Sam Leith writes on the huge influence Alice in Wonderland has had on children’s literature, in this extract from his new book, The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading

At the time Lewis Carroll was writing, we’d had a century or more of dry books of facts and history, and moralistic fables – books that sought to improve children’s minds or their souls. Both had in common that they were, one way or another, trying to shape children in an orderly way, to inscribe neat lines on the blank slate. Carroll ridiculed both these projects, and instead made a knight’s move: the books repudiate a moral and rational order in favour of the chaotic play of paradox and whimsy. He took the blank slate and doodled on it.

That made available a new mode of writing for children. One in which fun and silliness was an end in itself, and the sheer otherness of a child’s apprehension of the world could be acknowledged. It smashed up the old conventions, showing how children’s writing could be silly, and mysterious, and magical, and entirely uninterested in preparing its readers either morally or informationally for adult life.

It marked one position in a negotiation between realism and fantasy that has been going on in the bookshelves of our childhoods ever since. One tendency tracks the path of the novel itself towards the high-water mark of nineteenth-century naturalism you find in George Eliot or Flaubert; the other hews closer to the folktales and fables that are our basic narrative inheritance.

In children’s literature, as in childhood itself, growing up is a matter of negotiating between fantasy and reality, magic and disenchantment, the latter steadily gaining the upper hand. Children’s books simultaneously seek to prepare us for the real world – offering lessons in courage or friendship or virtue – and to offer a marvellous escape from it. Often, again following the model of Alice, they contain elements of both by supplying a rabbit-hole, a magical wardrobe or a curiously permeable railway platform that creates a portal between two worlds. As any student of folktale will know, magic mirrors and underground kingdoms aren’t original to Carroll – but he made them his own. A vast body of subsequent children’s fantasy writing takes its protagonists through some form of portal into a world populated by fantastical creatures and whose rules are not like our own.

Even the books’ emphasis on food anticipates a thread of gustatory wonder that runs through subsequent children’s stories – with their midnight feasts, their fabulous picnics and their bags of sweets. Alice’s potion, before Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans or Willy Wonka’s three-course dinner chewing gum were thought of, before lashings and lashings of ginger beer, or a rat’s picnic containing ‘coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwidgespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonade-sodawater’, Alice’s ‘Drink Me’ elixir tastes of ‘cherry tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast’.

But at the same time, Alice has a place in literary history more like that of Tristram Shandy than that of Tom Jones or Clarissa. Vital elements of its outlook go through subsequent children’s writing like the lettering through a stick of rock, but it doesn’t establish a genre. There aren’t any other books remotely like it. It’s more, to mix metaphors in what I hope will pass as a Carrollian way, like a catalyst than a foundation-stone. There’s no denying, anyway, that children as well as adults adored it, and quickly. Five hundred copies of Alice were sold in the first three weeks after publication and a 3,000-copy reprint was made in September of the following year. By 1869 it was still selling more than 500 copies a month and had gone into French and German translations.

The 1871 publication of Through the Looking-Glass fixed Carroll in the firmament: within two months of its appearing in print 15,000 copies had been sold, and a review in the Athenaeum thought it ‘had the power to bring happiness to countless children of all ages’. In 1898, the Pall Mall Gazette conducted a poll entitled ‘What Children Like to Read’. In first place, which the magazine described as a result ‘so natural that it will surprise no normal person’, was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

By the end of the century in which they were published, then, these books dominated the children’s literary landscape. Manuscripts and early editions have routinely set record prices at auction, and Alice became the first multimedia children’s franchise. There were theatrical productions, cash-in imitations (when The Adventures of Pinocchio found its way to the US, one edition billed it as Pinocchio’s Adventures in Wonderland), multiple new versions and even merch. There were Alice stamp-cases, ‘Alice in Wonderland Biscuits’ and advertising tie-ins. A 1919 pamphlet called ‘Alice in Fi-co-land’ had Alice sipping from a bottle (marked ‘Drink Me’) of a patent laxative called Ficolax.

The success of Alice represented an unimaginable transformation in only thirty-odd years: a transformation of reading tastes and of the widely accepted idea of what children’s literature could be for. The pious tracts of the previous century had given way to wit and silliness, to that most vital ingredient of children’s writing and of the modern idea of childhood: play.

This is an extract from The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading by Sam Leith (Oneworld Publications). Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

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