Probably in the portfolio of almost every illustrator there are illustrations dedicated to "Alice in Wonderland" and I am no exception. Alice is my love since childhood. I listened to the record with this fairy tale again and again. And I still keep this record. I have watched almost all existing movie adaptations, including the very first 12-minute version from 1903. And recently I wandered into the site of the National Library of Great Britain, and my happiness knew no bounds when I found there a handwritten version of the very first fairy tale called "Alice's Adventures Underground". Reading in the original that same notebook with a fairy tale handwritten by the author himself and presented to Alice Liddell is an inexpressible feeling, as if I had found a treasure or they locked me up in a candy store!
One of my favorite hobbies is to look for interesting facts about fairy tales and events that I illustrate. And here are some crazy and not so crazy facts about this fairy tale.
All Alice's transformations with altered space, increase and decrease are not related to psychotropic drugs (as some believe). L. Carroll himself felt all these metamorphic states, suffering from hallucinations due to a rare neurological disorder. This disease in psychiatry was later (in 1955) called "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome" The official name is micropsia. With such a disease, a person is not able to assess the real size of the objects surrounding him. A person with Alice in Wonderland syndrome may see a doorknob as if it were the size of a door. But much more often people perceive objects as if from afar. Most terrible is a person in this state does not understand what really exists, and what only seems to him.
The idea of the Mad Hatter arose from the fact that hat manufacturers were dealing with mercury vapor and this seriously affected their minds. Mercury nitrate, which was used to treat felt hats, caused dementia. Therefore, in the Victorian era, the expression "mad as a hatter" was popular.
Many events in the book that are absurd for us were based on people, places, events that the real Alice Liddell (the prototype of the heroine) and her sisters were familiar with in real life. The absurd events did not seem so absurd to them.
So, the rabbit hole through which Alice got into Wonderland actually led to the gardens of Oxford - the author was inspired by one of the many local arches. The tiny door, into which the heroine of the fairy tale could not climb because of her size, is also quite real. This door led from the rector's garden to the cathedral garden, where the Liddell sisters were forbidden to go and where they desperately wanted to go. In these gardens stood a sprawling tree favored by cats. The current residents of the rector's house are sure that the Cheshire Cat was among them.
Carroll himself was the prototype of the Dodo bird. In life, he stuttered a little and often said his last name (real Carroll's name is Dodgson) as "Do-do-dodgson".
Where did mock turtle soup come from? In the Victorian era, all the nobility were very fond of green turtle soup. Ordinary people, of course, could not afford turtle soup, which is an expensive delicacy. Therefore, the people prepared beef turtle soup. This is where the Mock Turtle comes from (half turtle, half calf).
