In an age before schooling became compulsory, girls were expected to help their mothers with household chores, often at the expense of their education, while boys were sent out to work in the factories from as young as nine. The most notorious example of child labour was in the chimney-sweeping business, as depicted in Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies. Boys as young as five were sent up chimney-flues, often naked, to scrape away the accumulated dirt by hand. Deaths from injuries or burning were common, as were cancers caused by constant exposure to soot.

In a family like Alice Liddell’s, life was nowhere like as grim. In the first book Alice has a governess and a nurse and is very aware that some of her classmates at school are less fortunate than herself. When she first falls down the rabbit-hole, and finds herself wondering whether she might have been changed into somebody else, she hopes that she hasn’t become Mabel, a slow-witted schoolfriend who lives in a “poky little house” and has “next to no toys to play with”. Boys from her background might learn a trade at an early age, but were certainly not in danger of being sent up chimneys. They were more likely to be found, as in the opening chapter of Through the Looking-Glass, helping with “getting in sticks for the bonfire”.

Telling stories

Whether comfortably or badly off, families were typically much larger than today. When Lewis Carroll first told the Wonderland story to Alice, she was in the company of two of her sisters, but eventually she had nine sisters and brothers in all. In these large households, children were often less able to stand out, which is one of the reasons why Carroll’s story provoked such delight in Alice that she pleaded with him to write it down. In the tale, Alice emerges as a sharply defined and self-possessed character, a depiction that must have fascinated her.

Story-telling was an important feature of Victorian home life, and not just for children. There was a strong tradition of reading aloud in the home, whether of poetry, nonsense verses, adventures or mystery stories. The great popularity of Charles Dickens’s works was that he was very adept at making them come alive at public readings, even inducing fainting fits in the more delicate of his female listeners during some of the more gruesome passages. The Alice story would have found an attentive audience in the Liddell sisters not just because the tale itself was so good, but because they would have been quite used to listening to adults reading stories to them at home.

On special occasions, such as birthdays, parties were a far more formal occasion than today’s jelly-and-ice-cream bashes. After strictly organised games, dancing, perhaps even (if you were lucky) a magic lantern show, everybody would sit down to tea. The table would be laid with starched white linen, the best silverware and china would be used, and you would be expected to sit up straight and observe the strictest rules of Victorian table manners. It isn’t hard to see, in the light of such formality, why the anarchic Mad Tea-Party with the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse would have been such an entertaining episode to the young Alice.

Mad as a hatter?

One of the book’s most memorable characters is the Hatter (who is never referred to, incidentally, as the Mad Hatter). The expression “mad as a hatter”, to mean crazy, is often said to be derived from an occupational hazard of the millinery trade, as toxic mercury nitrate was used to treat the felt linings of hats. The symptoms of mercury poisoning include uncontrollable tremor, rambling, nonsensical speech and even hallucinations. This would certainly explain the Hatter’s oddball conversation.

The phrase “mad as a hatter” was certainly in use before Carroll wrote about the Mad Tea-Party, but it tended to mean mad in the sense of angry. To be “mad as a March hare”, though, definitely referred to the other sort of madness. It derived from the way the English wild hare was thought to behave during its spring mating season.

Another theory suggests a quite different origin of the phrase (again, with ‘mad’ in the sense of ‘enraged’. The phrase ‘mad as a hatter’, so the theory goes, used once to be ‘mad as an adder’!

There is some evidence to show that John Tenniel’s illustration for the Hatter is a caricature of an Oxford furniture dealer Theophilus Carter, who always wore a top hat and was noted in the city for his eccentric ways. He once invented a bed with a built-in alarm mechanism, which worked by hurling its occupant on to the floor. The eccentric Mr Carter seems a more likely explanation for the Hatter’s “madness”. It’s quite hard, after all, to imagine him doing anything as organised as making a hat!

Is there anybody there?

Another increasingly fashionable social practice at the time Carroll was writing was the séance. Spiritualism had travelled across the Atlantic in 1852 from the northern United States, sparking a huge interest in the paranormal. Such phenomena as table-turning, levitation and communicating with the dead – who were thought to have passed over into the spirit world – also fascinated some scientists.

Perhaps surprisingly for an Anglican deacon, Carroll was a founder member of the Society for Psychical Research and firmly believed that the time was coming when extra-sensory perception, and telekinesis (the power to move objects by thought alone) would be accepted by the scientific community.

In both books, Alice is transported into another world – firstly by falling down a rabbit-hole, and then by stepping through a mirror. The other-worldly quality of the places she visits is a powerful element in the books’ appeal. Interest in hypnotic states, out-of-body experiences and, with the work of Sigmund Freud, the interpretation of dreams, all gathered pace in the Victorian era.

By royal appointment

One story tells of how Queen Victoria took the trouble to write to Carroll to say how much she had enjoyed Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, and that she would be greatly interested in reading anything else he had produced. Carroll duly obliged by sending her a copy of his Syllabus Of Plane Algebraical Geometry (1860). The Queen had not known that behind the mask of Lewis Carroll was the Oxford mathematics don, Charles Dodgson.

In later life, Carroll denied the story, calling it “silly”. Was he telling the whole truth, or was he embarrassed in retrospect at what appeared to be a faux pas? Apparently the Queen was “not amused” by the gift and perhaps Carroll finally became fed up at the less than flattering colours in which the story painted him.

The Lady with the Lamp

Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland was written against a relatively peaceful period in British history. After the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, there were virtually no large-scale hostilities in Europe until the outbreak of the first world war in 1914. Any unrest Britain was involved in was far away in China and India.

The one great exception was the war in the Crimea, fought between 1854 and 1856, which saw British and French forces fighting on the same side. Its origins now seem obscure, and we remember it mainly because of the young nurse, Florence Nightingale. She became a national hero almost as soon as the war was over, and Carroll was among those who were moved and impressed by the advances she achieved in the medical care of wounded soldiers. In 1856, he published a poem in tribute to her, entitled Path Of Roses.