Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and William Paley’s Natural Theology

Abstract

Charles Dodgson could well have had Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species on his mind when, in 1862, he conceived of Alice’s Adventures under Ground, the prototype of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.1 Samuel Wilberforce, who had spoken against the theory of evolution in the notorious Oxford ‘debate’ of 1860, was the Bishop of Oxford. His diocesan seat, Christ Church Cathedral, was the chapel of the College of Christ Church, of which Dodgson was a Fellow. Furthermore, the father of the real Alice, Henry Liddell, was Dean of Christ Church, and thus directly responsible to Wilberforce. That Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is to some extent a response to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was first suggested by William Empson in 1935, and the Darwinian dimension of Wonderland (in the versions of both 1862 and 1865) has been elaborated by several recent critics.2 As Judith Murphy has observed, Alice operates in relation to the diverse and largely animal population of Wonderland as, potentially, both predator and prey. She thus participates in a quasi-Darwinian struggle for survival, her unnerving bodily transformations projecting the advantageous adaptations responsible for the evolution of new species.3