Alice in Wonderland VS The Hobbit

The publishers claim that “The Hobbit,” though very unlike “Alice,” resembles it in being the work of a professor at play. A more important truth is that both belong to a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that each admits us to a world of its own – a world that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable for him. Its place is with “Alice,” “Flatland,” “Phantastes,” “The Wind in the Willows.”

It's an interesting pair to put against each other because a) if you read them in childhood you've probably got competing childhood memories of them, slippery sands, etc b) two different types of Englishness and English ideas of what a child would want to read and how you should address a child and c) two different worlds, one chaotic and another static, but both with vast attention to detail.

I dunno if I would say there's a vast attention to detail in Alice in Wonderland. Initial instinct is to vote for Alice as being the more beguiling, endlessly rewarding work but a lot of it doesn't make any sense at all if you have no understanding of the milieu it was written in (ie, Victorian England). In attempting to read this to my daughter I realized how much of the references (to manners/social mores/roles, things like treacle, etc.) are now so outdated as to be incomprehensible. I still love it though.

In attempting to read this to my daughter I realized how much of the references (to manners/social mores/roles, things like treacle, etc.) are now so outdated as to be incomprehensible.

This is the thing - I'm finding it difficult to decide and part of that is working out whether I should factor in whether or not it's still enjoyable for my smaller relatives.

But then I distinctly remember being infuriated by the book when I first encountered it aged 4-5 ... why were these absurd things happening? ... which was also part of its absolute hold on me.

my daughter liked the Disney movie well enough, but the book is a bit too convoluted for her (she is only 5yo). she does like and understand chess though, so maybe I should just skip to Through the Looking Glass lol

I find that Alice is more re-readable as an adult than Tolkien, but most of Carroll's work hasn't stood up as well as Alice has. Re-reading the Hobbit or the ring trilogy is much like watching the Star Wars movies for the twentieth time or learning to speak Klingon; yes you can delve ever deeper into the minutiae of Tolkien's world, but it does not repay that devotion with anything but a heap of details to master.

i found 'alice' totally enthralling when i discovered it age 8 or 9, though a lot of it went way way over my head. (i don't think i even knew what a 'dormouse' was, let alone a 'hatter.') the books do have a kind of scary randomness and even a vague sense of malevolence going on that might be off-putting for some younger kids -- it's definitely the least cuddly and comforting of the great kids' classics.

very otm. The inscrutable anti-logic of Alice never gets old because it never makes sense. Re-reading Tolkien (and I just re-read the Hobbit a few months ago) doesn't really reveal any hidden depths, it must makes you remember how many stupid names every character has.

er Aimless v otm that is

xp

i actually just reread 'the hobbit' and i think it holds up pretty well as a stand-alone kids' adventure classic. it's a shame it's been so eclipsed by tolkien's subsequent work. bilbo baggins is really a wonderfully drawn character -- his transformation over the course of the book is very believable.

Aimless - I hear that and I think one difference between the books is that Alice stays weird when re-read into adulthood, whereas trying to recapture the enchantment of Tolkein into adulthood feels somehow sad and pointless. But then it is v. unfair to let things like cosplay and role playing games colour perception of what Tolkein was doing, and I think I find it hard to separate the original book from the resulting sub-culture

Or, indeed, 'The inscrutable anti-logic of Alice never gets old because it never makes sense'.

treating either of them as "timeless" feels nonsensical to me, they're both of their time and their appeal to successive generations of children is at least in part a reaction to the oddness of their birth eras. Alice is vastly more influential on culture as a whole, not that that's a reason for preferring it. i prefer it cos it's in every possible way a more remarkable book than The Hobbit, tho in terms of straight beauty they run each other close. Every so often I'll reread Alice as an adult and none of the giddy thrill has gone, whereas The Hobbit is still a good book but in no way is it the book I read when I was a child.

Alice is vastly more influential on culture as a whole

I would've agreed with this a couple decades ago, but now I'm not so sure

there are no "adult" books with important influence from The Hobbit. if we wanted to talk about Tolkien's mythos as a whole well yeah, maybe we can argue about that, but even then i'd argue that Tolkien's influence is only in terms of numbers and not in terms of the breadth of different art/culture/whatever that it's influenced

like yeah Fantasy is massive now but Alice creeps into almost everywhere.

Foucault wd probably have fun with the idea that Wonderland is not a possible space in the way that Middle Earth is. Tolkien's stuff is bodied by landscape, Carroll is strictly happening in the head.

i like the hobbit but i see the world through alice

idk you can kinda blame the entire culture of RPGs - which is vast (altho I have zero engagement with it these days) - on Tolkien. So maybe his appeal has ultimately been more low-brow. No doubt Alice appeals to a wider, more intellectual class of aesthetes (musicians, other authors, film, etc.)

Foucault wd probably have fun with the idea that Wonderland is not a possible space in the way that Middle Earth is. Tolkien's stuff is bodied by landscape, Carroll is strictly happening in the head.

Now there's something

sometimes alice is junior kafka

also carroll wrote better verse

it's funny to read that lewis review and think that there really was a time when there weren't really any other books like the hobbit, and that comparing it to alice or even flatland (!) wasn't as outlandish as it seems now -- just another unusual book written by a professor. so i guess tolkien really did change the game in a way that carroll maybe didn't -- but i don't know much about pre-alice children's lit. were there other books like alice before alice?

there's children's lit for a good while before Alice but not much Alice-y perhaps? The Water Babies is the first thing that comes to mind but also the bowdlerized versions of Gulliver's Travels were being printed for children pretty early i think

and fairy tales duuuuh excuse my memory

well Grimm's Fairytales are pretty fucked up, bizarre, threatening, and sometimes nonsensical

I dunno where Beatrix Potter falls in the timeline, but she bears at least some surface similarity to Carroll - talking animals behaving like people (and often being rude or crazy or violent)

a quick skim suggests that Grimm's fairy tales probably weren't a big deal in the English-reading world before Alice's success. Potter is a couple of decades later iirc

i think of potter as being more in the gentler 'wind in the willows' type genre, though her stories can be surprisingly violent and unsettling.

but even without Grimm there wd be folk tales and nursery stories in common circulation. obviously before the mid 19th century most stuff that made it to print had a pretty limited audience in class terms

Part of the marvel of Alice is that it wasn't a mere vehicle for pummeling kids with hamfisted moral lessons.

yeah, people will argue it's one of the first books specifically for children that isn't moralizing but i'm not sure it was ever wholly aimed at children and i'm not sure there wasn't a junior version of the penny dreadfuls circulating amongst the lower classes prior to it

Bullfinch's Mythology is mid-19th century too...? Not sure if that's really relevant here

her stories can be surprisingly violent and unsettling.

yeah - again, something I delved into for my own kids and was surprised at what I found. some excessively grim punishments meted out, characters acting like complete shits etc.

Alice >>>>>>>>>>>The Hobbit. The Annotated Alice in particular, which is awesome.

it's kind of an unfair comparison, carroll's up there with the best literature ever imo.

Josh in Chicago beat me to it, was gonna say Shakey's daughter is 5, time for Annotated Alice!

There were definitely manuals of conduct and Cautionary Tales for Victorian kids, which Belloc satirised

if there's anything 5yos love, it's footnotes amirite

the best part of annotated alice is getting to read the original didactic poems carroll was making fun of in things like 'how doth the little crocodile.' gotta feel sorry for the victorian era kids who were subjected to those things.

Speak, memory ...

At about 10 or something I stumbled across a Victorian illustrated book of Wagner's operas (illustrations quite possibly by Arthur Rackham) and sat there getting high off it and was seen doing so, then given the first bit of build up of Der Ring Des Niebelungen (is it?) to listen to by musician relatives. (Note to self, Cardamon was very lucky, try and pay this forward please)

About the same time or perhaps a year earlier had done a project on Beowulf at my primary school which involved acting out the bit where Grendel creeps into the hall when they're asleep and murders them.

Interest in Tolkein reached its zenith after these experiences with high culture (which I forgot about the next day as you do when a child) and I think probably the Hobbit resonated with these earlier impressions. Drifted away from Tolkein-reading with the general drift of adolescence, not really knowing why but feeling something wasn't quite there in it anymore. Hit the Elder Edda when an undergraduate, which is still terrifying as is the Beowulf poem, which leads me to suspect that where Tolkein's work struggles is that it is more or less fan fiction (which is of course also its strength, cf. Lewis up there talking about how it connects to sagas).

Meanwhile, Alice jumped in and out of my life like giggling lightning, with no warning and causing all kinds of complexities, and continues to do so.