Carroll is certainly striving against his bonds. The entire structure of the book (with its nearly unmarked shifts between ordinary, eerie, and trance) seems to be an expression of this attempt.

“Undigested” is the perfect phrase. I think some of my current sense of almost-revulsion for S&B comes from the mixture of that now-alien cultural framework with my empathy for the painfully timeless and immanent human dissatisfaction that permeates the text. The wit and whimsy (and there is much of both there) seem slight and almost garish in that setting.

Perhaps this is my failing as a reader, but I’ve always found it hard to maintain the sangfroid of literary detachment; I tend toward strong identification with characters and moods.

With suitable forewarning I can steel myself to appreciate and even enjoy an otherwise unpleasant text, dissecting it with scalpel and speculum and sardonic penetration. I suspect this approach may be a more fruitful path to take on the next reading.

I’ll certainly check out your articles on S&B in detail . . . a quick glance does not suffice.

“Sylvie and Bruno come through as the fantasies of a particular, not very happy man who is very much clamped by the mental shackles of his own time.”

I think this is what the book ultimately more interesting to me than Alice. The latter has been so absorbed into our culture that it is virtually impossible to see it anew–whereas reading S&B brings home the utter alterity of late Victorian intellectual life. Carroll is constantly straining at his shackles, even if he can’t escape them, and in doing so we come to have a better sense of what was, and what was not, possible in 1890. The parts that make it up are much less digested than in Alice–they stick out aggressively and make one uncomfortable. For me, this challenge is the key appeal.