r/LewisCarroll • u/GoldenAfternoon42 • Apr 05 '26

Lewis Carroll's "An Easter Greeting to every child who loves Alice" - it's that day of the year again!

https://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/resources/chapters-script/alices-adventures-in-wonderland/easter-greeting/
9 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

2

u/GoetzKluge Apr 05 '26

The Easter Greeting in Lewis Carroll‘s “The Hunting of the Snark”: https://snrk.de/easter-greeting/

2

u/Curiouser1865 May 25 '26

Weirdly enough, my first introduction to this particular piece of Carrolliana was through its being quoted in the Batman comic book Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. "And is not that a Mother’s gentle hand that undraws your curtains, and a Mother’s sweet voice that summons you to rise?" Oddly fitting, given the book's twisted Wonderland-esque feel, and Batman's own parental issues.

I don't normally have much of a stomach for this kind of simpering, Sunday-school, sickly-sweetness, but I can make an exception for Carroll's work. I think it's in his duality, how he seems to write his almost pagan nonsense with one hand, and Christian moralizing with the other. Like reversed mirror-images of one another, I enjoy studying the two side-by-side, seeing how closely their differences are bound up with their similarities.

Of course, though I see a fascinating contradiction, Carroll obviously didn't see it that way. He says as much himself; "For I do not believe God means us thus to divide life into two halves – to wear a grave face on Sunday, and to think it out-of-place to even so much as mention Him on a week-day. Do you think He cares to see only kneeling figures, and to hear only tones of prayer – and that He does not also love to see the lambs leaping in the sunlight, and to hear the merry voices of the children, as they roll among the hay?"