“He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about?”
Alice said, “Nobody can guess that.”
“Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”
“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.
“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”
“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”
Iwas somewhat disconsolate in the waning days of 2008 as I realized that the centenary of one of the most significant events in the history of humanity—the first publication of The Wind in the Willows—was about to slip away all but entirely unremarked. What a barbarous lot we are, I thought, to be so callously indifferent not only to such exquisite artistry, but to that new epoch of the spirit inaugurated by the advent of Mr. Toad, and revealed in its truest depths when Mole and Rat sank to their knees before the piper at the gates of dawn. A people no longer awestruck by such things, I concluded, is probably only a few generations away from devouring its own young.
Well, now 2015 has passed and an even more momentous occasion—the 150th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—has gone by, if not entirely unnoticed, certainly without anything like the celebration and pageantry and royal progresses it merited. In terms of the evolution of human imagination, sensibility, and moral tact, few moments in the course of Western and world culture could possibly be of comparable magnitude. The most substantial commemoration of the event was Norton’s issue of the newest new edition of Martin Gardner’s wonderful Annotated Alice, including all the material from earlier editions, amended and updated by Mark Burstein. It is a lavish and delightful volume, for which we may all be grateful; but it is not enough. As far as I am concerned, if that enchanted place at Godstow near the banks of the Isis could be found where the rowing party of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), Rev. Robinson Duckworth, and the three young Liddell sisters, Lorina, Alice, and Edith, stopped for a picnic on July 4, 1862, and where Dodgson for the first time told the tale of Alice’s adventures “Under Ground” (that axial instant when he truly became Lewis Carroll), it should become a pilgrimage site as sacred as the Mahabodhi Tree at Bodh Gaya.
