The golden afternoon
Alice in Wonderland day: celebrating the 'golden afternoon' when Alice's adventures in Wonderland were first imagined and shared.
Hello! It’s the fourth of July today, which is Alice in Wonderland day, a celebration that marks the so-called ‘golden afternoon’ when Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll, 1832-1898) first began telling Alice Liddell, and her sisters, the stories that would evolve into the beloved Alice children’s books: Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking-Glass.
Lewis’s poem, ‘All in the golden afternoon’, appeared as a preface in the first edition of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, and is at least partly responsible for the legend about the creation of the work.
All in the golden afternoon Full leisurely we glide; For both our oars, with little skill, By little arms are plied, While little hands make vain pretence Our wanderings to guide. Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour, Beneath such dreamy weather, To beg a tale of breath too weak To stir the tiniest feather! Yet what can one poor voice avail Against three tongues together? Imperious Prima flashes forth Her edict "to begin it"— In gentler tones Secunda hopes "There will be nonsense in it!"— While Tertia interrupts the tale Not more than once a minute. Anon, to sudden silence won, In fancy they pursue The dream-child moving through a land Of wonders wild and new, In friendly chat with bird or beast— And half believe it true. And ever, as the story drained The wells of fancy dry, And faintly strove that weary one To put the subject by, "The rest next time—" "It is next time!" The happy voices cry. Thus grew the tale of Wonderland: Thus slowly, one by one, Its quaint events were hammered out— And now the tale is done, And home we steer, a merry crew, Beneath the setting sun. Alice! A childish story take, And with a gentle hand, Lay it where Childhood's dreams are twined In Memory's mystic band, Like pilgrim's withered wreath of flowers Plucked in far-off land.
According to the legend recreated in this poem, on the afternoon of the 4th July, 1862, Lewis Carroll and Reverend Robinson Duckworth stepped into a rowboat at Folly Bridge, in Oxford, and proceeded to row three young guests up the Isis River. The guests were the daughters of Carroll’s friend, Henry Liddell: Lorina Charlotte (13), Alice Pleasance (10), and Edith Mary (8). During the roughly five-mile journey upstream to Godstow, Carroll told the children a story about a curious little girl called Alice, and her adventures ‘Under Ground’. The real Alice—Alice Pleasance Liddell—asked him to write the tale down. Carroll began to do so the next day (though that version of the manuscript is now lost), though it was two years before he finally furnished her with the requested manuscript.
![A little girl with a crown on her head is seated on the grass. She wears a white ruffled dress, and her petticoat peeps out from her skirt. Two women lean against her on either side. The woman on the left, who is asleep on the girl’s right shoulder, is wearing a crown, an orange patterned shawl, and black gloves and holds a scepter in her right hand. The woman on the right, who is asleep in the girl’s lap, is wearing an orange patterned shawl, a beaded necklace, and black gloves. A crown is lying in the grass in the foreground. A little girl with a crown on her head is seated on the grass. She wears a white ruffled dress, and her petticoat peeps out from her skirt. Two women lean against her on either side. The woman on the left, who is asleep on the girl’s right shoulder, is wearing a crown, an orange patterned shawl, and black gloves and holds a scepter in her right hand. The woman on the right, who is asleep in the girl’s lap, is wearing an orange patterned shawl, a beaded necklace, and black gloves. A crown is lying in the grass in the foreground.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdf3f2754-9617-4ea3-a01d-272af220502a_660x1024.jpeg)
There are innumerable ways to celebrate such an occasion: tea and croquet? A game of cards or an afternoon in the garden, pruning the roses? Perhaps you’d like to run a caucus race or dance the lobster quadrille?
I thought I’d take you drifting down memory lane, and share with you the illustrations that graced the pages of my first encounter with Alice, and with Wonderland.
My earliest edition of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland was a copy I bought at the white elephant shop in Chatswood. A place where, as a small girl, I often spent all my pocket money on dusty, yellow-paged old children’s books. I loved the cloth-bound books, with pictures pasted on the covers, and gilt patterns on the spines. I don’t recall how old I was when the book came into my greedy possession, but I remember the smell of the book: slightly mildewed, slightly dusty. And I can recall the way that I adored the look and feel of the colour illustration pasted to its cover. Slippery under the fingers. The white rabbit queerly over-sized. The woods behind him and Alice a delicious palette of blues.
It was an American edition, published in 1901, and illustrated by Peter Newell. Perhaps you, too, remember the delight of curling up on the sturdy and supportive branch of a good tree with a book that smells of the past and has fragile, once-glossy and bright, illustrations tipped in. My childhood reading tree was a venerable mulberry tree: wide-limbed and strong, and generous with her fruit.
Climb up into the tree with me. Bring a thick blanket to roll up beneath your back. Better yet a crumbling biscuit stolen from the pantry (childhood books are improved by being stained with butter and mulberries, glitter-bombed with crumbs, as well as by being the slender homes of pressed flowers, moths, and leaves).
Peter Newell (March 5, 1862 – January 15, 1924) was an American illustrator. As well as illustrating Alice in Wonderland, he illustrated works by noted American writers like Mark Twain and Stephen Crane, and wrote and illustrated a serial comic for the New York herald called ‘The naps of Polly Sleepyhead’, which ran from February 1906 until September 1907.
‘The naps of Polly Sleepyhead’ features the titular character Polly, who, in each six-frame comic, has a dream or a day-dream. As one commentator notes:
[Newell] seems to have made the typically Victorian children's book more popular and introduced techniques that would be used by newspaper comic artists in their daily or weekly production; in particular the recurring device (hole, turning the picture) recalls the repetitiveness of the early comic strips (Nemo's waking up, Ignatz's brick) (Grazio 2004).
In the comic below, first published 29 April, 1906, you can see the typical structure of Newell’s serial, but also the delightful echo of some of the imagery that is so familiar from Alice’s otherworldy adventures: a young girl as viewpoint character; dreaming (day-dreaming) as a portal to an alternative reality; and nonhumans (animals and others) as guides, companions, friends, and mentors.
Throughout both ‘Polly’ and the Alice books, there’s a strong focus on the interactions between these young, curious, wondering girls and the nonhuman. Perhaps, like me, you found those interactions a curious mixture of delightful and unsettling. Even now, looking at ‘Polly and the screen’, I feel the enticing delight of a crane emerging out of a screen, putting on flesh and bones and feathers, but also a sense of danger and the uncanny. Of feeling ill-at-ease.
In Polly’s adventures, the otherworldy intrudes into her (our) real world. According to Farah Mendelsohn’s four-mode model of the fantastic, Polly’s stories are comic-book examples of intrusion fantasy. Alice’s adventures, by comparison, are Portal/Quest fantasies: adventures in which a character or characters leave their ordinary world and home, typically with the help of a guide.
Aside: it’s delightful, I think, to consider the white rabbit as a Mendelsohnian guide: a character with an absolute and unchallenged understanding of the otherworld.
In her critical work, Mendelsohn explores the challenges (and necessity) of maintaining the sense of the estrangement between the character (in this case, Alice) and the setting (Wonderland) in Portal/Quest fantasies. Once the character understands and becomes numbed to the wonder of the fantastical setting, the work moves into a different mode of the fantastic: the immersive. The sense of estrangement—of wonder—is preserved throughout the narrative of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland by a dazzling array of settings and characters. Forests and fields, chess gardens and castles, Cheshire cats and mock turtles, jabberwocks and mad hatters.
Alice’s adventures in Wonderland (1901)
In Newell’s illustrations, this sense of the otherworldy and unfamiliar is gently and tenderly evoked. The strange, here, rarely feels as dangerous or threatening for Alice as it does in Tenniel’s more well-known illustrations. Rather, the nonhuman characters in Newell’s works seem foolish and harmless. They remind me of EH Shephard’s illustrations for The wind in the willows or Winnie-the-Pooh, particularly in making the nonhuman characters and their world seem safe, sweet, and amusing. Though … never quite wholly. Never quite so much that you’d like to be a little child unable to eventually escape from Wonderland and go home to your cat, a nice hot cup of tea, and a little sensible conversation.
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According to Miriam Stewart:
Newell’s drawings for the Alice books that were reproduced in halftone, a photomechanical process that replaced wood engraving in publications and significantly changed the illustrator’s craft. Rather than being translated through an intermediary, as in wood engraving, Newell’s original drawings could be reproduced photographically. In order to take best advantage of the halftone process, which uses a screen of closely spaced dots to render graduated tones in gray, Newell used muted colors in opaque and transparent watercolor. His illustrations—printed on yellow paper—have a softer, more lush appearance than Tenniel’s linear wood engravings. The three-dimensional shadings allowed by the process further animate the settings (Stewart 2020).
Newell used his daughter, Josephine, as his model for Alice. She was just seven years old at the time, and perhaps it’s her youth—or simply the artist’s attention to the soft curiosity and softness of his daughter’s countenance—that makes her appear younger, and less severe, than Tenniel’s Alice.
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As with many fairy tales and related works that we first encounter in childhood, the illustrations that accompanied the text have had a sustained influence on my relationship to the story, the world it takes place in, and the characters who inhabit that world.
I wonder if you, too, have a particular vision of Alice, and of Wonderland, that has cast a long shadow over your relationship to the story? I’d love to hear about the illustrations—or other visual interpretations of Alice—that have burrowed deep into your literary imagination …
References
Carroll, L 1901 Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, Ill. Peter Newell, Harper & Brothers, New York.
Carroll, L 1902 Through the looking glass and what Alice found there, Ill. Peter Newell, Harper & Brothers, New York.
Grazio, M 2004, ‘Peter Newell’s books’, Nonsenselit.org, viewed 27 April 2024, <http://www.nonsenselit.org/newell/index.html>.
Mendlesohn, F Rhetorics of fantasy, Middletown, CN, Wesleyan UP.
Stewart, M 2020, ‘Down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass: Peter Newell’s Alice illustrations’, Harvard art museums, viewed 27 April 2024, <https://harvardartmuseums.org/article/down-the-rabbit-hole-through-the-looking-glass-peter-newell-s-em-alice-em-illustrations>.
What a fun and interesting post! I just looked on my bookshelf and discovered that I still have a pop-up book (from 1980) based on John Tenniel's art of Alice's adventures from 1865. Your essay and the pop-up book have brought back a lot of memories. :)
Great post!