I always had fear.

ALICE: Of what?

PETER: What does every child fear? … Captain Hook.

ALICE: The character?

PETER: The idea. Means something different for every boy I expect… For me it was no more summers of pirate yarns and playing in the grass. All the boys going to school, moving away and getting separated. My brothers not being my brothers anymore, being someone else’s husband or father, but not my brothers, not really, not like it was. No more father and mother… Just me… That’s a piece of growing up, isn’t it? Learning to name the thing you fear? … Captain Hook.

CARROLL: Or the Red Queen.

ALICE: Children’s stories can’t hurt you.

PETER: You know better.

ALICE: They don’t exist. There is no Captain Hook.

PETER: Are you sure? Don’t you sometimes feel him? … When you’re alone, in a dark room, the point of his hook touching the back of your neck?

ALICE: They can’t hurt you. Not once you grow up.

CARROLL goes to her:

CARROLL: But, Alice, you must never grow up! Promise me!

ALICE: Really, how can I help from growing up?

CARROLL: Ah, the question of the ages. We’ll have to ask a wise old tortoise. Shall we stroll?

She’s disturbed by this bit of her past.

ALICE: That long summer. God, would it never end? … We were walking in town. There were illuminations that evening and the street was radiant. My sisters and our governess had wandered ahead, so it was just Reverend Dodgson and me… It was so rarely that, just the two of us alone. Only twice that I can recall.

PETER: Truly?

ALICE: It was a different era, Mr. Davies. Unaccompanied in the presence of a gentleman? It wasn’t done… I can only remember two times. This was the first…

Gentle and magical illuminations light the stage.

CARROLL and ALICE stroll. It is 1862.

ALICE: But why mustn’t I grow up? It seems the most marvelous thing in the world to be old and wear gowns and gloves and hats with feathers.

CARROLL: Oh, hats with feathers are admirable things, but along with them goes something altogether unlike gowns and gloves. First the squint in the eye and then the hard set of the mouth, followed in quick order by the wagging tongue and the shaking finger. One day you turn around and you’ve become Mrs. Grundy: soberly disapproving of everything that used to give you pleasure.

ALICE: I can’t imagine that! Shan’t I always be able to laugh at things?

CARROLL: Does your mother laugh much?

ALICE thinks about this.

ALICE: No… Not so much as she used to perhaps.

CARROLL: And it seems to me even our Lorina is not so amused as she used to be.

ALICE: She got her first corset, you know.

CARROLL: Alice, you shouldn’t talk about such things to a gentleman.

ALICE: It’s made out of whale bone!

CARROLL: That’s why the leviathans are so terribly fat. They’ve given all their corsets to little girls in Oxford.

ALICE speaks to PETER:

ALICE: I watched my sister putting on her corset for the first time. I shall never forget it… My mother sat us down, all three girls, and produced it from a gorgeous purple box, made of Venetian paper I think. I was intoxicated by the box. And then the bone of the corset was iridescent. Here was growing up and becoming a woman: and it was beautiful… My mother helped Lorina put it on and tighten the laces. Well then I could see it hurt. Lorina cried… And my mother, the look on her face. She was not a woman given to displaying vulnerability. She was our soldier. But on her face… What was it? Not quite sadness.