The Picaresque of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its Role in Lewis Carroll’s Social Commentary Olajumoke Lasisi College

As a popular and widely loved novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; and, Through the looking Glass and What Alice Found There has been translated to well over a hundred languages and is a household tale that most people have enjoyed in their childhood. With a seemingly lighthearted storyline full of imagination and adventure, the novel also intended to have depth and share the author Lewis Carroll’s thoughts on the Victorian society. Carroll uses the picaresque aspect of Alice’s narrative to produce effective social commentary on the Victorian lifestyle through playful use of words, rhyme, and even the characters themselves; these elements aid in Carroll’s criticism of the victorian way of life and 19th century England’s politics. The characters that Alice meets on her adventure along the way show different parts of the Victorian lifestyle that allow for those defective features to be emphasized and highlighted. A picaresque novel is one that is usually a first-person narrative, relating the adventures of a rogue or lowborn adventurer as he or she drifts from place to place and from one social environment to another in an effort to survive.

Though Alice is obviously not from a low class family due to her somewhat educated...