Well... today's post sent me off down a rabbit hole of reading about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, and suddenly I am feeling colossally ignorant. Apparently the Alice stories and the characters there-in are satires of mid-19th century English current events and persons. Appreciating the word-play requires having not just an extensive understanding of both Latin and French but also of how Latin and French were taught in the mid-1800s. Looking-Glass is particularly complex as it involves a deeply embedded critique of mathematical concepts in a plot that can be illustrated as a series of chess moves.
I honestly had no idea!
Now I shall need to find a thoroughly annotated version of the stories that details and ex-plains all of the above elements. Even that, though, would be insufficient to overcome my newly realized colossal well of ignorance, as obviously I'm not even a fraction as well educated as a typical 19th century child, for every bit of this content has gone unrecognized by me until now.
I honestly had no idea!
Now I shall need to find a thoroughly annotated version of the stories that details and ex-plains all of the above elements. Even that, though, would be insufficient to overcome my newly realized colossal well of ignorance, as obviously I'm not even a fraction as well educated as a typical 19th century child, for every bit of this content has gone unrecognized by me until now.
They're not dolls, they're action figures!