What is "Alice in Wonderland" Actually About?

A tumble down the rabbit-hole with Alice.

“Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.”
~ The Duchess

“Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”
~ Also the Duchess

I’m convinced that there exists a thing we can call a good reader. There also exists the good reader’s opposite — and if we don’t want to call them bad readers, then we can fairly describe them as basic readers. They are those people who fail to take much more from a book than an understanding of the mechanics of plot. A basic reader takes the advice of the King of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

The basic reader sees how the author got him from beginning to middle to end, with maybe a few surprises along the way. You can spot a basic reader in the same way C. S. Lewis spot…