George Dunlop Leslie - Alice in Wonderland

George Dunlop Leslie, Alice in Wonderland (c. 1879), oil on canvas, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery

The title of this painting tells us both the name of the book being read aloud and also the place to which the mind of the little girl listening has travelled. It shows the artist’s wife Lydia, and their daughter Alice, who seems lost in the world of her own wonderment. Her receptive imagination is represented by the blankness of the wall behind, a space demarcated by the horizontal line at the very top that stretches across the width of the canvas as a frame-within-a frame, an outline that echoes the shape of the book and sets a pictorial and figurative boundary to its seductive power.

Intimacy is beautifully conjured by the child’s entranced gaze as she leans against her mother’s bosom, while her doll lies abandoned on top of the seat cushion. Alice’s expression is unfocussed, and the slightest of frowns furrows her brow. She is dressed like her namesake, in a blue dress (although interestingly, the colour was not originally mentioned in the book) overlayed with a lacily topped white pinafore the petalled pattern of which echoes the posy of wildflowers that sits in her lap, and which similarly patterns the couch upholstery.

We see the young mother in three-quarter length profile, dressed comme il faut for a respectable woman of her class. Her fashionable gown and chignon demonstrate both her modesty and conventional formality. But this punctiliousness of dress is overruled by her affection for her daughter, an attachment that is unusually physical for mid-Victorian decorum. It would be customary for the governess or nanny of the household to take primary responsibility for both the education and entertainment of children in this period, particularly girls, and mothers would often maintain a distance from them because of this. But here, we can almost experience Lydia’s breathing, the rising and falling of her chest, the comforting rhythm of her reading voice and even the beating of her heart as Alice’s pressing ear hears and feels it. Can there be any warmer or more loving contact than this, the sublime expression of the special bond between mother and daughter?

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the actual title of Lewis Carroll’s novel (Alice in Wonderland was a later contraction), was published in 1865, just a few years prior to the date of the making of this painting, but had gained rapidly in popularity in the intervening years, and while there was some commercial savviness in Dunlop Leslie’s bandwagoning portrayal of its reading, there is also a depth and nuance to the figuration and composition that lifts it above the commercialism, triviality and sentimentality of some of his other works. It explores instead the poignant symbolism of pre-Freudian psychology.

For example, might the buttercup (virtue) and clover flower (faith, love) that seem to have fallen from the doll’s hand onto the couch illustrate a lost innocence? The doll is dressed in black as if in mourning and its recumbent pose and downward hanging arm might suggest its death. It is missing one shoe, a neglect which hints at vulnerability but is more likely implicit of moral laxity if not brazen unconstraint and the flowers that have dropped from its hand may insinuate an even more profoundly sinful Fall, the future loss of chastity. Does the doll hint at the presence of evil and pain in the world, the sadness of mortality and loss? Or is its abandonment more straightforwardly an indicator of the availability of alternative imaginative realms? The make-believe involved in playing with dolls as simulacra for grown-ups and their concerns has been subsumed here by the disturbingly dark fantasy of Wonderland with its multiple threats of death (‘off with her head!’) and its pervasive feeling of meaninglessness or at least the world’s absurdity and indecipherability. The reading mother is positioned to the left of the horizontal composition while the doll occupies the right and for the moment of the story at least, Alice has been drawn to the former’s realm but may feel herself pulled back in the other direction at some future point. Both realms, the artist seems to suggest, have their perils and their magnetism.

The words on the open pages of the book are blurred, as if to emphasize the sense of interiority of the young fancy at the expense of legibly printed specificity – the artist wants us to imagine the child’s imagination rather than one particular episode from the tale. At the same time, the clear lines of the upholstery pattern seem to hold the figures firmly within their trammels, as if in contradistinction to the many detours and reverses of the narrative, so that both interior and exterior domains are conjured for the viewer’s own imagining. Alice’s gaze is directed towards us, but it doesn’t connect with us; it looks through us and for that moment she remains lost. There exists some anxiety for the viewer on behalf of the listening Alice as she hovers anxiously between her worlds of play and story and our world of here-and-now looking back and feeling concern for her, knowing that we can never give her reassurance.

The painting seems to play with fanciful and metaphorical dualities of entrapment versus freedom, knowledge versus oblivious ignorance, of the certainty of straight boundaries versus worrisome adult freedom. The Alice as painted becomes both imaginatively captive within the rectangular folds of the book covers that are held so close to her head, but yet perturbed by what she hears of its apparent boundary-transgressing lawlessness, its ultimate contingency. She is lying on the rigidly rectilinear pattern of the couch while seemingly comforted by the proximity and memory of her mother’s pliantly accommodating womb and at the same time, we as viewers are gathered in through the rectangular enclosure of the picture frame in the act of witnessing Alice’s confliction. She remains spellbound by the story and manages to swallow us into it too by proxy.

If Alice’s blank stare nevertheless signifies her rapt attention, her discarded doll is both deaf and mute, seemingly incapable of engagement in the novel’s unfolding. And yet she is a stage prop whose presence may not be immediately apparent, but like the Chekhov’s gun principle, the skull in Hamlet or the loaded gun in Hedda Gabler, the doll’s inertia masks a latent power, as if she were some kind of miniaturised fetish object that has arrogated meaning and significance to itself through bodily shrinkage. The angle of Lydia’s body makes it look like she is reading not to Alice but to the doll who appears to have become stricken down by the words read aloud but who nevertheless continues to command the right side of the painting. Lydia’s expression is tender but her spoken narrative seems baleful.

Both Alice and her doll have their feet up on the couch and this surely represents a lapse in normal rules of Victorian behaviour but perhaps this is forgivable if the more momentous developmental transition from childhood to adolescence is emerging. Alice may no longer find herself projecting her imagination onto the doll but will now instead apprehend its surrogation of her daydreams and her nightmares. Just as the Alice of the story undergoes frequent and alarming changes of size, so the Alice of the painting will feel confusion as she embarks on her own journey of self-discovery, struggling as we all must do at one time or another to accommodate physical and mental metamorphosis.