ABSTRACT

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a literary fantasy work written by Charles Lutwidge

Dodgson, under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, and published during the Victorian Age in

1865. It tells the story of a girl, who after falling down through a rabbithole, ends up in

Wonderland, a place where anything nonsense is possible. The novel not only shows a strong

criticism of the extremely moralizing education that foremost middle-class children got

access to in the 19th century in the United Kingdom, but it also represents the value of a

child’s basic need to stimulate his barely developed senses by the means of recreation. The

understanding of the consequences on children, triggered by the strict obedience to social

codes and expectations, was set as the main objective of this monograph, along with the

deliberation on leisure being ultimately relevant for children’s development and upbringing

process, supporting on how Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland turns out to be a literary

resemblance of it. In order to accomplish the production of this monograph, extensive

research was carried out using resources such as online historical articles and essays on 19th

century United Kingdom’s context, literary reviews and study guides about the novel,

biographies of Charles L. Dodgson and scientific studies on recreation effects on human

development. Based on it, adequate data was collected to demonstrate the

importance of nurturing imagination and creativity through the significant physical and

cognitive stimulation that recreation provides children, a fact for which the novel is

considered to advocate.

Keywords: children, Victorian Age, United Kingdom, recreation, social codes, middle

class, imagination, creativity.