Fantasy – Down the Rabbit Hole

(b) A pocket watch

The White Rabbit takes a watch out of its waistcoat pocket, looks at it, and hurries on — this is what makes Alice realise that a rabbit wearing a waistcoat and carrying a watch must be most unusual.

In the opening chapter of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice follows the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole not out of any plan or purpose, but because of an irresistible surge of curiosity. The Rabbit is already an oddity — it wears a waistcoat, mutters "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!", and pulls a watch out of its pocket. These details mark it as something out of the ordinary, and Alice, who is bored and drowsy on the riverbank with nothing to do, is instantly alert. The moment she sees it, she is "burning with curiosity," and she runs after it without a moment's thought. When it pops down a large rabbit hole, she follows it in at once, giving no thought to how she will ever get out again. Her action is impulsive, not reasoned: she does not stop to weigh the danger or ask where the hole leads. Carroll stresses that she never once considered how she would get out, which shows that curiosity has completely overruled caution.

Her state of mind at this point is a mixture of boredom, wonder, and reckless excitement. Before the Rabbit appears, she is tired and listless, "considering in her own mind" whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain is worth the trouble of getting up. The Rabbit jolts her out of this dullness. Once she is falling, her mind stays active rather than panicking: she looks about her, wonders how many miles she has fallen, thinks about latitude and longitude, and even imagines what the Antipathies (her mispronunciation of "Antipodes") might be like. She is more puzzled than frightened, and her curiosity keeps her calm and observant. This dreamy, questioning state of mind is typical of Alice throughout the book — she wants to understand everything, even when she is in danger.

Curiosity shapes the opening events in a clear chain. It is curiosity that makes her leave the safe riverbank and enter the Rabbit's world; it is curiosity that keeps her from being terrified during the long fall; and it is curiosity that drives her to explore the strange hall she lands in. There she finds the little door, the golden key, the bottle marked "DRINK ME," and the cake marked "EAT ME," and she tries each one because she cannot resist finding out what will happen. Each act of curiosity creates a new problem — she grows too large to fit through the door, then too small, then too large again — and these problems set the plot in motion. In this way, Carroll makes curiosity the engine of the whole story: Alice's desire to know what lies beyond the next door is what carries her from the ordinary world into Wonderland. Her curiosity is both her defining trait and the cause of the adventures that follow.

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice's changes in size follow a clear pattern of cause and effect, and each change brings a fresh practical problem.

Drinking from the bottle. In the hall of locked doors, Alice finds a small bottle labelled "DRINK ME." She checks it carefully first — no sign of poison — and drinks it. The drink tastes of cherry-tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffee and hot buttered toast, and she shrinks to about ten inches high. The change solves one problem and creates another: she is now small enough to go through the little door into the garden, but she has left the golden key on the glass table and cannot reach it.

Eating the cake. She then finds a cake marked "EAT ME." She eats it and grows so tall that her head strikes the ceiling and she is "more than nine feet high." Now she can reach the key, but she is far too large to pass through the door. She begins to cry, and her tears form a pool four inches deep — which later nearly drowns her when she shrinks again. She then uses a fan (and later a piece of mushroom) to reduce herself, and the pattern continues: she becomes small enough to enter the door but too small to reach the table, and later grows so large in the White Rabbit's house that she is trapped inside a room.

The problems these changes create. Her size is never right for the situation. When she is small, she cannot reach the key or the table; when she is large, she cannot fit through doors or move freely. She loses control of her own body, is mistaken for a monster, is attacked with pebbles (which turn into cakes), and is constantly anxious about whether she will "ever get back to her right size again." The changes also threaten her sense of identity — she cannot answer the Caterpillar's question "Who are you?" and fears she has become Mabel, a girl she considers ignorant.

What they reveal about her character. The size changes show Alice to be curious and impulsive, yet also cautious — she reads the label before drinking. She is adaptable and resourceful, learning to manage the mushroom to control her height. Above all, her confusion about size reflects the confusion of growing up: her body is changing, her identity feels uncertain, and the adult world she meets is illogical and arbitrary. Her repeated attempts to find the "right size" mirror a child's struggle to find her place in a world she does not yet understand.

Introduction

Down the Rabbit Hole, the opening chapter of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, shows Lewis Carroll's characteristic method: he does not build his fantasy out of nothing. He takes the ordinary furniture of a Victorian child's life — a rabbit, a waistcoat, a watch, a key, a bottle, a cake, a jar of marmalade — and gives it a slight twist. Because the materials are familiar, the strangeness is measured against the known, and the fantasy becomes believable. Because Alice reacts to it like a real child, it also becomes engaging.

The White Rabbit

The first wonder is a rabbit, an animal every reader knows. But this rabbit wears a waistcoat and takes "a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket," muttering, "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!" The familiar details do the work: a waistcoat has pockets, a watch tells time, and being late is a very ordinary anxiety. Only the combination is impossible. Carroll even tells us that Alice does not at first think it "so very much out of the way" to hear a rabbit speak, because she is drowsy and because talking animals are normal in nursery rhymes. Her surprise comes a moment later, when she realises she has "never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it." The fantasy is thus anchored in a detail we can picture, and the reader's own double-take mirrors Alice's.

The Objects Alice Finds

The rabbit-hole itself is a familiar feature of an English field, but it "went straight on like a tunnel," and Alice falls so slowly that she has time to look about her. Down there she finds shelves, cupboards, maps and pictures hung on pegs — a whole sitting room arranged vertically. She picks up a jar labelled "ORANGE MARMALADE," a homely object, and is "greatly disappointed" to find it empty. Later come the little golden key, the tiny door behind the curtain, the glass table, the bottle marked "DRINK ME," and the cake marked "EAT ME" in currants. Every one of these is a domestic thing a child would recognise; the magic lies only in what they do. Carroll also gives them a child's logic: the bottle's label is a plain instruction rather than a spell, and the cake is decorated with currants like an ordinary tea cake. The physical world is never abandoned — Alice grows so tall that her head strikes the roof — so the fantasy has weight, size and consequence.

Alice's Reactions

Alice herself is the strongest link with reality. She is curious rather than frightened: she runs after the Rabbit "burning with curiosity," and as she falls she chatters to herself about latitude and longitude, wondering whether she will fall "right through the earth" and come out among the "antipathies" — her comic mispronunciation of "antipodes." She is a well-brought-up child who checks the bottle to see "whether the bottle was marked 'poison'," and who reasons about whether eating and drinking will make her larger or smaller. When she cannot fit through the little door she sits down and cries — the very ordinary frustration of a child who has been thwarted. She scolds herself, as a governess would, for crying. Her ordinariness is the anchor: because she responds as any real child might, we accept the world she is responding to.

How the Mixture Works

Carroll's fantasy is believable because it is built from recognisable parts. The reader knows rabbits, waistcoats, watches, keys, cakes and marmalade jars, so each impossible element is only one step away from the known. The dream-frame helps too: the story opens with Alice "beginning to get very tired" and drowsy, so the oddities feel like the half-logic of a dream. The mixture is engaging because it creates both humour and suspense. We laugh at the Rabbit's fussy anxiety and at Alice's solemn self-advice, and we keep reading to see whether she will catch the Rabbit or get through the door. The child's-eye view — everything seen from a low height, everything explained in half-remembered lessons — makes the strange world feel immediate rather than remote.

Conclusion

Carroll's genius lies in his restraint. He never lets Wonderland float free of the real world; he keeps it tethered to pocket watches, keys, cakes and a small girl's common sense. The result is a fantasy that is credible because it is familiar, and delightful because the familiar is turned gently upside down.

would have done

The if-clause uses the past perfect (hadn't been invited), which is the third conditional. The main clause therefore takes would have + past participle: If he hadn't been invited, I would have done my homework.