"De omnibus dubitandum", Descartes had said. "To doubt everything." Most will be right. And they will be right, that is. But, between us, now, it is good not to doubt everything. Not everything is so infected.
How, let's say, bro, will you look at the innocent children's stories with a strange eye? How can we say not to rejoice and not to relax with the sensitivity and carelessness of "Alice in Wonderland"?
And that is where Descartes comes and is justified. De omnibus dubitandum. Even for "Alice" and especially for the "wonderland".
You see, the author of the book is a dark personality. So dark that no one can help but shudder reading it book and learning the real story behind it.
The protagonist of the story you will read is Charles Dodgson. For those of you who have read the book and the specific name does not tell you anything, let's say that this is its real name writer of. Charles Dodgson is "Lewis Carroll".
A strange and definitely controversial personality. It was not always so. How dark a man Dodgson was emerges over the years and the study of his work and life.
Before we move on, it would be good to point out that no accusation has ever been made publicly about Charles Dodgson. Only suspicions. And the whole truth is not going to be learned because someone took care of it…
You see, out of the 13 volumes of the diary he kept with religious reverence, four of them were lost while someone (maybe himself) took care to tear and completely lose several pages of the volumes that still exist. Coincidentally or not, the volumes and pages that were lost refer to the most critical five years of his life. The season in which what you will read below takes place. The time when Charles Dodgson was inspired to write "Alice in Wonderland". But let's start from the beginning.
Dodgson was an extremely low-key man. He was largely shy. They say he stuttered when he tried to talk to a group of adults. This stutter, however, escaped him when he was talking or telling a fairy tale to young children.
That's how it all started, after all. A Dodgson conversation with three little girls traveling with them on a boat on the Thames. The three underage girls were the Lindell sisters, daughters of Henry Lindell, Rector of Christ Church at Oxford University.
Dodgson manages to win the favor of the rector. He was a master of low tones, a great mathematical mind and told beautiful stories. Ideal for company that is.
From the beginning of this relationship, Dodgson seemed to be indifferent to everything else and to enjoy the company of Henry Lindell's middle daughter, 10-year-old Alice! It was the little one who pressured him to tell them stories. She was inspired to write that of a girl trapped in a magical land where anything can happen. Disappearing cats. Talking rabbits. Well dressed playing cards that come to life. Theorata mushrooms…
At a time when, at the urging of Alice, Dodgson was writing stories in Wonderland, the author of one of the most successful children's fairy tales of history, ascended his own "Golgotha". He lived a health adventure that for many modern scholars explains a lot about what he wrote.
He was faced with a severe form of epilepsy, unknown at the time but now called TLE by scientists. In fact, this condition is now known in the medical community as the "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome". Dodgson had problems with dysmetrophy, which affects the way we perceive the space around us and the objects that make it up. In macrops, for example, we have objects that look much larger than they normally are, while pelops show them closer to us when they are actually far away. It is not entirely clear which of the above forms of epilepsy Carol was experiencing, but she made sure to present it clearly to the public through Alice's objects that grew and shrunk.
Could this also apply to the lights that were brightly lit in the bunny hole? It may. Also the lights become brighter when you "trip" after using psychotropic substances drugs.
As the LSD. Dodgson was also blamed for that. It is known, after all, that perhaps the harshest criticism about his book was received for the caterpillar that makes hookah on its huge mushroom! Both the hookah and especially the mushroom, probably show more than what everyone understands but again there is no evidence.
There is, of course, another and, in fact, extremely widespread view that developed many years after its first publication, when "Aliki" acquired "Freudian" interpretations! It was claimed that with the constant changes of its size, Aliki symbolized the male penis, something that becomes even clearer when it is "lost" in Wonderland having fallen into the… hole that the hare has opened. The book was banned from some schools in the United States because of its references to sexual fantasies and in masturbation.
In any case, things did not go as well as Dodgson would have liked as the rift with Henry Lindell's family plunged him into depression from which he found a way out through writing. The interesting thing, however, is why the Dodgson came into conflict with the Lindell family.
The relationship - although very intense at first - ended abruptly. So abruptly that a lot of gossip was provoked. They sounded different, however, two of them are the ones who remained as a "shadow" over this story.
The first, he says, is that Dodgson had an affair with the family's eldest daughter, Lorina. The young girl was then 18 years old (so typically there is no question of pedophilia) but it seems that the father did not like this at all.
The second is that the one Dodgson fell in love with was not 18-year-old Lorina but Alice herself! It is said that one day when she was at Lindell's house, somewhere between serious and funny, she asked her father to shake hands so that he could marry her as soon as she became an adult.
Whatever the truth, it was enough to end his relationship with his family once and for all. A few years later, Alice would become Lord Hargreaves' wife and leave the past behind.
"Alice in Wonderland" (the original title of the book was "The Adventures of Alice Under the Ground") was published in 1865. Two years after Dodgson had severed all ties with the Lindell family. He died in January 1898 and from that point onwards the rumors that were based on the book, on Alice and especially on the photographs that were Dodgson's second great love, were reaped.
He showed a preference for photographs of minors, which, however, was common in Victorian England. The issue, however, seems to have escalated due to the behavior of Dodgson, who wrote to a friend of the painter that "I confess that I do not admire the pictures with naked boys. They always seem to need clothes, while the beautiful figures of the girls should never be covered!
It is a given that the author, through his favorite children's book, wanted to send messages about society, the way we want others to see us and the decency that reigned in Victorian England since he believed that Victorian culture contaminated the innocence of youth. In the presence of the children he found redemption and freedom. Of course, all this does not rule out the possibility of sexual attraction to young girls whom he admired for their spontaneity and innocence.
It is definitely a book with many shadows and the lost pages from Dodgson's diary will forever hide what really happened. No one will ever know if it really was what he was showing or changing like all the other objects in Wonderland.