. ‘If I was on the other side of the glass,’ [Alice] said, ‘wouldn’t the orange still be in my right hand?’ . . . ‘Well done, little Alice,’ [Carroll] said. ‘The best answer I’ve had yet.’5

Carroll completed work on the sequel quickly; a manuscript entitled Behind the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Saw There was posted to Macmil lan in January 1869. It appeared, with its present title, in time for Christmas 1871, though its publication date reads 1872. The book was a wild success, selling out its initial print run of 9,000 copies almost immediately. By 1893 it had sold 60,000 copies.

TAMING CHANCE VS. ENDING BOREDOM

“I can’t remember things before they happen.” (p. 204)

“Can you row?” the Sheep asked, handing her a pair of knitting-needles as she spoke.

“Yes, a little—but not on land—and not with needles—” Alice was beginning to say. (p. 209)

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland began as an oral tale told by Lewis Carroll to the three Liddell sisters, although it is often forgotten that Carroll’s fantasia of reading and upside-down geography lessons begins with a book, and specifically the aversion to reading one. In the first chapter, Alice, bored to tears and sitting on a river bank, peeks at and then turns away from her sister’s book because it lacks “pictures or conversations” (p. 13). She thinks to make a daisy chain, thus taking charge of her own boredom by ending it. Of course, Alice never does make herself a daisy chain, and in this she implicitly acknowledges that it may not be enough to want to end boredom to bring it to an end. It might be more accurate to say that boredom is ended for her by something she cannot entirely provide by herself. Not surprisingly, Alice’s dream, like the landscape of Wonderland itself, feels both expansive and boxed in, wonderfully curious and frustratingly opaque, an imaginary landscape that is located under as opposed to above ground.

For a child, boredom may be the biggest non-event or riddle to solve because its solution must come from without—while seeming to come from within. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “We are bored when we don’t know what we are waiting for.”6 Like the various creatures in Wonderland, boredom is a curious riddle of wanting something to want. Like a good many “acceptable” neuroses, boredom is indeterminate. It resists analysis. Not surprisingly, when Alice first sees the Rabbit she answers as any bored child might: “There was nothing so very remarkable in that” (p. 13). As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips suggests, it may be a pedagogical and therapeutic mistake (Alice in Wonderland is filled with both) to try to cure boredom.7

If boredom is difficult to dispel, the boredom all children feel is not easily tolerated by adults, who insist that children have things to do, that they have interests. The field of symbolic logic and the adult’s attempts to eradicate boredom turn out to be equally coercive. Alice’s English and her manners are corrected relentlessly. Alice is bossed about: The rabbit orders her to fetch his handkerchief, a note on a bottle enjoins her to “drink me,” the caterpillar demands that she explain herself, the Queen summons her to play croquet. The result of such coercion is generally terror followed by tears, and there is much crying in Alice in Wonderland. Nearly all the players in Wonderland, with the exception of the Duchess and the Queen, are male, older than Alice, and contentious, imperious, or condescending in their adherence to strict rules.