So I'm Franziska Kohlt, I study for a DPhil in English Literature,
and my research area is Victorian Literature,
especially fantastic literature and science.
What I found really fascinating when I started 19th century literature
is that the way 19th century literature is usually taught we think of
Charles Dickens, and we think of the great realist novel.
But the 19th century was also the age
in which you get the emergence of science fiction,
you get people who are wonderfully creative
and all of these authors, Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, H.G. Wells,
all of these authors we now sort of call
the pioneers of 19th century fantastic fiction, and of
and of fantastic fiction in general -
all had a pretty similar background.
A lot of them were trained clerics, a lot of them were scientists,
and in the 19th century we have to remember,
disciplinary boundaries were not drawn in exactly the same way as they are now.
So everybody could join in really,
scientific communities were really multidisciplinary,
and a lot of the people who were engaged in these debates
and who contributed to science in due course
were actually authors.
Now you get writers like Charles Dickens who was really interested in psychology,
who started writing essays on dreams,
and let's take as an example Lewis Carroll.
Lewis Carroll is mostly famous for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland nowadays,
however, when you look at his library, an entirely different man emerges.
You'd think that the author of Alice in Wonderland would perhaps have some fairytales,
some, well you know he was a mathematician,
probably some maths books on his shelf.
But then when you look at Lewis Carroll's library, he's got over 4000 books in there,
a large amount of which are on scientific topics.
Not just Darwin's Origin of Species,
but actual medical textbooks, textbooks on psychology,
which was, at the time, a really brand new emerging science.
And then when you think about Alice in Wonderland again,
it's a dream.
It's a story set in a psychological space,
and the more you start looking into that you realise
what Carroll was portraying is actually informed by the
most recent, and the most brand new science that he read.
One of the most enduring themes of Alice in Wonderland
is the theme of madness.
Now dreams were actually considered a form of madness in the 19th century
because the mind was very much conceived of
the rational mind, and the irrational mind that happens when you sleep.
So when you sleep, and the Cheshire Cat says to Alice in Wonderland
"we're all mad here", it's because they're in a dream.
Now the Mad Tea Party is the most explicitly 'mad' thing in Alice in Wonderland.
You get the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, obviously idioms of the 19th century,
- 'mad as a March Hare' and 'mad as a hatter' -
but then if you look at what's going on there, an entirely new picture emerges.
Lewis Carroll not only read lots of books on 19th century psychology,
he was also really interested in 19th century psychiatry,
and that was through this uncle.
His uncle was a Lunacy Commissioner.
Now when we think of 19th century 'lunatic asylums' we think of really grim things,
people chained to walls and beds,
and everything that happens in a Tim Burton movie.
Thats actually quite anachronistic by the middle of the 19th century
because a huge reform movement was underway at that stage,
led by people like Lewis Carroll's uncle.
And this reform movement saw the introduction of
things we would now call Occupational Therapy.
People were so interested in what was going on in lunatic asylums
that really kindled the public imagination.
I was talking about Charles Dickens as someone who wrote on scientific topics.
Charles Dickens attended a lunatic asylum and
wrote an article called 'A Curious Dance Around A Curious Tree',
which portrayed a lunatic Christmas ball held in an asylum
which the public could visit and look at.
That's a really strange idea to us now.
But these reform movements in the hospitals were very visible to the public,
the public were really interested, they filled pages and pages of newspapers,
and one of the things that they introduced,
besides amusements, besides occupational therapy,
was tea parties.
They held tea parties with patients.
In every single file I've read about lunatic asylums
in my research you get at least one instance where a visitor describes
one of those tea parties.
Of the 'lunatics' dressed up in all of their best Sunday clothes,
vying each other with propriety,
behaving like real Victorian tea party goers.
And these events were attended by the public.
Now if you now look into Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
Alice is of course the one who comes to the tea party, and leaves,
the mad people don't get to leave.
And I think this is where one of the amazing things about Alice in Wonderland comes from,
that from a really really contemporary portrayal of madness,
and, you know, a deeply medical subject,
which chimed so much with people,
it was Alice herself that became synonymous with madness.
Because when we now sit in a meeting that's a little bit like the Mad Tea Party
you say 'oh that's a bit of a Alice in Wonderland meeting'.
But this is because it caught on, because it was so brilliantly accurate at the time.
So in the 19th century there was
very little children's literature in the way we think of it now.
One of the really popular genres was so called 'Natural Histories'.
'Natural Histories', very much what it sounds like,
were books about nature, explaining flora and fauna, especially from where you live,
and encourage people to take that book and go out there into nature
again, with a very moralistic purpose,
to worship God's creation in it's perfection,
that was considered morally improving.
But it also had this element of a child
gaining a little bit of agency,
going out there and discovering something on your own.
When we now look at the general narrative structure of Alice in Wonderland
we can see that's exactly what Carroll works with.
This is exactly the narrative of going on an adventure
and discovering a strange new wonderland,
and this is quite interesting because these science books had titles like
'The Fairyland of Science',
in which the fairies make the rain happen and
in which the fairies are the things that embody natural processes.
but what the child is learning is how natural processes work.
So a lot of science writing was actually like a fairytale.
And when Alice shrinks down to microscopic size,
to shrink down to these creatures and actually engage with them
what she does, really,
is a fantastic natural history narrative,
of exploring how the world really works.
And this is something that Carroll was definitely interested in,
that was one of his core interests,
was discovering what's underneath, discovering what's below,
and discovering the invisible worlds of how things happen.
When you look at what Carroll had here in his rooms at Christ Church,
he had a collection of microscopes, of telescopes,
of all of these fantastic things.
And only when you really study an author
and what he was really interested in in his everyday life
can you fully appreciate what he was doing in his stories,
that Alice is literally the one who dives
through the glass, through the magic glasses of the microscope,
and explores the invisible worlds beneath.
Because fantastic literature, and that's what it really means,
means 'to make visible'.
That's the origin of the word.
And although we sometimes smile down on science fiction and fantasy as genres themselves,
they are actually the genres that really engage with the stuff
that's sort of hidden beyond the surface of the visible,
and really deal with it head on.