SOURCE: "Framing the Alices," in PMLA, Vol. 101, No. 3, May 1986, pp. 362-73.

In the following excerpt, Madden argues that the critically-debated framing poems of the Alice books serve several nineteenth-century literary purposes.

Over the past thirty years Lewis Carroll studies have both altered and generally enhanced the reputation of Carroll's two Alices. Yet from early on in this reevaluation process one feature of these famous stories has posed a persistent critical problem. I refer to the three poems, one prefacing each of the Alice books and the third concluding Looking-Glass, that, together with the prose ending of Wonderland, frame the central tales. The problem is raised in acute form by Peter Coveney in his influential study of the figure of the child in nineteenth-century English literature: praising the central Alice dream tales as triumphs of "astringent and intelligent art," he detects in this frame material evidence of what he...