SOURCE: "Carroll's Alices: The Semiotics of Paradox," in American Imago, Vol. 34, No. 1, Spring, 1977, pp. 86-108.

In the following essay, Baum explores the linguistic and philosophical complexities of the Alice books.

When the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was buried, in 1898, Lewis Carroll was set free behind the Looking Glass to continue his interminable game of chess with Alice, the heroine of his first two fairy tales, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. During the century since their game began, the Alice books have played to a larger reading audience than most traditional folktales. Even while Dodgson lived, Wonderland and Looking Glass could be found alongside the Bible on the top bookshelf of practically every Victorian nursery. Carroll's first biographer, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, claims that the Alice books became primers for many Victorian children and that lines from them were cited in the daily press as often...