Dreaming (and) Insanity: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Through the Looking-Glass of Victorian Psychology
Victorian Literature and Culture January 1, 2025 Alessandro Cabiati
This article compares Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with Victorian medical essays from Carroll's library to show how the novel's nonsense—linguistic and cognitive incongruities, identity confusion, forgetfulness, and distorted time—draws on mid-nineteenth-century psychological ideas about the similarities between sleeping and madness. It demonstrates that before psychoanalysis emerged in the 1930s, Victorian writers of psychology used Alice's Adventures to illustrate their theories. The article explores the two-way influence between the novel and Victorian psychology, arguing that Carroll portrays Wonderland as a place where childhood dreaming and adult insanity converge, offering escape from everyday reality into the absurdities of nonsense.