150th anniversary of Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland

First published in 1865, Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland has just turned 150. This timeless children book, playful and puzzling, was inspired by real events and a real child. Lewis Carrol, Charles L. Dogson´s pen-name, was a lecturer in maths in the Christ Church college in Oxford. Although he suffered from a bad stammer, he was a natural storyteller who liked to invent tales to entertain his friends and this speech dysfunction seemed to disappear when he spoke to children.

On a summer day, three years earlier, he had taken a boat trip up the river Isis (the Thames in Oxford) accompanying the Dean of his college and his three young  daughters for a picnic. Lewis Carrol started recounting them about a bored little girl called Alice who, while looking for adventure, tumbled down a rabbit hole. So enthralled was everybody that the medium girl, also called Alice, implored him to write it down. 

Once published, it soon cut the mustard and people of all ages were drawn to it. Both Queen Victoria and Oscar Wilde adored it, for instance. His personal circumstances might have had a bearing on the creation of this masterpiece. The mathematician is well-known to have suffered a rare neurological disorder that provoked hallucinations in him and affected his vision of the size of objects. Besides, the surreal world into which Alice falls is oddly mathematical and logical.

Both Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, inaugurated a new era of children literature, which did not longer have to be didactic or moralistic. Lewis Carrol broke new ground by adding a whole world of imaginative whimsy which would let the children´s minds roam free. The tragic and unavoidable loss of childhood innocence, life as a meaningless puzzle or whatever it might represent, what is certain is that Alice is considered one of the most beloved characters in the classics today and she has kept us good company ever since.

Henry James, Washington Square and Cervantes

Like many 19th c. Americans, Henry James (1843 -1916) grew up with that feeling that culture, beauty and sophistication lay on the other side of the Atlantic. Living in a country with no antiquity or mystery, but only with commonplace prosperity, class distinction involved travelling to the Old World to imbibe all its art and elegance; probably, just a question of snobbery. He could afford doing so and so could and did many of the upper-middle class characters in his novels.

He anchored most of his cosmopolitan writings in an idealised aristocratic Europe, focusing on personal relationships and aiming at a kind of psychological realism: The Golden Bowl, The Portrait of a Lady, The Turns of the Screw... Although Washington Square is mainly set in the New York quarter where he was born, describing his maternal grandmother's house, Austin Sloper and his daughter also cross the ocean. It is something brief, but "she failed to gather animation from the mountains of Switzerland or the monuments of Italy". A wicked father, an unscrupulous suitor and a virtuous and wronged heroine were familiar types from Victorian melodramas. This novel, which defies a happy end, was turned into the unforgettable The Heiress, starring Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift; a film I watched a long time ago, and before reading the book, probably too young to understand how Catherine could resign herself to a lonely future, locking the door against the man who had once betrayed her love.

In a recent trip to New York City, I wanted to visit the place. Nowadays there is a residential neighbourhood which has developed around Washington Square Park, a green space to hang out and stage demonstrations, a park adored by the locals and a kind of sanctuary for the Beat Generation of the 40s and 50s. Strolling around, just a few metres away from the park arch, we arrived at NY University campus where, at the end of a courtyard just off the 5th Avenue, we unexpectedly met... a statue of Cervantes.

We could read it had been a present to the city from the mayor of Madrid in 1989 and, first intended to be located in the middle of Washington Square Park, the statue had been considered too fragile and they had opted for this charming alley instead. Surfing the net, we also learnt that at the end of the 19th century the small Spanish colony in New York had already made an unsuccessful proposal to raise money to donate the city a statue of Cervantes in order to improve the hostile image of Spain at that time due to the war in Cuba. The statue would finally manage to turn up a century later, but by other means and for other reasons.

Unforgettable books and stories

If I had to choose a single remarkable book from all those I have ever read, I would rescue one from my childhood: The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde.

Before being able to read it on my own, I remember my mum telling us the wonderful story of this charming prince.  Having turned a blind eye to the hardship and miseries of his people during his lifetime, he is now a golden statue on a tall column in the centre of a city, from where he sees nothing but ugliness and suffering. He feels such a great sorrow and sympathy for all that poverty that the sapphires that are his eyes weep. He cannot bear what surrounds him... A fairy tale of a prince without a princess, but with a swallow which plays her role, it reminds everybody of the importance of love, inner beauty, sacrifice and charity. What a moving and instructive story for a child! What a moving and instructive story for anyone!

Wilde used to say that he had not written it "for children, but for childlike people from eighteen to eighty". Once more, he was making witty and satiric allusions to contemporary issues like the tremendous gap between the rich and the poor. He did not only aimed at ridiculing and scandalising that rigidly conventional Victorian society, but also at attacking its lack of humanitarian feelings. The dangerous game he was playing would come in with a high price...

Dickens, 200th birthday

If Dickens was immortal, he would be 200 years old today. If he was alive nowadays, he would probably have lots of friends on Facebook and he would be trending topic on Twitter quite often. He enjoyed such a fame and popularity during his lifetime that no other British writer has equalled him since then. Even Queen Victoria is said to have read his novels fervently. These were published serially in newspapers and delivered in monthly instalments, which were awaited eagerly.

The portrait he made of Victorian London is unforgettable, part of our cultural subconscious: an age of Puritan morality and strict discipline, with fathers depicted as god-like figures allowed to beat children and submissive wives; that awful fog that even made pedestrians die from walking into the Thames; the horror of prisons where whole families had to live due to debts; the chimney sweeps and the cruel conditions for orphans at boarding schools... He was the first great novelist in English to make childhood central to his fiction. Deeply wounded by the experiences of his early life, he was not only an entertainer but also an influential spokesman who attacked that new capitalist society and soulless and sordid industrialism.

Although he wrote for adults, not for children, I first encountered Dickens when I was only eight. I remember it perfectly because it was thanks to a classics illustrated comic book I got as a present for my First Holy Communion. Among other versions by authors such as Jules Verne or Stevenson, it included A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield. Those well-rounded and enduring characters struck me. So trapped and fascinated did I feel that, when I started to read those lively plots, I could not give them up until the end. I was just a child, but now I believe it is incredible that at that early age I already got acquainted with Paris and the French Revolution or 19th London. Sometimes I wonder what kind of literary and historical references children have nowadays. We used to follow the adventures of D´Artagnan and The Three Musketeers, The Quixote, Tom Sawyer or Willy Fog in his 80 Days Around The World. Now they follow Sponge Bob and Dragon Ball... Maybe it is also just a question of belonging to another age...