Chapter 1 explores one of the most enduring popular works for children, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Charles Dodgson wrote it at a time when the very conception of childhood as a distinctive and cherished stage of human development was being explored and, through the popularity of Dodgson’s penmanship, being promulgated. Dodgson’s interest in children is also apparent from his (now controversial) photographs of children and from his obsessively detailed exchanges with his publisher, Frederick Macmillan, over the presentation of Alice and other works for children. Dodgson sought to curate the way young readers entered into and experienced the fantasy realm. He appeared to draw the line at ventures he judged could dilute the fantasy, such as mass-manufactured goods produced outside of Victorian artistic creative industries. Dodgson wrote at a time when authors could and did control the terms of engagement with their fantasy through the exercise of copyright. Management, agency and legal relations would supersede this authorial power and authority in the following century.

This chapter begins with a sermon from the 1530s that describes the iconoclastic practice of giving formerly sacred objects to children, in order to desacralise them. It shows that this was a widespread activity during the Reformation, and relates this practice of iconoclastic child’s play to the common polemical tactic of comparing traditional Roman Catholic religion to the inane playing of children. It then argues, however, that the actual transformation of such objects into playthings is more complex than this polemical elision, and shows that, when related to broader Christian traditions, the implicit claim that playing with an object is necessarily to demean it becomes far less clear. Play could be a way of accessing or reflecting the divine, not trivialising it. The object of iconoclastic child’s play, suspended between idol and doll, does not therefore clearly lack value, but becomes a potent and unstable object upon which competing conceptions and valuations converge, and within which they can co-exist.