How Alice in Wonderland Relates to Victorianism
             Victoria became queen of Great Britain in 1837. Her reign lasted until 1901; this period was called the Victorian Age. Victorian writers had to deal with the contrast of poverty and the prosperity of the middle and upper classes. This led to a pessimistic tone, which appeared in much of the best Victorian poetry and prose. Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson invented "Lewis Carroll" for use on a poem published in The Train in 1856. The story of Lewis Carroll is one of the most unique and curious in Victorian literature. Carroll was a Victorian nonsense writer for children, whose work caught the attention of adults as well. Nonsense was not a Victorian invention. In 1865 Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland, which was said to be a revolution in that it presents a comical, but exciting, outlook on an entire middle class world turned upside down. He considered Alice in Wonderland to be "a realm apart from the world where the rule of Moral Order was absolute" (Lewis, 98)
             The Victorian Age was an age of intensified sexism and misleading notions. This era is described as "wondering between two worlds, one dead, and one powerless to be born" (Arnold, 153). During this period the world was in a whirl of social, economical, and religious changes, which had to greatly with the ideas of Darwinism. The grotesque style in Literature tends to be prevalent in eras marked by radical change and stress. This left the British people struggling to find meaning in a world they no longer understood. In spite of the prosperity of the Victorian Age, factory and farm workers lived in terrible poverty. Queen Victoria set the tone of the late Victorian Age. She had always been a very serious and self-important person from the time she took the throne at the age of eighteen. In 1861 her husband Albert died, which led to Victoria becoming more and more withdrawn from the...