‘Speak roughly to your little boy
and beat him when he sneezes
he only does it to annoy
because he knows it teases.
I speak severely to my boy
I beat him when he sneezes
for he can thoroughly enjoy
the pepper when he pleases’
It was Friday the fourth of July, 1852, 150 years ago this week, when Charles Dodgson, a mathematics don at Christ Church, Oxford, and his clergyman friend, Robinson Duckworth, took the three little daughters of the college dean boating on the river from Folly Bridge to Godstow village for a picnic. That fourth of July, observed W H Auden, was "a memorable a day in the history of literature ".
Carroll described the "golden afternoon" of the boat trip in the verses that preface the book. He jokes about the bossy Prima, Secunda and Tertia, otherwise Lorina, 13, Alice, 10, and Edith, eight, who demanded a story. And so the tale of "the dream child moving through the land of wonders wild and new" came into being. He recalled later: "In a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy lore, I sent my heroine straight down a rabbit hole, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards."
"We had tea on the bank," wrote Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, in his diary, "and did not reach Christ Church again till a quarter past eight... on which occasion I told the fairy tale of Alice's Adventures Under Ground, which I undertook to write out for Alice." And with the writing of the story, with the title later amended to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the nature of children's literature changed for ever.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, has, as you might expect, umpteen references to the people the girls knew. The Dodo in the race was Dodgson himself; the Duck was Duckworth; the date of the Mad Hatter's tea party was the fourth of the month, the Mad Hatter may have been based on a local furniture dealer called Theophilus Carter, who wore a top hat and invented an "alarm clock bed" that woke the sleeper by tossing him on to the floor.
