The Religious Sense of Alice in Wonderland (original) (raw)

Lewis Carroll believed that he kept religion out of Alice in Wonderland just as purposefully as he kept it free from didacticism: "I can guarantee that the books [both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass] have no religious teaching whatever in them -in fact they do not teach anything at all" (qtd. in Kibel 611). This assertion has not, of course, prevented scholars from painstakingly combing Alice in Wonderland (hereafter Alice) for references to religious ideas or for vestiges of what they take to be Dodgson's religious convictions. 1 One of the most recent efforts to understand "the Alice books" as at least involved with Dodgson's religious imagination and convictions was David Bentley Hart's 2016 essay, first published in First Things, entitled "The Dream-Child's Progress." In this essay, which paints an unusually sympathetic and, as it were, Christian portrait of Dodgson, Hart laments that so little attention has been paid to Dodgson's "religious convictions" and judges this interpretive decision a "critical mistake, given how central Carroll's faith was to his entire understanding of life" (36). After constructing a model of these convictions, especially as they relate to children, Hart proceeds to find in the Alice books a reflection of "a deeply engaging spiritual sensibility" that does transmit a sort of "lesson" through these stories: "seen from the saner vantage of 1 I will use the names Carroll and Dodgson interchangeably, not merely for the sake of convenience but as a noiseless protest against those critics, like Lennon, who assume that Dodgson's adoption of the name "Lewis Carroll" fostered "a split" in his personality and then attribute to this newly formed alter-ego all manner of what "Mr. Charles Dodgson" would have taken to be impiety and blasphemy and, thus, could never have brooked (28). As should become clear over the course of this essay, I maintain that Dodgson understood himself and his impulses well and that he integrated his personality as well anyone might. Verhine 2 eternity, our world will also prove to have been in many ways a rather ridiculous and irrational and only half-substantial reality, through which the pilgrim soul wanders only till she wakes again into a land of far greater wonders." (38).