Lewis Carroll and Victorian Children's Literature Analysis

Lewis Carroll: Life and Background

a) This excerpt belongs to the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:

It was written by Lewis Carroll, and this book was published in the year 1865.
He was the inventor of the nonsense genre. He was born in Daresbury, England, in 1832.
Educated at Rugby and at Christ Church College, University of Oxford, he became a member of the faculty of mathematics at Oxford.
Lewis Carroll, the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was an English logician, mathematician, and novelist.
The author's life and work has become a constant area for speculation, and his study of the boundaries of sense and nonsense has inspired a number of psychological studies and novels.
He died in 1898.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), written in the 19th century during the reign of Queen Victoria, is regarded as a landmark text in the history of children's books. It is a witty subversion of the staid and often stodgy books that the Victorians thought were suitable for their children (usually didactic or moralistic). Entertainment was now the priority; there was now liberty of thought. In this story, the generally staid Alice moves through a world of mad adults, all with their own irrational logic; she is generally more puzzled than anything else, although occasionally patronizing.
The new approach to childhood resulted from smaller families, fashionable attitudes, better health, and medicine. Children's books were now for a recognizable childhood, with control changing to complicity.
Some of the particulars of the children's world of the epoch are the incorporation of songs, games, passages from schoolbooks, hymns, and the names of certain foods and drinks, and even some of the constraints and anxieties of a mid-nineteenth-century childhood.
Most books were priced out of the reach of ordinary families, and now the success of cheap, sensational texts was hardly surprising with the introduction of Hoe's six-cylinder printing press in 1864.

The Victorian age was marked by change-induced crisis in politics, economics, religion, morality, elitism, and social affairs, as well as by faith in progress (industrialism and improvement). The Victorians are credited with inventing childhood, partly by their efforts to stop child labour and by the introduction of compulsory education.
Forster's Education Act of 1870, which legislated for free elementary education, had by 1880 created over one million new places at schools. Juvenile departments were created by publishers such as Macmillan, Routledge, and Nelson in the late 1860s.