well enough to write stories that became children’s classics? The answer is probably not so difficult to find, for he was, after all, once a child himself and a sensitive one at that.

He was the eldest boy in a family of eleven children and very early in life took it upon himself to amuse and instruct his younger siblings. In fact he actually wrote and edited several family magazines, in verse and in prose, where, one might say, he cut his teeth as a creative writer for children. When Dodgson was thirty-six, his father died, and he became the head of the family, a responsibility that he took seriously. But however heavy the burden of such a large family, he always remembered his childhood, the pain of it as well as the Joy, and in dealing with children he knew how to avoid the unintentional callousness of which children often find adults guilty. Instead, he remembered and concentrated on how to please them, how to entertain them, how to make them shriek with laughter.

One might ask how a clergyman could allow himself to spin tales that make his readers abandon all seriousness. Well, Dodgson clearly believed that enjoying life did not diminish its seriousness nor violate either the canons of the Church or the lessons of Scripture. For him there was nothing wrong with fun and laughter at the right time and in the right place.

One might also ask how a professional mathematician, thinking customarily along strict, straight, disciplined lines, could abandon all logic and create disjointed worlds where systems and order break down completely and where nonsense rules. But perhaps a professional mathematician likes to take a holiday once in a while, too, and let his mind run out of the confining groves of academic life. And besides, no one unskilled in logic could have created the special brand of illogic that so delights us in these books.

But are a sensitive childhood, a good memory, a sense of fun, and an adventurous illogic enough to explain Lewis Carroll? Not really. There is at least one more important element to consider: his genius, his talent, his inspiration—call it what we will. After all, he told the first Alice story spontaneously to three young girls as their party rowed along the river near Oxford. He knew that a story would amuse the children, and so he made one up. In those few moments on that river picnic Charles Dodgson the Oxford don became Lewis Carroll the storyteller. Ultimately this transformation led to a new vocation, one that became as important a part of his life as mathematics. He recognized that the spark that set off the tale about Wonderland was something precious, something not given to all. He treasured it and fanned it into being again and again.

Many critics, a good many of them Freudians and post-Freudians, have tried to explain Dodgson and his brand of inspiration in terms of the deep unconscious springs of his being. As we know, psychoanalytical criticism is rarely flattering to its subject, and indeed the Charles Dodgson that these critics sketch for us is not a pleasant human being. But their analyses, in the end, do not help us very much to understand the attraction the man and the books hold for us, to this day. Dodgson himself knew that people would ask why he wrote theAlice books, and he had his own answers. They are not “trendy,” but they bring us closer than other explanations to gaining real insight into his character and his motives

“One of the deepest secrets of life”—he once wrote to his friend Ellen Terry—“is that all that isreally worth doing is what we do forothers.” Elsewhere, commenting onAlice in Wonderland, he wrote:

The why of this book cannot, and need not, be put into words. Those for whom a child’s mind is a sealed book, and who see no divinity in a child’s smile, would read such words in vain; while for any one who has ever loved one true child, no words are needed…. No deed… I suppose… is really unselfish. Yet if one can put forth all one’s powers in a task where nothing of reward is hoped for but a little child’s whispered thanks and the airy touch of a little child’s pure lips, one seems to come somewhere near to this.

 One of the reasons why theAlice books are so successful and enduring certainly lies in Dodgson’s remarkable knowledge of the child’s inner nature. He knew what childhood was all about. He revered his child friends as individual human beings, and he showed them respect and love where other adults might have dismissed them as unimportant or rebuked them. He dealt with the child seriously, and he fed the child’s mind and imagination with highly inventive words and images, not just saccharine rhymes and limp, outworn narratives. This regard for the child, the integrity he gave to their friendships, made all the difference to the children he knew, to the children he wrote for, to children today, and, one ventures to guess, to children of tomorrow.

A child friend of his, Ethel Rowell, once wrote of her debt to him for teaching her logic and compelling her “to that arduous business of thinking.” And she remembered that he gave her something else as well:

He gave me a sense of my own personal dignity. He was so punctilious, so courteous, so considerate, so scrupulous not to embarrass or offend, that he made me feel I counted…. In Mr. Dodgson's presence I felt proud and humble, with the pride and humility which are the grace of personality, grace conferred thus upon an ignorant school-girl by the magnanimity of a proud and very humble and very great and good man.

TheAlice books do for all children of all time exactly what they did for Ethel Rowell. They give young people self-confidence, a feeling that the author is sharing a jokewith them, not playing oneon them: that he enjoys sharing the joke, that he knows how to turn the conventions of everyday life into a joke. A seventeen-year-old student of mine recently confirmed this notion. In a paper on nineteenth-century fantasy, she wrote:

Lewis Carroll gives equal time to the child’s point of view. He makes fun of the adult world and all the arbitrary restrictions that adults impose upon children. Alice suffers all the hurt feelings that most children suffer, and she is caught in the contradictory condition of growing up and still being small. As a young adult, I personally find myself constantly identifying with Alice as I move through this bewildering world of ours. The books help the child develop self-awareness, and assure her that she is not the only one feeling what she feels. With luck, they lead even beyond developing the child’s self-awareness and show adults how to be better aware of the child and the needs of children. They really make it easier for a child to grow up.

The most enduring quality in the Alice books for that student and for many others is the laughter. Psychoanalysts often give laymen the impression that they seldom laugh; if so, how are they to come to grips with laughter? But the jests, the shattered sham, the punctured pretense and the resulting peals of laughter are the essential enchantment of these two books. What child, young or old, can resist the Mock Turtle’s account of his education, where the master was an old turtle, called Tortoise, “because he taught us”? Or his description of the subjects he and others studied when young: “Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with… and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision….” Then there was “Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling—the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a week:he taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils”? (And the Classical master, quite naturally, taught them Laughing and Grief.)

Education at the bottom of the sea is just as funny today as it was when it first appeared, over a century ago, and it is sure to amuse for centuries to come—because it appeals to something basic in most of us, our sense of the ridiculous, our yearning for fun. Those seabed lessons, we know, took ten hours the first day and nine the next, and so on; how could they be called lessons if they didn’t lessen from day to day? Quite the opposite with Lewis Carroll’s fame or the popularity of his two great children’s books.