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Subverting Wonderland
A New Alice in the Old Wonderland
Anna M. Richards
Anna M. Richards
"An anonymous reviewer for the Dial describes Richard's work as a "hazardous experiment" because of its daring appropriation and transformation of the settings, characters and themes of the original Alice novels. Richards challenges the original books not by reinventing them, but by invading them with her "new Alice", Alice Lee. Alice Lee is, however, a new kind of female hero who maintains power over her own fantasy, rather than allowing herself to become its victim". p.146
Amelia and the Dwarfs
Juliana Horatia Ewing
George Cruikshank
"Described as a counter-fantasy to Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, this vivid and wryly observed tale is most memorable for its early domestic scenes, which lampoon idealized feminine decorum. Unlike the anxiously polite Alice who, like a good Victorian child, attempts to please and placate adults, Amelia is powerful and agressive." p.28
Speaking Likenesses
Christina Rossetti
Arthur Hughes
Arthur Hughes
Arthur Hughes
"Though it does share certain similarities with Alice in Wonderland - the dream-fantasy form, violent and threatening talking animals and animated objects, and abrupt changes in size and location - peaking Likenesses is a highly original work that aggressively critiques and satirizes not only the conventions of the Victorian fairy tale and domestic fiction, but the gender conventions that inform them." p.50
Wanted - a King
Maggie Browne
Harry Furniss
"Carroll himself owned a copy of Wanted - A king as part of his collection "of books of the Alice type". (...) Unlike Carroll's Alice, who attempts to survive in the Wonderland and Lokking Glass worlds by adapting and acquiescing, Merle is encouraged to "Defy, Deride, Desist, Deny, / Heed not a growl, or scrowl, or sight." the constantly shifting identities of Endom'd vharacters enable Browne playfully to explore and challenge social and gender roles, as Merle's successes reveal the ways that nonsense and imagination can oppose socially imposed expectations and constraints." p.79
The didactic Looking Glass
From Nowhere to the North Pole
Tom Hood
W. Brunton and E.C. Barnes
W. Brunton and E.C. Barnes
"Though very much "a fantastic story in the style of Alice's adventures" as another reviewer described it, Form Nowhere to the North Pole is also very much in Hood's own comic style, full of puns, grotesque imagery, and wild slapstick humor. Hood's spoiled and destructive protagonist, Frank, is whisked away to Fairydom by PRince silverwings to face the result of his thoughtless selfishness in such places as Teumendtland, where broken toys recuperate, the land of the Wild Wallpaperites, where Frank meets the grotesque creatures with wich he has adorned his bedroom wallpaper, and Frog-land, the domain of a pompous and opinionated frog. These early chapters relate Frank,s continuing adventures in the realms of Fairydom." p. 206
Down the Snow Stairs
Alice Corkran
Gordon Browne
"Corkan's revision of the dream-fantasy plot construction is strongly moral and didactic, and she is clearly interested in utilizing the idea of a dream "wonderland", which she has turned into such realms as "Naughty Children Land" and "Punishment Land", for the purposes of self improvment; however, her work offers fascinating insights into some of the ways that evangelical victorian women writers - such as Corkran, susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Hesba Stretton - appropriated and transformed domestic literary conventions as a means to larger social reform, and as part of what Jane Tompkins has called "a monumental effort to reorganize culture from the woman's point of view." p.223
Sentimental Re-creations
The Wallypug of Why
G.E. Farrow
Harry Furniss and Dorothy Furniss
"George Edward Farrow was a popular and commercially successful British author of at least thirty works for children, including Alice like fantasies and adventure stories, as well as poetry. (...) Girlie's adventures in the land of why (where all the questions and answers come from), feature His Majesty the Wallypug (a kind of King, governed by the people instead of governing them") and are not only lively and engaging, but full of comic inventiveness." p.243
New Adventures of "Alice"
John Rae
John Rae
"Alice's new adventures begin as she's reading Mother Goose Rhymes to her kittens, and include encounters with conventional nursery rhyme characters, though Rae's version of Alice dream world is often more chaotic and surreal than Carroll's." p. 268
Uncle Wiggily in Wonderland
Howard R. Garis
Edward Bloomfield
"Garis was the author of over three hundred books, including more than thirty five Uncle Wiggily books. It is little wonder, then, that Garis often turned to the work of other writers for inspiration, including that of Lewis Carroll. Uncle Wiggily, like Alice, has remained an important and enduring icon in children's literature. Though the tales in Uncle Wiggily in Wonderland are not as complex and original as many of the other literary responses to Carroll's Alice books, they are notable in their reworking of the Alice tales to agree with Gari's and Uncle Wiggily lively optimism and good humor, as well as with Garis's consciousness of the war in Europe, which the United States would enter the next year." p.289
David Blaize and the Blue Door
E. F. Benson
H. J. Ford
David Blaize was one of the most prolific and popular writers of the Edwardian era. He wrote three books about David Blaize that became a classic in the British gay community. "After discovering a small blue door beneath his pillow, six years old David Blaize goes in search of "the real world lying somewhere just below the ordinary old thing in which his father and mother and norse and the rest of the fast asleep grown up people lived". Searching for answers to important questions that adults dismiss as nonsense, David finds behind the door a Wonderland like realm where nonsense is taken seriously by the inhabitants." p.299
Political Parodies
The Westminster Alice
Saki
Carruthers Gould
"Through the sketches in Alice in Westminster specifically reflect British uneasiness with the Boer War in south Africa, they antecipate Saki's later work in a number of respects, satirizing the smug complacency of the English upper class, using a child to reveal social hypocrisy and delusion." p. 331
Clara in Blunderland
Caroline Lewis
Stafford Ransome
"Caroline Lewis" was a collaborative team of Harold Begbie, J. Stafford Ransome and M. H. Temple who together wrote two Alice inspired political parodies, Clara in Blunderland and Lost in Blunderland. (...) Like Saki's Westminster Alice sketches, Clara in Blunderland reflects British anger at the government's failure to resolve the Boer war." p.340
Alice in Blunderland
John Kendrick Bangs
Albert Levering
"Bangs sought more to entertain and delight with his good-natured wit than to satirize. (...) His Alice in Blunderland pokes fun at familiar issues from high taxes and bureaucratic ineptitude to the greediness of giant business." p.348
