Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices
- 1 Moving Books in Regency London
- 2 Byronic Networks: Circulating Images in Minds and Media
- 3 Natural Magic and the Technologies of Reading: David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott
- 4 Reading Habits and Magic Lanterns: Dickens and Dr Pepper's Ghost
- 5 Dissolving Views: Dreams of Reading Alice
- 6 Flickering Effects: George Robert Sims and the Psychology of the Moving Image
- 7 Literary Porjections and Residual Media: Cecil Hepworth and Robert Paul
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Dissolving Views: Dreams of Reading Alice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices
- 1 Moving Books in Regency London
- 2 Byronic Networks: Circulating Images in Minds and Media
- 3 Natural Magic and the Technologies of Reading: David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott
- 4 Reading Habits and Magic Lanterns: Dickens and Dr Pepper's Ghost
- 5 Dissolving Views: Dreams of Reading Alice
- 6 Flickering Effects: George Robert Sims and the Psychology of the Moving Image
- 7 Literary Porjections and Residual Media: Cecil Hepworth and Robert Paul
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Mad Hatter and the Hare went ‘mad together the day they murdered time’, according to Gilles Deleuze. The teleological momentum of common sense no longer anchors them in any chronological sequence, ‘they now change places endlessly, they are always late and early, in both directions, but never on time’ (79). The dream life of Alice herself mirrors this anachronistic disarray, always going in two directions at once, ‘the becoming-mad’ and the ‘unforeseeable’ (78). She loses hold of time, as well ‘as the identity of things and the world’ (77–8). Bereft of the means to decode and fix any truth from the surrounding nonsense, she is caught in a seemingly endless cycle of unanswered questions and questioning answers. Yet these riddling dialogues that seem at first to lead nowhere had, in fact, an implicit target – the unthinking learning by rote promoted by utilitarian mechanisms of modern education. Carroll was equally contemptuous of the heavy-handed truisms of Victorian didactic and moral literature. His concern was that forcing a child to memorise without comprehension conspired against understanding. The message would, in other words, get lost in the medium. As the mock turtle observes: ‘What is the use of repeating all that stuff? … if you don't explain it as you go on?’
This fear of the signal going unheard, or the message being lost or misunderstood, was an enduring one for Carroll. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Carroll's struggle to control the reception of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872).
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- Information
- Moving ImagesNineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices, pp. 126 - 151Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013