SOURCE: Morton, Lionel. “Memory in the Alice Books.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33, no. 3 (December 1978): 285-308.

In the following essay, Morton discusses the role of memory and nostalgia in the poetry contained in the Alice books.

The afternoon of 4 July 1862, on which the story of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was first told during a boat trip up the Thames, remained “golden” in Lewis Carroll's memory, although the weather is said to have been cool and wet.¹ Most importantly, it is nostalgically recalled in the three poems which Carroll attached to the Alice books. These are not parts of the stories, but they express an essential part of the meaning which his creations had for Carroll—an undercurrent of a certain kind of nostalgia. And though nostalgia does not seem to be of much importance in Alice's adventures—the original audience wanted “news of fairyland,”² not anything they had experienced already—the...