VICTORIAN SOCIETY AS REFLECTED IN LEWIS CARROLL’S

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

ABSTRACT
Lewis Carroll's books of Alice offer an unprecedented view of Victorian ideas and ideals. It
reflects the rapidity of change during the nineteenth century and the widespread anxiety that the
Victorians went through as they navigated through the expansions of consumerism, a cash
economy, machinery as well as mechanically measured time as dominant forces in their daily
lives. Alice in her upside down world represents the entire middle class world of the Victorians
turning into self-centred and disconnected individuals free from the traditional rules and
customs. This materialistic vision profoundly affected philosophical thoughts, religious beliefs as
well as political actions- that is, the entire social fabric of the Victorians.
This paper will deal with the changing ideals and transitions during the Victorian period as
reflected in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass.

Keywords: Materialistic Vision, Nineteenth Century, Transition, Victorians, Victorian

Period

INTRODUCTION
In simpler terms, “Victorian” refers to the historical era in England roughly coincident with the
reign of Queen Victoria, 1837-1901. However, the beginning of this period is dated 1830, or
1832 and sometimes 1837 and extends to the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. Historians
subdivide these periods into three phases- Early Victorian (to 1848), Mid-Victorian (1848-70)
and Late Victorian (1870-1901). It was a time of rapid economic and social changes that had no
parallel in earlier history—that made England the leading industrial power, with an empire that
occupied more than a quarter of the earth’s surface. This produced not only positive but also
negative impacts like class conflicts, social stresses and widespread anxiety that questioned the
ability of the individual as well as the nation. It questioned the Victorians ability to cope,
socially, politically and psychologically with the rising developments and the problems of the
age. The literature of this era mostly dealt with or reflected the pressing social, economic,
religious and intellectual issues and problems of the era. The literary men of this era have
significantly made truth the supreme object of human endeavour. The literature departed from
the Elizabethan’s purpose of artistic standards and became more prominent by a definite moral
purpose. It has become very close to daily life, reflecting its practical problems and interests. The
Victorian Age is therefore emphatically an age of realism which strives to reveal and find the
truth. It entirely revolves around the concept of ‘evolution’ which is the principle of growth and
development from simple to complex forms. The term “Victorianism” is also used in a
derogatory way, to connote narrow-mindedness, sexual priggishness, the determination to
maintain feminine “innocence” and an emphasis of social respectability.
The triumph of this materialism and machinery developments was also often condemned in a
variety of Victorian literary texts. Many of the Victorians yearned for the much slower-paced,
coherent world of certainties and secure social values. The reactions of such unprecedented
changes of the period is also reflected through Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking
Glass. It is about revolution as it presents an anxious vision of an entire middle-class world
turned upside down. The dizzying pace of life in multifarious, mechanized mass society is
reflected in Alice’s fast-paced, crowded and discontinuous dream adventures.
OBJECTIVE
1. To study Victorian tendencies in Through the Looking Glass.
2. To analyse the critical interpretations of Alices’ books.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The study will be carried out in the form of analysis and discussion from different sources. Data
or information will be collected from the secondary and tertiary sources like books, articles,
essays and the web.
ALLEGORIES AND ALLUSIONS
Alice’s dream fantasies presents the changes produced by industrialism, laissez-faire capitalism,
and limited representative democracy. It depicts life in a fragmented society as a response to the
numerous technological, economic, demographic and political changes which seem to reflect the
Victorian Age of the rapidly developing market economy of England.
In Chapter 3 of the book, the looking glass railroad carriage represents the technological
advancements during the first half of the nineteenth century marked by the factory system,
railways, steamships and telegraph lines- four of the period’s many contributions to commerce,
transportation and communications that also changed the relations between time and space. It
also is a hyperbolic representation of time as an industrial construct and its connection with the
growing capitalist system of the Age as well as the wide-awake anxieties suffered by Victorians
as a result of the rapid expansion of consumerism, a cash economy and machinery. The
paradigmatic shift in time during the Age was also characterised by fast-paced adventures of
Alice and accelerated by the major discoveries in the fields of astronomy, geology and biology
among other fields. The sense of speedy motion is represented through Alice’s fast paced,
crowded, discontinuous dream adventures.
Another example is the Red Queen’s response to Alice’s assertion that “Well, in our country…
you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time as we’ve been
doing” (Carroll, p.22-23) is relevant to the empty bustle of urban existence in Carroll’s mid-
Victorian England, as it questions its own faith in the sudden progressions and intensifying
developments in the country. In Alice’s dream of the railroad carriage, commercialization of
time and space is reflected, a new standard which was until then considered beyond control and
measurement.
Another instance is the reference of the train tickets equal to the size of human beings
representing the way the commercial and social institutions had grown to the point of
dominating, dwarfing and even overwhelming the people they were meant to serve, turning the
recent masters of machines into worshipful servants.
Another response uttered in Alice’s dream is, “Don’t keep him waiting, child! Why, his time is
worth a thousand pounds a minute!” (Carroll, p.26-27) reflecting the new idea that emerged with
recent developments i.e. “time is money” and that money also determines value emphasizing on
the developing capitalist mindset in the society of England.
This railway scene is an example that alludes to the mechanization, commodification and
acceleration that were transforming Victorian life. Some other examples that presented this side
of Victorianism include—the cards, chessmen, set figures from traditional nursery rhymes—
inflexible cogs in an incomprehensible but perpetual, all consuming social mechanism. Thus the
society of England experienced these developments for the first time which affected them deeply
specially Lewis Carroll and his contemporaries.
REVOLUTIONARY TENDENCIES OF THE AGE
These anxious yet revolutionary tendencies of the period emphasized on the middle-class world
that turned upside down: the hierarchical level in case of humans have fallen as seen in case of
Alice where she is scolded and ordered by inanimate and manufactured playing cards and
chessmen. The latter had gained control over the former as they have manipulated her to take
part in the game of chess to attain their highest level of hierarchy i.e. to achieve her impending
queenhood. Other instances of this upside down world include the Mad Tea-Party where the time
never “behave” due to which the time is always six o’ clock (the quitting time for many factory
workers).
This change from the static class system to the increasingly materialistic, competitive society
driven by mechanical innovation and volatile, mechanistic standards of the market threatened the
interests of a small minority of privileged Anglican gentlemen like Matthew Arnold and Lewis
Carroll. This also threatened the personal identity of these middle- class men as Alice repeatedly
asks in the book, “What will become of me?” carrying implied meanings of class based societies
of England during the Victorian Age.
This period was also plagued by bitter, destructive sectarianism in which many of the best minds
had already lost all religious conviction. Lewis Carroll’s funny and confusing dream fantasies
also reflect Victorian earnestness about which they made fun of themselves as well. Writers like
Caryle, Dickens and Gilbert and Sullivan, the Brontes, Elliot and Arnold also implemented the
humorous treatments for serious social issues of their times like Carroll. The Alices is also cited
as prime models of “nonsense”—a genre whose success depends upon a lack of applicable
“meaning”—a liberating and delicious indeterminacy that defies the conventional purpose of
trying to make sense about real life. These writers thus made fun of their admirably earnest age
of revolution, bourgeois anxiety, and respectability through their works.
Alice’s curiosity is questionable as well, including her self assurance and her refreshing sense of
wonder. Though, her curiosity seems to lead her nowhere it seems it drives the plot and keeps the
readers engaged in her adventures. These books provided the liberating and imaginative
experience divulging from the “useful” texts that were common during the period written to
improve the minds of the children, morals and manners. The Alices’ were not for their education
but rather were sources of entertainment offering the child readers a realistic heroine with whom
they could identify as well.
CRITICS AND INTERPRETATIONS
The Alices’ presents the readers a challenge to find the meanings and methods associated with
the books as well as to interpret them as “devices” that may be associated with their own
“meaning” as human beings. In the introduction to her 1984 study, Fantasy and Mimesis:
Responses to Reality in Western Literature, Kathrym Hume asserts, “Hemmingway, in mimetic
terms, says, ‘this is what life is like’. In the metaphoric manner permitted by their fantasies, so
do Kafka and Lewis Carroll.”
In the 1920s and 1930s, a number of prominent authors and literary critics discovered that these
books also captivated the adults, resonating with their mature concerns and complexities about
existence, knowledge, human motivation and society. They came to believe that Carroll had
informed these “nonsense” books—whether consciously or unconsciously—with much sense.
By 1930, Walter De La Mare could find many adults to agree with him that the books have
“delights with them which only many years’ experience of life can fully reveal.”
In 1932, Edmund Wilson, also complained that Carroll “deserves better” than the sentimental
appreciations of previous critics , the works of “admirers…who revel in his delightfulness and
cuteness but do not give him any serious attention.” Moreover, other critics also agree that it was
“the psychological truth of these books that lays its hold on us all”, children and adults alike.
(Rackin, p.101-142)
Among many perceptive critics, one of the best is that of Florence Becker Lennon’s Victoria
through the Looking-Glass: The Life of Lewis Carroll (1945). It examines Carroll and his
fictions in the light of bourgeois Victorian repression and continues to illuminate crucial
elements in the books. The most psychoanalytic analysis of Carroll’s life was published in 1955
by the eminent professional psychoanalyst Phyllis Greenacre—Swift and Carroll: A
Psychoanalytic Study of Two Lives.
The Alice books have been increasingly valued by critics as crucial artifacts that offer important
clues to the dynamics of Victorian and post-Victorian thought, ideology and behaviour. They
have been studied recently in connection with a wide variety of culturally and politically oriented
issues like the ideology of empire and colonialism; gender, sex and the ethos of modern
patriarchal societies; the development of nineteenth and twentieth century conceptions and
exploitations of childhood; modern ego psychology and constructions of the self; the
psychosocial foundations of modern irony and comic art; and the impact of Darwinian theory of
nineteenth-twentieth century thought. They also have a great deal of critical attention from
theorists of literary structures and genres because of the mixture of literary forms, sense and
nonsense and their elusive referentiality.
CONCLUSION
These books were hailed in the 1920s and 1930s as forerunners of modern surrealism. Recent
studies of Alices’ books also show that they exemplify the profound questioning of reality and
social norms that characterizes the mainstream of nineteenth-century English literature. Alice
speaks to us about the most pressing and persistent doubts and fears; in the symbols of myths and
dreams—about the different aspects of life while presenting to us the mid-Victorian England
society and its behaviours.
Through the Looking Glass bears many resemblances to the middle-class life in developed
countries today and at the same time bear inscriptions of the era from which they first emerged
which make the Victorians’ reactions much fresher, passionate and vivid as seen through Alices’
character. At the same time it also presents a general critique of the lack of logic in Victorian
custom, etiquette and social behavior and also lets the readers experience our own contemporary
world in its nascent state.
WORK CITED
1. Carroll, Lewis. Through The Looking Glass, edited by Brinda Rose, Delhi: Worldview
Publications, 2022
2. Victorian Literature Modern Essays in Criticism, edited by Austin Wright, Oxford University
Press
3. Legouis, Emile. A Short History of English Literature, translated by V.F. Boyson and J.
Coulson, Oxford University Press
4. Nandrajog, Meher. "Experiences of Childhood in the Victorian Cultural and Literary World of
Carroll’s Alice in Through the Looking Glass". New Literaria–An International Journal of
Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Volume 2, No.1, January-February, 2021, Doi:
https://dx.doi.org/10.48189/nl.2021.v02il.009