Preparing for the Summer School at which we discussed Alice in 2010, I find my thinking about children’s literature has changed. I will put the powerpoint here at some point after the class, and I don’t think it will be much changed; Alice’s dates, &c are unrevised, and I haven’t much else to say about Victorian education and childhood – but what I am thinking over is the notion of the sly joke, the remark way over the heads of the child audience, flattering or distracting the adult teller and/or the adult reader.
So the first (new – well, to this blog) question is:
How many audiences are there in Alice?
Crudely outlined, I can discern a basic five: children past; children present; adults past; adults present; scholars. In fact this will fragment and kaleidoscope into all sorts of divisions: children in the past who were original audience (the Liddells – see below); the first children to read the first published editions; children before this present generation; the informal adult audience for the first stories; the adult readers of the first editions (Queen Victoria being one), subsequent adult readers – and this is where it gets even more complicated by a subdivision of adults who had and had not been child readers, and adults reading with and without children…. How to begin to think of ‘reader response’ with such a diverse audience? Perhaps the excellent Rob Pope English Studies Book is a place to start?
He asks, as I do here, about readers (“The Reader… Which Readers?” Pope 1998:247), and rightly raises issues around how we theorise these readers, but behind all the readers we can come up with (and maybe many others I haven’t begun to name) are three girls and one male adult: Revd Duckworth, and Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddell, the original hearers of the stories of Alice, the fellow-travellers in the rowing boat to Godstow, on 4th July 1862). Whatever we make of any subsequent readers, these four – and one in particular – are always with us.