I’ve resolved to review everything I read, so I have to write something about Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland even though I don’t really see the point. I mean, you’ve heard of this book haven’t you? And you’ve almost certainly read it too. But have you read it recently? No? Ah, well in that case…
Thanks to the magic of copyright expiration you can get hold of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland for free nowadays, and if you’ve got an e-book reader it’s worth every penny. Just head over to Project Gutenberg to download it right now. You won’t regret it.
Lewis Carroll’s real name was Charles Dodgson and he was a respected mathematician and logician who published more than a few books. He proposed a game-like method for visualising formal logic, but unfortunately his technique was eclipsed by the more rudimentary Venn diagrams.
However his general idea that games can be used to illustrate and introduce systems of logic also showed up in his works of fiction, some of which – especially Alice – have become more or less immortal. So Venn can stick that in his pipe and smoke it.
An adult reader who revisits Alice in Wonderland expecting to find lots of profound allusions to mathematics or cleverly hidden patterns will find instead that this is, at heart, a children’s book, and it succeeds as such through an avoidance of such high-brow tactics.
Yes, there is a lot of maths in here and a lot of games with numbers, language and geometry, but these are pitched perfectly at the intellectually curious child for whom Carroll / Dodgson was writing. There are patterns and symbols to be found but they are hidden in plainsight, not buried away to such an extent that unearthing them should become the reader’s main pursuit. You’ll enjoy it more if you put aside your allusion-hunting equipment and let yourself enjoy the dreamlike world the book creates.
