There Are So Many Fairy Tales — Why Has Alice's Dream Lasted 150 Years? | QDaily Business History

Plenty of fairy tales are sunny, lovely, uplifting. Yet it is Carroll's absurd one — Alice's dream — that has gone on all these years.

There is a children's book that, as of this year, has been in print for exactly 150 years. The British have worn themselves out celebrating its birthday.

The Royal Mail issued a set of 10 stamps on the story, designed jointly by the designer Jason Godfrey and the illustrator Grahame Bakersmith.

Britain's V&A Museum of Childhood opened a new exhibition about the tale, walking through 150 years of its evolution in order and showing what it has done to contemporary pop culture.

The British designer Vivienne Westwood — known in China as the "Empress Dowager of the West" — worked with the publisher Vintage Classics on a collector's edition. She is 74, and she designed the cover herself.

This long-lived fairy tale is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In 1865, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson published the first edition under the pen name Lewis Carroll. In 2015 the book turned 150. Over that long stretch it has been translated into 174 languages and sold around the world. Two professors at Yale, word has it, are even preparing to translate Alice into Egyptian hieroglyphs.

But there are so many fairy tales, plenty of them sunny and uplifting. Why is it Carroll's absurd one that has stayed young and never gone out of fashion? Early on, critics called it "incoherent, the mad ravings of a bunch of oddballs."

A Remarkable Author and a Grotesque Fairy Tale

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland began as nothing more than a fantastical little story Carroll made up to pass the time on a journey, told to three small girls. Only later, at the request of Alice Liddell — the real girl behind the story's Alice — did Carroll spend two years turning it into a finished work. Without her, later generations might never have read anything so good.

Lewis Carroll

Like the story, Carroll himself was a remarkable man. He taught mathematics at a theological college. In today's terms he was a science student with an artistic streak: as a boy he was already putting together a family magazine, writing plenty of doggerel, drawing comic strips. In 1850, while preparing for his Oxford entrance exams, he also wrote a book called The Rectory Umbrella. He had a real gift for writing, and he was accomplished in photography too.

By the age of seven, it is said, Carroll had finished Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress — an allegory generally reckoned in the West to be the most important Christian book after the Bible. That a seven-year-old got through that classic says enough: he was a genius.

Alice Liddell in front of Carroll's camera

But geniuses have their troubles, and Carroll had his. He was shy by nature and stammered badly; as a child his playmates mocked him, and he stayed timid and awkward in company for the rest of his life. Only around children did he feel at ease, and little girls charmed him most.

Most of his photographs used young girls as models — he was especially keen on photographing Alice — and now and then the small models were posed "half-dressed." Carroll himself held that children were sensual, by which he meant to capture their innocence and purity; people at the time appear not to have seen it that way. Those photographs may well be why Alice's parents cut off contact with him for a while.

As a mathematician, Carroll's logic was clear and tight. But anyone who has read Alice, whether the book or the films, notices that logic does not work in the Alice world he built. Here Alice swells and shrinks without warning; a mouse and a duck squabble endlessly over a pronoun with no clear referent; the Caterpillar can't be bothered with anyone and likes to ask, "Who are you?"; the Mock Turtle sobs and sighs though nothing tragic has happened to him; there is a mad tea party that never ends, and a court that hands down the verdict before the trial. From start to finish it is an inexplicable world of the absurd and the strange.

Now look at Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish fairy-tale writer of the same era. He earned his title as "the sun of the world's children's literature" (this year marks exactly 140 years since the master left us), laying out the truths of this world in one gentle, friendly tale after another.

In his stories, those who try hard end up beautiful — the Ugly Duckling. The kind sacrifice themselves for love — the Little Mermaid. Friendship between friends can break a spell — Gerda and Kai. Fools get laughed at — the emperor in his transparent new clothes. The world you see there is good and normal, and everything runs on the logic of the real world (in the real world evil really does lose to good, doesn't it?).

The Mad Hatter's tea party

But learn a little about the Victorian era Carroll lived in and you find that all his absurdity has roots. None of it is nonsense. The never-ending tea party was an ordinary British social occasion of the day, and the Queen of Hearts, forever calling for someone's head, was a dig at the Victorian ruling class (ironically, Queen Victoria herself was a devoted fan of Alice).

The Cheshire Cat, always grinning with its jagged teeth, most likely comes from the English saying "grin like a Cheshire cat." Many other characters were named after people around Carroll: the Dodo in chapter three is Carroll himself (his stammer made his speech come out as "do-do"), while the Lory and the Eaglet are Alice's sisters.

In the telling, Carroll used a great many brilliant puns and homophone games, plus several nonsense poems that spoofed well-known rhymes and verses of the day — enough that no reader ever thinks, "Oh, maybe I'll go get a coffee first." But he did not use this literary tradition of nonsense verse merely to make readers laugh like fools and be done with it. Behind the laughter sit his philosophical metaphors and his satire of the newest mathematical research of his time. He found a balance between fun and depth, between the absurd and the real.

Put that way, doesn't Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland sound a little like a split personality? On the surface it pulls readers into a wondrous dream world on a wildly imaginative plot; underneath it carries tight logic and serious meaning. Perhaps it is exactly this mismatch between surface and substance that won Alice both child readers and adults, and carried it across time and oceans to stay popular worldwide for 150 years.

An "Alice Circle": the Fairy Tale at the Center, the Radius Unknown

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a British Victorian fairy tale, and it has stayed popular through the 150 years since its birth. Beyond its own literary charm, much of the credit goes to how many different media and forms can carry it to an audience.

By now the bizarre tale has been adapted into picture books, TV dramas, films, songs, musicals and games — and that is before counting all the merchandise and other work it has inspired. Alice, clearly, has considerable artistic and commercial value.

Of the many illustrated editions, two have to be mentioned (the others are excellent too). The first is what the British illustrator John Tenniel drew for the original edition. His illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, made him famous at home and abroad. Tenniel created Alice's visual identity, and he is the reason the little blue dress is her standard outfit. Unhappy with the printing at the time, he shelved the first run of 2,000 copies and released a new edition that December (1865), which set off a buying rush and made Alice a bestseller.

An illustration from Yayoi Kusama's edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The other is the version drawn by Japan's "eccentric old lady," Yayoi Kusama, thick with the artist's own style. At the age of 80, Kusama worked with Penguin to lay out her Alice's fantastical journey in more than 100 illustrations, a fairly complete visual narrative. This edition is also close to torture for anyone with trypophobia, because Kusama applied her signature device — polka dots — to every image, so you get pattern after pattern built from black-and-white and colored dots.

Unlike other Alice illustrators, Kusama has lived among heavy hallucinations since childhood, for physiological reasons, and long ago fused the real world with the world of illusion. The Alice world under her brush is stranger and less real for it. She has every right to say: "I, Yayoi Kusama, am the modern Alice wandering through Wonderland."

Alice has also been adapted often for film and television. In 1903 the directors Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow put it on the big screen for the first time. It was only a silent film, but it opened the screen era of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

After that a great many directors and screenwriters who loved the book adapted and reinvented it in their own ways, making the on-screen Alice richer and more varied. As of 2014, Alice had been filmed at least 46 times. The most influential were Disney's 1951 animated version and Tim Burton's 2010 live-action 3D version.

A still from Cheongdam-dong Alice

Among all those adaptations, there is naturally no leaving out South Korea, that factory of wish-fulfillment romances, or Japan, the anime power. In 2012 South Korea's SBS made the weekend drama Cheongdam-dong Alice, starring Moon Geun-young and Park Si-hoo.

Here the rabbit hole is not the gate into a magical world but Cheongdam-dong, Seoul's rich district. Alice is not the innocent little girl but a broke young woman set on marrying into money, chasing love in an unfamiliar world of the wealthy. The pocket-watch rabbit that opens every episode becomes the mentor who helps her reach her dream of getting out of poverty and getting rich. It strays a long way from the original story, but judged as an idol drama Cheongdam-dong Alice worked. It averaged over 13% in ratings, peaked at 17.6%, and finished on a strong 16.6%.

In the many Japanese comics and cartoons Alice has inspired, "Alice" is often not a real person at all but stands for something beyond ordinary reality. In Gakuen Alice, the shōjo manga by Tachibana Higuchi, "Alice" is the name of a special power, and Alice Academy is a school built for the people who have one. In Rozen Maiden, by the two-woman manga team Peach-Pit, "Alice" is the male lead's symbol of the one pure, flawless girl — the goal the seven Rozen Maiden dolls pursue.

Traces of Alice can be glimpsed in the work of literary and intellectual heavyweights too: in the Irish writer James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses; in the Austrian writer Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and The Trial; in the British poet T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Burnt Norton; in the Chinese writer Shen Congwen's Alice's Adventures in China《阿丽思中国游记》. The shadow of Alice turns up everywhere.

The Catbus in Studio Ghibli's My Neighbor Totoro

Beyond shaping other work as a whole, single characters from Alice have become sources of their own. The Cheshire Cat — mysterious, forever grinning — has always been one of the book's best-loved characters, and one of the muses later creators keep chasing; you can watch it appear and vanish across all sorts of comics and animation. Take the grinning Catbus in Ghibli's My Neighbor Totoro; the nameless black cat that gets Coraline out of danger in Coraline; the Grinning Cat in Pandora Hearts; and the Cheshire Cat in Thy Name Is Alice《汝名艾丽斯》, a fictional manga built on the two Alice books.

Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is no longer only his absurd story, or only his coded satire of his own age. It has become a spring that never runs dry. Countless works draw on it without being tied to it, and some outdo it. That has formed an "Alice circle" with the original at its center and a radius that can stretch on forever. Later generations can widen the circle with their own strange, bright ideas, and Alice, at the center, will always be remembered — because this is where it started.

Pop Culture Keeps Shifting, and Alice's Story Has Become "a Thousand People's Hamlet"

In the 150 years since Alice's Adventures in Wonderland appeared, adaptation and reinvention have never stopped, and neither has research into what it means and what it stands for. Alice seems to have opened not just an underground world but people's inexhaustible curiosity.

Will Brooker, a professor at Kingston University London and the author of Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture, says the way each generation reads a text reflects the culture of its own time: "the 1930s was psychoanalysis, the 1960s was hallucinogens, the 1990s was pedophilia." So people of different decades went on stuffing Carroll and Alice into their own reading frames, making new meaning out of the text without end.

Before the 1930s, Alice was defined as a happy, uncomplicated children's storybook with no deeper intent. But as psychoanalysis caught on, people came to believe that something deeper had to sit under the surface of the story, something to be read through Freud. Alice became a fairy tale heavy with philosophy, and even its vaguest dialogue was given philosophical color.

"How can you go on talking so quietly, head downwards?" Alice asked, as she dragged him out by the feet and laid him in a heap on the bank. The Knight looked surprised at the question. "What does it matter where my body happens to be?" he said. "My mind goes on working all the same. In fact, the more head-downwards I am, the more I keep inventing new things."

This exchange between Alice and the White Knight carries a serious point: it is about the detached nature of theoretical reason. The White Knight takes it as given that theoretical reason is detached — that it keeps working however the body is displaced, and can go on inventing new things regardless. In theory, that is, as long as these new inventions are never tested in practical use, they hold up fine. In practice they may not work at all.

The 1960s and 1970s were a decadent age awash in drug abuse and sexual freedom. In that climate Alice was not only twisted out of shape — it got lost along with the times. Because the visions Alice sees in the underground world resembled the hallucinations of ecstasy or marijuana, people began to suspect that Carroll had been a user himself. The veteran rock band Jefferson Airplane even wrote its classic "White Rabbit" in 1967 out of this "drugged" reading of Alice. The song reached a respectable No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 at the time. But the first biography of Carroll says he took no drugs.

In 1976 the film version directed by Bud Townsend and starring Terri Hall overturned the original's innocence more thoroughly still: the director turned a pure children's fairy tale into a pornographic film. Even so, the R-rated picture seems to have done well at the time. It opened in the major mainstream theaters and took more than $9,000 worldwide.

The three Liddell sisters

By the 1990s the claim that Carroll was a pedophile had all of society reaching for morals and ethics. The suspicion rested on his close relationship with the young Alice and on the child photographs he made; there was even a rumor that he once proposed to Alice and was refused. But Carroll spent so much time with children largely because he was bad at socializing. Set against the complicated world of adults, a child's world was one he found easier to enter, and readier to enter.

Brooker puts this gossip about Carroll and Alice down to a cynical age. Does that mean everyone on the road to success is bound, at some point, to be smeared in some tasteless way?

Whether Carroll and his Alice really hide some secret best kept quiet cannot be settled now. Carroll has been dead for many years, and there is no reliable first-hand material to answer the doubts. None of it changes how good the fairy tale of Alice is, or the fact that Carroll was a genius.

The various game adaptations have also worked hard at darkening Alice. In Alice: Madness Returns, made by Spicy Horse, the whole setting is dark and frightening, and Alice becomes an avenger just out of an asylum. American McGee's Alice, made by Rogue Entertainment, follows the same formula — a bloody, filthy setting in which Alice becomes a psychologically twisted figure carrying a butcher's knife.

These 150 Years Have Also Been the Commercialization of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with Disney the Main Driver

Jack Zipes, a critic of the Frankfurt School, has pointed out that since the 1950s many writers have recognized that the great majority of the readers they face have been "Disneyfied" — deeply shaped by the Disney culture industry.

What Zipes means is that although Disney's adaptations of literary works push literature toward commerce and entertainment, they also put far more people in touch with the originals, and people grow more used to literature expressed the Disney way.

Of the many Alice films, two produced and released by Disney landed hardest, and both pushed Alice's commercialization along: the 1951 animated version directed by Clyde Geronimi and Wilfred Jackson, and the 2010 live-action version directed by Tim Burton.

A still from the 1951 version of Alice in Wonderland

The 1951 Alice in Wonderland opened on July 26 that year, the 13th film in the canon of Disney animated classics. But it came out in the United States during the postwar economic slump, when mainstream culture leaned toward realism, so a cartoon made by surrealist means naturally caused little stir. Only when psychology became fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s did the film draw attention again.

The budget is estimated at $3 million, and the film took about $5.23 million at the US box office. It brought Disney little profit, but its later influence turned out to be considerable. Because so much of its imagery has the flavor of a fantasy world, Disneyland in California built an Alice in Wonderland ride, the hedges outside the castle at Disneyland Paris were clipped into the shape of the Cheshire Cat, and Tokyo Disneyland opened an Alice-themed restaurant back in 1999.

A still from the 2010 version of Alice in Wonderland

By comparison, the 2010 Alice, shot with live actors in digital 3D, brought far bigger changes and far more money. It opened on March 5, 2010, on a budget as high as $200 million, and grossed $1,024,299,904 — the second-biggest earner in Disney's history.

In Tim Burton's Wonderland, Alice is no longer a child who never grows up; she is a young woman of 19. The fairy-tale world she enters is no longer simple and innocent but full of danger and challenge. The film plays more like a fairy tale made for adults. Burton said he had held himself back, but his black Gothic style is still plain throughout. Look at Disney's work in recent years, in fact, and you can see it has started down a road of remaking and rethinking the classic fairy tales rather than simply "copying" them.

By the box office, audiences around the world liked the film. In practice, though, Disney's expansion of the merchandise around it has been fairly limited. All of Disney's big theme parks now have Alice attractions for visitors. Tokyo Disney recently announced an Alice-themed area, expected to open in 2017. The new Tokyo areas will also include Frozen and Beauty and the Beast; the three together are expected to cost 10 billion yen.

The Cheshire Cat ring

Inspired by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Brazilian jewelry brand H.Stern joined Disney to release a set of five rings, all in solid gold, partly covered in colored enamel or set with diamonds. The Cheshire Cat ring is the oddest of them. A cluster of bare branches sits on top of the band, with a shrunken Cheshire Cat sprawled across the branches, grinning its wide grin at you. The cat's mouth, reportedly, is made of a special composite that glows in the dark just as it does in the film. This Cheshire Cat ring is not cheap either: $20,500.

Alice is a prize in the fashion world too. Well before the films came out, plenty of big labels had already put out Alice-themed high-end ready-to-wear for adults, feeding women's fantasies about fairy tales. And Marc by Marc Jacobs, which announced this March that it was about to fold, will release an Alice-inspired capsule collection as its parting shot. The collection is called "I Am Not Like Other Girls," and covers clothing, sunglasses, jewelry, bags, phone cases and more, priced from $60 to $400.

Alice's Dream Will Go On

Given how well Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland did with critics and at the box office after its worldwide release in 2010, Disney is bringing out Alice Through the Looking Glass, now set for May 27, 2016. This time the director has changed to James Bobin, who made The Muppets for Disney. But the stars Johnny Depp and Mia Wasikowska both return for the sequel. So the film is still worth waiting for.

Of course, one Disney sequel is not what keeps Alice and her dream from aging. Alice has in fact become part of many people's lives, and part of the culture itself.

To book lovers it is a classic work of literature and a spring of inspiration for other work; to film fans it is a few animated features and a flashy Hollywood 3D picture; to travelers it is a theme park you can cross into an underground world through; even to eaters it is a bowl of mock turtle soup at The Fat Duck and chocolates from Lucky's. Alice seeps into different lives in different ways, naturally, without ever feeling forced.

It started as nothing but a fairy tale, yet every later appearance of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has been anything but dull. People keep giving it new carriers and new content, which is why it has never gone stale and still catches the eye.

That, in all likelihood, is exactly why Alice's dream has no end — because people keep opening new ground for it.