Alice in Wonderland – Old Paper & Cats, Reviews by S. Hargrave

In Dark Times

Most of the world is in despair as I write this on the Wednesday morning after what felt like the election to end all elections. I’m in that pit too. Everything feels impossible and ominous. Nothing makes sense. And it is so incredibly hard to let go in these moments. It’s so hard to pick myself up from the floor and keep going because there’s nothing else one can do from the sidelines across the border. But the birds are still singing outside in my birches. The cats are still purring at my feet. There is still wonder and beauty and joy on this planet and it’s so important to find it in moments like this one. So go to the bookstore. Read what makes you happy. Watch some films that bring the best parts of life to you. Draw closer to what you hold dear. Never forget who you are and how amazing existence can be. That’s all the comfort anyone has to give and it will always be enough if you let it.

A tabby cat wearing a crown and ruff looks at a chapter titled 'The Queen's Croquet Ground'.

Immortal Literature

When I’m having a bad time, I like to turn back to the past for comfort. Not because times were simpler and art was better, but because when I look at the past, I know how things turned out. I re-read books and relish knowing how they end. I watch old films and take comfort in the tropes and formulas. I enjoy disappearing into a world I used to inhabit when I was too young to know what adulthood had in store.

A tabby cat wearing a small crochet crown curls around a copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, illustrated by Tove Jansson.

Alice in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll and published in 1865, is a book I go back to again and again. Wonderland with all of its wonderful nonsense is full of all of the things I love about life. Poetry. Art. Rhyme. Whimsy. Language. As Alice evades her dour sister on the riverbank and slips into the realm of cats that talk and tea parties with rotating cups, she is finding the joy of being in one’s own world and one’s own mind. She talks to caterpillars and follows rabbits and provides a lesson in enjoying small moments and never losing your sense of play and wonder.

A cat in a ruff sits beside Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. A little crown casts a shadow on the book.

Of course, it should be said that though this book is a comfort, its history is not bereft of darkness. Dodgson’s victimization of Alice Pleasance Liddell and at least one of her sisters is something that always lurks in the back of my head while I read this story and Dodgson’s other work. It’s a lesson that important to remember when enjoying classic literature and film. You can enjoy them, but you should know the true history of it and have your eyes wide open to whose voice you’re reading and who it is that was silenced.

In My Life

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass were actually the first novels I read by myself when I first started reading. I’ve always loved them, enough that I am always up for perusing another edition or another interpretation. I’ve played and enjoyed American Magee’s Alice and Alice: Madness Returns. Disney’s version of Alice in Wonderland was something I watched very often, and I even made a paper mural for our sitting room of Tenniel’s original art from the book. Wesker’s first name is Alice (and she’s the only cat that has a first name), and two of the other cats are named from Carroll’s poems (Jabberwocky and Bandersnatch).

A tabby cat sits majestically on a patchwork blanket. She wears a small crochet crown and a lace Elizabethan-style ruff collar. Beside her is a copy of Alice in Wonderland.

I could go on and on and on and on listing all of the things that Alice in Wonderland as influenced and the impact that it has had on literature, imagery, film, and just about every other area of art. It was important for so many people and I’m sure it will continue to be important to many others in generations to come. If you have not read this book, then you probably are getting a lot less out of the European literature that has come after it. It definitely has a prominent place in literary canon and is one of the essential works of English literature, and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.

On Illustration

One of the reasons I was so excited for this particular edition of Alice in Wonderland was the inclusion of illustrations by Tove Jansson — who you probably know from her very famous collection of work, notably Moomin. Moomin is also one of the books (or, more accurately, series of books) I turn to when I’m sad. It’s a bit dated, but it has the same whimsical quality of Alice in Wonderland and the same sense of a world elsewhere with nonsensical problems and events, but one which still retains the rhythms of the natural world.

An illustration shows an elongated Alice, her face in her hands, sitting in a pool of water. The White Rabbits is coming to her through a row of trees.

Jansson’s illustrations for the book retain the charm of old woodcut and a kind of Victorian quality from the original, but at the same time she manages to turn the traditional on its head and give us something closer to Edward Lear’s illustrations for his Book of Nonsense (another childhood favourite of mine). Alice isn’t in a puffy corseted dress, and the Mock Turtle looks like a distant relative of a dinosaur and it is all so different and utterly fantastic.

A stately cat wears a crown and ruffled collar. The book beside her shows a picture of three cards painting white roses red.

Getting Through

It’s not going to be easy, but I’m going to just try not to look at the news and get back to nature and books and film and the safe spaces inside my own mind that make me happy. I know I need a bit of break to get over the pit and get back to living more mindfully and less like doom is somewhere on the imminent horizon.

Part of the plan? Holiday decorations. Yes, I know it is ridiculously early but I agree with Angela Lansbury — we need a little Christmas now. At least in this house.