Go Ask Alice !

The Enigma of Lewis Carrol's "Alice's Adventures Underground" and
"Through the Looking Glass"
{and what alice found there}

What people refer to when they talk of "Alice in Wonderland" never has existed.
There never was a book called "Alice in Wonderland" and Mr. Carrol's real
creations mentioned in the title of this article are very rarely read in thier
original forms and even more rarely-truelly understood.Perhaps it's a good
thing to because the stories that Carrol wrote are really not appropriate for
children.There is way to much material of an adult nature that would send
many a family to the lines forming to ban the stories as Carrol originally wrote
them.
What most people have read is a compendium of the two very differant stories
watered down to the 100th degree to make it politically correct for modernity.
That's essentially what the Walt Disney movie was-and who can blame him.There
is no way Disney could have told the stories as they were written.They are far to
adult in nature,many of the referances to places and people would fall on deaf ears,
and people would not be entertained by Lewis Carrol's way of twisting the world
upside down so much as to be totally unrecognizable.No,people needed a neat and
tidy story that wouldn't upset parents or children and that's exactly what they
got.That's the "Alice" the modern public knows but the real alice{yes there was a
real alice}was a very unique person living in a completely unique time and place
and she and her two sisters just happened to fall in love with the stories told to
them by the Rev. Charles Dogson.It was alice that requested the Rev. to write the
stories down and that's really the only reason the alice stories ever made it to print.
Much of the information and inside jokes inside the original stories would only
be understood by Alice,her sisters and people who lived in the region of oxford,
england at the time.The questions about the nature of logic and nonsense and
the middle ground inbetween where Carrol mined the most humor and Wonder
from his storys has not appeared in print for nearly a Century.The only "Alice"
we get is second hand edited stories that have little if anything to do with what
Carrol and the Liddel sisters understood only to well.Maybe someday the real
Lewis Carrol stories will be printed again in thier original form but i fear it's
to late.The public has come to accept the watered down "Alice" and to bring back
the original stories in thier original text would only confuse people and cause an
uproar and we certainly don't need that.

Written by Pete Holly-all rights reserved-2010