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Five years before the publication of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), the celebrated British psychiatrist Sir James Crichton-Browne published his groundbreaking 1860 essay "Psychical Diseases in Early Life," in which he denounced the "pernicious practice" of "castle building" or imaginative flights of fancy in children.1 Urging his readers to prohibit children from engaging "airy notions" brought about by daydreaming, Crichton-Brown offered the following ominous warning:
Impressions, created by the ever fertile imagination of a child . . . are soon believed as realities, and become a part of the child's psychical existence. They become, in fact, actual delusions. Such delusions are formed with facility, but are eradicated with difficulty, and much mental derangement in mature life, we believe, is attributable to these reveries indulged in during childhood.2
Despite the fact that Crichton-Browne's assertions were widely accepted by the medical community,3 they were not well received by Lewis Carroll. The concluding paragraph of Alice illustrates the stark contrast between Carroll and Crichton-Brown's respective characterizations of childhood imagination. In it, Alice's older sister imagines Alice as an adult:
Lastly, [Alice's sister] pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.4
Carroll's idyllic depiction of a grown-up Alice's preservation of the "dream of Wonderland" and its connection with "the simple and loving heart of her childhood" challenges medical depictions of the link between childhood flights of fancy and "mental derangement in mature life." Indeed, Alice's "dream of Wonderland" is precisely the kind of deluded "castle building" that Crichton-Browne and many other medical experts feared would cause mental pathologies, and Lewis Carroll knew it.
Although Carroll is remembered primarily as a writer of literary "nonsense" and fantasy, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871) were...