Charles Lutwidge Dodgson loved little girls. He loved to tell them stories, he loved to feed them jam, he loved to set them puzzles, and he loved to take their photographs. On 25 March, 1863, he composed a list of 107 prepubescent portrait subjects, arranged alphabetically by forename. Below the Agneses came the Alices, including Alice Liddell, the little girl for whom he created Alice in Wonderland. Mostly good-mannered, occasionally lachrymose and stuffed full of half-remembered governess-led learning, the fictional Alice displays behaviour quite out of step with her age. Instead of doing what she is told to do by the creatures she meets, she behaves like an adolescent (though adolescence was to Dodgson a destructive force) and learns to disobey.
Unsuk Chin’s 2007 opera Alice in Wonderland is not family-friendly. Her Wonderland is a world of sudden and frightening body changes, unreliable information and irrational violence, the worst offenders being the booming, shrieking, baby-beating, head-chopping adult females whose number Alice must eventually join.
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