No word exists for imaginary characters such as Hamlet, or Frankenstein and his Creature, who have developed autonomous life, leaping off the stage or out of a book, who add to the variety of human personalities we all know and offer us compass bearings. Of all such figments, the most recognisable must be Alice, the little girl questor at the heart of Lewis Carroll's two classic stories, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871).
It's perhaps surprising that an art gallery, rather than a library, is holding a huge survey exhibition about Alice, but then Carroll's creation has been and still is the inspiration of artists, photographers, theatrical designers, animators, film-makers. The new Tate Liverpool show explores this territory, from the author's own rarely seen manuscript illustrations and marvellously evocative biographical materials (Carroll's perceptive and often lyrical photographs, works of art by his pre-Raphaelite friends) to the Surrealists, for whom Alice became a cherished myth. The Surrealist movement is represented by some of the most potent works in the exhibition: Salvador Dalí's illustrated edition of Alice, and the finest painting in Dorothea Tanning's oeuvre, the eerie Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, with sunflowers bursting colossal tentacles around the little girl with her hair on end in spikes of flame. The Surrealist legacy is still very fertile, in the context of a growing return to myth, fairytale and romanticism. Alice is the prototype of wise child and naive innocent – as seen in the vision not only of such artists as Peter Blake and Graham Ovenden, but of their successors in disquiet, Annelies Štrba and Alice Anderson, practitioners of the contemporary uncanny who give a new feminist twist to the heroine. Alice has grown older and more knowing than her original model, and turned into the receptacle of erotic dreams, a femme enfant with whom women artists strongly identify: the knowledge you are Alice as strong as the longing for her.
The character of Alice was inspired by Alice Liddell, the second daughter of the growing family who came to live in the Deanery, Christ Church, the college where Charles Dodgson was a fellow. A very pretty child with a melancholy cast of feature, she became the dearest of the author's child-friends, his chief love from among a host of girls – and boys – whom he entertained with puzzles, riddles, jokes, poems, gadgets, ditties and caricatures. He had begun photographing children several years before he wrote the Alice stories. He would focus on the families of artists, inviting himself into the houses of Rossetti, Millais, Arthur Hughes, and the fantasy writer George Macdonald, in a forward way that seems at odds with the shy, stammering persona of the rather undistinguished mathematics lecturer, who was deaf in one ear, and very partial to jelly and cakes. The eccentric and miraculous creator of Alice was one of history's great refusers. Like Kafka, with whom he has more in common than usually recognised, Dodgson could never resolve himself to move to the next stage of his life: he never took holy orders, never rose in the college hierarchy, never married. He was happy only in the company of children. However, he looked after a large number of other unmarried siblings (especially after he made so much money with the Alice books), campaigned against vivisection, seems to have devised the single transferable vote, and successfully pressed to improve the living conditions of child performers.
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Today, Lewis Carroll might be under surveillance and, if not in prison, tagged. His sexuality caused him "unspeakable torments", writes Carroll's assiduous biographer, Morton Cohen. Yet, as Penelope Fitzgerald pointed out, "we can consider ourselves fortunate", since his diverted sexual energy "was in all probability the source of his genius".
The first Alice story was originally called Alice's Adventures under Ground, but Carroll thought this sounded as if it might contain "instructions about mines". Elf-land was another possibility he considered, before he decided – momentously – on Wonderland. But his first idea of an underworld reveals the connection of the Alice books to forebears among dream visionaries who descended into the nether regions, such as Dante and Blake. Carroll was above all a parodist, who fired in his own kiln a great original work from the rubble of others. This member of the Anglican clergy shows very little sign of Christian faith, evincing instead a passionate up-to-the-minute engagement with nascent ideas about the unconscious, fantasy and altered states. He translated Christian eschatology into early psychological delvings into terrors and absurdity – Alice is opposed and frustrated at every turn, but she's a dissenter not a collaborationist, and keeps speaking up against the way the people and animal-characters she encounters insist on the rightness of their way of doing things. A little girl raises a voice of common sense against the arbitrary rules and unjust commandments of the grown-up world; the picture of adult repressiveness was written to cheer her up, as it has done so many readers since.
The dream child who is also a dreamer of truths, and the Carroll vision of the folly of the world are only two of the myriad themes that have excited artists. The Tate show reveals a lineage of art works that have not been explored before: the long interest, especially in this country from the early Victorian era onwards, in graphic illustration. The future Lewis Carroll was born during the heyday of a form of British art that has been sidelined as minor for too long, and the story of Alice's rise to mythic status also belongs to this history of a great 19th-century enterprise: the picture book. Thomas Bewick, a pioneer of the form, is vividly remembered, for example, by Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre (1847). In the novel, Jane is also a little girl at the beginning and we see her happily mind-voyaging through the pages of Bewick's History of British Birds: Jane confides to us how "Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings … and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery-hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and … fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and other ballads …
"With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way."
Charles Dodgson was 15 when Brontë's novel exploded into Victorian consciousness, but he doesn't have to have known this book directly for us to imagine that he knew and even shared the heroine's feelings. When Alice thinks crossly, at the beginning of Wonderland, about her sister's reading matter, "What is the use of a book without pictures or conversation?" she speaks as a Victorian child from a similar background as young Charles Dodgson. For a family like the Dodgsons, living far from the metropolis in not very affluent circumstances in a draughty rectory, illustrated magazines such as Punch were the principal vehicle by which pictures reached them, and they contributed a crucial element in the world that formed the creator of Alice.
As a boy, Carroll made up family miscellany magazines with lots of drawings by himself and his brother Wilfred, copied from pictures that came their way: his early attempts look like Edward Lear's cartoons, and he recycled several of the poems and jokes for the Alice books: part of "Jabberwocky", for instance, appears in one of these family magazines, Mischmasch, as a "Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry", written out in pretence runes.
The author of Alice grasped intuitively the power of images to imprint themselves on the collective consciousness in the age of mechanical reproduction. For many years, he tried to make the Alice pictures himself, and their awkwardness sharpens his fantasy's quirky weirdness. The Tate show includes the original sketches Dodgson drafted – of Alice, the White Rabbit, the Gryphon, the Mock Turtle, and the Caterpillar, as well as the earliest version of the "Long-Tale", a pioneering "calligramme", or picture-poem, in the form of a mouse's curving tail for which Dodgson razored every typographic character individually and pasted it down. But he couldn't draw little girls of character, and it was when he realised he needed a better artist than himself and chose John Tenniel that his Alice became the universally recognisable figure she is – from the Alice band to the pinafore and the pumps. Carroll admired Tenniel for his work on the animals in Aesop's Fables in particular, but he also knew him as a Punch cartoonist and indefatigable illustrator, with the magic metamorphoses of the Arabian Nights and many other titles in his portfolio. Although Tenniel was overburdened with work, and relations with the pernickety and exacting Dodgson were often fraught, he brilliantly rendered the curiouser and curiouser world of Alice.
Before Freud formed his model of the psyche, Carroll was writing with conviction about infancy and the unconscious, which he identified with travels in fairyland in the introduction to his last book, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893). His interest was shared by his generation: the same year, Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote a full account of her child self called The One I Knew Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child, about her dreamworld and her imaginary friends. But Carroll wrought a great difference to the Romantic legacy of fantasy about childhood imagination, and to his contemporaries' interest in internal states, because he adopted the technological and scientific structures of the new magic media: his skill as a photographer, using the extremely tricky wet collodion process, gave him the coordinates of space-time in Alice's Wonderland: she grows big and small as in a lens or developing tray, while Looking Glass country is governed by the catoptrics, the phenomena of reflection and refraction, which operate in the reflex camera.
The multiple layerings of reality that Alice passes through, growing more and more bewildered, anticipate current cyber-reality, as many extrapolations show. At the end of Wonderland, Alice's sister dreams of a future Alice telling the story of her fantastic dream to her children, and at the end of Looking Glass, Alice asks her kitten: "who it was that dreamed it all … You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course – but then I was part of his dream, too!" This labyrinth with no exit shapes Jorge Luis Borges's marvellous fable, The Circular Ruins, and since then, the central concept of the Matrix films, and, more recently, of Christopher Nolan's Inception. It is this emphasis on the reality of dream life and the absurdity of conventions, combined with the modernity of his methods, that has made Carroll's dream child the vehicle for so much active dreamwork from artists such as Sigmar Polke, Robert Smithson and Adrian Piper, whose interpretations give Alice a psychedelic and occult colour.
An intrinsic element in the universe of reverie is the mysterious elapsing of time, and the different temporality of stories, of daily business, of Carroll's imagination, as Gillian Beer explores in a fascinating catalogue essay. The Tate exhibition has included works that take up this aspect of the Alice story, by the conceptualist Joseph Kosuth, for example. "I wonder if I have changed in the night?" Alice muses. "Let me think, was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I am not the same, the next question is, who in the world am I? Ah, that's a great puzzle!" This is indeed the existential question that lies at the heart of the most recent controversial philosophy of personhood (as in Galen Strawson's latest book, and Derek Parfit's) but Carroll and artists his Alice has inspired have been exploring this unsettling question for decades.
When I was young and first read the Alice books, I found them peculiar and harsh, and felt something disturbing was going on underneath that I didn't understand. When I grew up the tantalising wit and fantasy in the stories won me over. But that current of strangeness and enigma still charges Alice's adventures and it touches a live wire in the imaginations of artists. A work by Rodney Graham in the show embodies this suggestion of secret knowledge: he has encased a vintage edition of Alice, one with a fancy pictorial binding, between two halves of a ghostly white slipcase, parted to allow a glimpse – of what? Like the White Rabbit, the sense disappears as one chases after it. As Lewis Carroll wrote of Alice:
still she haunts me phantom-wise
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes
Alice beckons us to enter our own fugitive states of feeling and desire, our own elusive dreamworlds.
