and most bestial of human creatures could invent and practise, was in this unhappy country [Tasmania] invented and practised without restraint and without shame.' Dawes's tormented life story can be read as a historical novel, but to most British versions of that genre, which celebrate the epic glories of discovery, conquest, and colonization-Westward Ho! again, for example-Clarke's novel offers a complete antithesis. Sylvia Vickers, the chief figure of -576- innocence in the story besides Dawes himself, reverses Miranda's 'brave new world' speech from Shakespeare's Tempest when she exclaims: ''Oh, how strangely must the world have been civilised, that this most lovely corner of it must needs be set apart as a place of banishment for the monsters that civilisation [has] brought forth and bred! '
From the time of the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, even the most overtly patriotic, imperialistic novels often sound notes of warning or anxiety about the internal and external enemies of the empire. Beginning in the 1880s, fears of decadence, including the prospect of the decline and fall of the empire, were deliberately mocked by decadent movement writers (Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, the early William Butler Yeats, and others). And to the frequent theme of 'going native,' as in The Beach of Falesá and Heart of Darkness, was added the equally distressing theme of reverse invasion and the possible conquest of England by its enemies, starting with Sir George Chesney's Battle of Dorking (1871) and running through William Le Queux's Great War in England in 1897 (1897) and Bram Stoker's very different Gothic thriller Dracula (1897) down to World War I and beyond. H. G. Wells's 'scientific romances' such as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and The War of the Worlds (1897) provided fantasy variations on these imperial themes and anxieties, while the radioactive «quap» in Wells's Tono-Bungay (1909), dissolving en route to England, suggests the later, postcolonial theme of 'the empire strikes back.'
Before the 1880s, most writers of fiction about the British Empire took for granted that Britain was the vanguard nation, and that the British were God's or Nature's chosen instrument to bring the light of civilization, commerce, and Christianity to the 'dark places' of the world. While the same chauvinism characterizes most fiction about adventures abroad and life in the colonies during and after that decade, a new anxiety and sometimes self- criticism also emerges, as in Gissing's Whirlpool or in Conrad's Lord Jim (1900). Jim's self-doubt about his courage and integrity seems an exact analogue to the mood of increasing uncertainty about Britain's place in the world and, indeed, about the meaning of its past imperial might and prosperity. A newspaper editor in Conan Doyle's Lost World (1911) says, 'The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there's no room for romance anywhere.' Once the «romance» of imperialist exploration and conquest is stripped -577- away, the reality is just as Marlow describes it in Heart of Darkness: 'The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.'
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Lewis Carroll and the Child in Victorian Fiction
What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning?
Lewis Carroll's two books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), regarded when they were first published as amusing pieces in the developing subgenre of 'children's books,' turned out to be major works of nineteenth-century literature and part of the history of serious imaginative writing. Carroll's words and images created art so radical and variously appealing that it could, did, and does bring many kinds of readers to look with fresh wonder at the structure and meaning of experience. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), the shy, eccentric bachelor, mathematician, logician, Oxford don, and cleric, made up tales for little girls, turned them into books by Lewis Carroll-his pen name-and, in doing so, astonishingly expanded the possibilities for art, fiction, and speculative thought. In creating the Alice texts, he became a master of what we might call a stream of unconsciousness that others could tap into and use. He points the way to both modernism and postmodernism, but he is also a writer who shows the fact and importance of the emergence in the nineteenth century of children as subjects in the enterprise of fiction-a key cultural fact that deserves recognition and attention.
Carroll's Alice is, after all, the most famous child in nineteenthcentury prose. She de-centers, de-constructs, and de-familiarizes the Victorian universe. A telling passage in Through the Looking-Glass, when Alice first passes through the mirror and sees the chess-piece kings and queens come alive and appear as befuddled parents and - 579- incompetent self-managers, offers a symbol for Lewis Carroll's subject and method:
Alice looked on… as the King… began writing. A sudden thought struck her, and she took hold of the end of the pencil, which came some way over his shoulder, and began writing for him.
The poor King… at last… panted out 'My dear! I really must get a thinner pencil. I can't manage this one a bit: it writes all manner of things that I don't intend-'
The child takes hold and writes what it wants, taking writing in new directions. That makes a good epigraph for Carroll's Alice fiction, and it can serve as a metaphor for the role of unconscious intention in all art. It points up the source of Charles Dodgson's imagination and also represents a process of high significance at work in nineteenth-century English literature. The royal road to the Freudian unconscious runs not only through dreamland, but through childhood.
Carroll's way is the way of regression. By befriending small girls, identifying with them, seeking to divert them, projecting himself back into childhood, and imagining stories explicitly for children, he managed to create two texts that have been, and are, as widely read, known, and quoted as any imaginative literature of the past two centuries. The Alice books do not directly address our serious, responsible, moral selves; Carroll turns his back on the adult world-the so-called real world. Nevertheless, this man who retreats into juvenility and dream states, reverts to play and nonsense, toys with language, avoids any overtly didactic or practical purpose, and escapes from
