Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Chapter 5: Advice from a Caterpillar

The latest entry in Bedtime in the Public Domain is from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, under the pen name Lewis Carroll. Today sees the release of Chapter 5: Advice from a Caterpillar. The series can also be found on Stitcher, on iTunes, or in a direct RSS feed.

6 replies on “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Chapter 5: Advice from a Caterpillar”

  1. Thanks to these podcast, I have come to learn that I would prefer Oz to Wonderland. I suspect there is some psychological test where this answers a lot of questions.

    • The Oz novels were written a chapter at a time as Baum told his children bedtime stories. The first Wonderland novel was written while Dodgson was stoned out of his mind, and it was just there in his handwriting when he sobered up. It shows.

      • Really? Because every reliable source I can find classifies this as a myth. He told the stories over time to the Liddell children, and used elements from the world around them (the stuffed dodo, descriptions of the effects of hallucinogenic mushrooms in a text) and inspiration from…. At that point, I cannot say for certain.

        • The annotated version in my junior high library claimed the original short story (Alice’s Adventures Under Ground) was the result of drug use, and it was then refined from the families after. The current Wikipedia page (which I didn’t check until now) disagrees, and actually includes documentation about specific research activities he did to prepare the book.

          Frankly, I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of a sober mind coming up with this stuff. That may be the source of the myth, or he may have just used drugs a lot in the course of his life.

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