Church in Oxford University, but it was a fairly open secret. He oen used his
literary fame as a children’s writer as his calling card.
Carroll is always careful to point out that while Alice might enjoy pretend-
ing to be two dierent people, her world of pretend has an established set of
rules; she once boxed her own ears “for having cheated herself in a game of
croquet she was playing against her self.”
e issue of ignoring the rules or
cheating at croquet reappears when Alice is invited to play croquet with the
Red Queen. Games are only fun if they follow established rules that allow all
the players equal access. As Kathleen Blake discusses in Play, Games, Sport: e
Literary Works of Lewis Carroll, Carroll’s imaginative universe is overwhelm-
ingly composed of rule games.
Using Jean Piaget’s Play, Dreams and Imita-
tion, Blake suggests that Carroll’s Alice books emphasize games, rather than
the larger category of play, observing that Piaget described the third period of
child development—from around ages seven to eleven—to be the time when a
child is most interested in games with rules.
Alice conforms to Piaget’s model;
she is seven years old in Wonderland and seven-and-a-half in Looking-Glass.
According to Blake, the majority of games that Carroll and Alice enjoy
feature competition.
Part of Alice’s frustration with the Caucus Race, in which
she and the other damp creatures engage aer falling into the Pool of Tears,
is that this game seems pointless to her. She and her wet companions may be
hoping to dry o, but as Alice sees it, all they do is run around in circles for half
an hour. When the Dodo announces, “e race is over!” the group inquires,
“But who has won?” To Alice’s confusion, the Dodo declares, “Everybody has
won, and all must have prizes.”
Alice is much happier with more competi-
tive games that create winners and losers and happiest when she is a winner.
Games—such as chess in Looking-Glass, where Alice begins as a lowly pawn
but eventually becomes a powerful Queen—truly appeal to her.
Games in the Alice books provide Alice with a way to display her skill and
mastery over other characters. As an upwardly ambitious and very socially aware
Victorian child, Alice longs to mingle with royalty, whether or not they are
pleasant. Alice is consistently competitive when she is judging if she is cleverer
than her friend Mabel, matching wits with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare,
and comparing schools with the Mock Turtle. Games allow Alice to feel supe-
rior to others. She is just the sort of girl who practices curtseying while slowly
falling down a rabbit hole and reviews her geography lesson, in case she has an
opportunity for “showing o her knowledge.”
Playing in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books 421