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In fact, Alice was intended for Alice and all other young "spirits fresh from God's hands"; yet it is equally true and absorbing for adults. Down a rabbit hole and through a looking glass, Lewis Carroll leads mankind into a world that is both sad and hilarious, wondrously nonsensical, and yet vividly relevant to a century from which most of the solid Victorian absolutes of Truth, Goodness and Progress have faded like the Cheshire Cat. There is no more devastating comment on Marxist myth than the White Queen's "Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today." In his wildest escapades, whether hunting the Snark ("They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care:/They pursued it with forks and hope;") or playing croquet with flamingos as mallets and hedgehogs as balls, the moral of the mythology is that all pretensions and dogmas turn, like the Red Queen, to pasteboard. As Dodgson wrote to one of his young friends: "If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things." No Boys. Charles Dodgson found many ways to truth. He was absorbed in science, photography, medicine, the theater. He concocted puzzles, invented gadgets and games. Most of all, the gentle, fussy bachelor sought truth and solace with dozens of small girls on whom he could lavish affection without the embarrassment of a mature emotional relationship. "Boys," said he, "are not in my line; I think they are a mistake." Though some critics have pictured Dodgson's little girl friends as 19th century Lolitas. he was an unfailingly considerate and honest man, whose moral standards were, as Alice Liddell described his physical posture, "almost more than upright, as if he had swallowed a poker." He suffered at the thought of children growing up and forgetting his friendship. Within two years of Alice's first telling. Alice's mother made it clear that she did not welcome a friendship between her daughter and a man 20 years older. Through the Looking Glass fades on "the shadow of a sigh" as Alice bounds happily into her future and the old White Knight bumbles on his way. Lewis Carroll's consolation was to create a Wonderland that lingers forever in "the golden gleam" of that summer's day a century ago.
* According to one legend (which the author denied), Queen Victoria was enchanted by Alice, and having discovered Lewis Carroll's identity, ordered his publisher to send her a copy of his next book. She is said to have received Dodgson's Condensation of Determinants (1866).