Thread: Lewis Carroll- Alice In Wonderland

I have never noticed all these drugs references before and am inclined to think that they are the invention of a later age. Alice in Wonderland most closely resembles an LSD trip but for Heaven's sake LSD didn't appear till much later although drugs were common in Victorian times of course. I am sure that there are people who passionately believe this and they will naturally be impossible to dissuade but personally I think it sounds a load of nonsense. I think there is a reference to smoking a hookah but there are references to all sorts of things. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was certainly rather odd though it has to be said and probably taking drugs would have been the least of his problems.

Actually even more surprising is the fact that only a couple of threads below this one is one about Aldous Huxley. You know Aldous Huxley? Writer of Brave New World. He was the real deal. An advocate of psychadelics, he even went to his death on a massive LSD trip. Raving mad.

Dodgson was I think a mathematician with scary facial hair and a penchant for photographing little girls.

I have never noticed all these drugs references before and am inclined to think that they are the invention of a later age.

I don't think so , the bottle on the table is ambiguous, the caterpillar smoking the hookah, is sat on a mushroom, less ambiguous but the one that clinches it, for me at least, is the strange dream sequence with the sheep in the post office in Alice in Wonderland. Alice finds herself in a boat among sweet rush. Sweet rush is not all that common and the root contains an hallucinogenic similar to mda and mdma in its effects.

...and of course L Frank Baum specifically wrote The Wizard of Oz to promote homosexuality and become a gay icon. As for J K Rowling she created an entire cast of homosexual characters. They didn’t of course but particularly in the case of the J K Rowling books I can say that there is a vast swathe of people who passionately believe this, populate the Internet with slash fan fiction, and are extremely vocal about their rectitude.
You can read anything into a story and if people are convinced then there is no way of swaying them. Personally I have no doubt that Alice in Wonderland is filled with references to Dodgson’s own life but magic mushrooms in Tom Quad? Personally it doesn't do it for me. We shall of course never know.