Children’s summer reading

It’s the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland — cue an explosion of editions of the book, a new biography of Lewis Carroll, make-and-do books, jigsaw puzzles and general Alice overload. In a way, it’s all dandy. Alice is part of our collective consciousness, even though for modern children it’s chiefly through the medium of assorted films. The Lewis Carroll industry hasn’t, however, even tried to rehabilitate his two later Sylvie and Bruno works, now unreadable thanks to the late-Victorian fashion for babytalk.

Trouble is, the cult of Wonderland has rather blinded us to the fact that Alice unexpurgated is actually quite hard for contemporary children. Of course any child will like a white rabbit with a pocketwatch, but the language and mental world of the book is so much of its time that it doesn’t make for an easy read. Through the Looking-Glass is a challenge for children who don’t know the first thing about chess.

Take the little incident that precedes the Caucus race, when the creatures who have been swimming in Alice’s pool of tears try to dry out. The mouse declaims:

Are you all ready? This is the driest thing I know. William the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by the pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who wanted leaders and of late had been much accustomed to usurpation and conquest…

Getting the joke of that depends on knowing that dry as in ‘not wet’ is the same word as in ‘dull and uninteresting’. I’m not sure most children would.

But all’s not lost. There are a couple of versions of Alice which omit passages like this, and just cut to the chase, giving you all the characters and incidents a younger reader needs — done by the author.