The Desecration of Wonderland: A Lament for Literary Civilization

By Harrison Pemberton-Clarke

The White Knight Quarterly Review

There are moments in a critic’s career when one confronts a work so profoundly disturbing, so thoroughly offensive to every principle of literary taste and cultural preservation, that mere disapproval seems inadequate. This “Emoji Edition” of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland represents not simply a bad adaptation, but rather a kind of cultural vandalism—a deliberate assault upon one of the crown jewels of English literature.

What Danslav Slavenskoj has perpetrated here is nothing less than literary sacrilege. To take Carroll’s exquisite prose—that perfect marriage of mathematical precision and whimsical fancy, of Victorian propriety and subversive imagination—and render it in the debased patois of contemporary youth culture is to commit an act of such staggering philistinism that one scarcely knows where to begin one’s objections.

The Corruption of Language

From the very first chapter, subtitled with the grotesque “Down the 🐰🕳️,” we are assaulted by an unrelenting barrage of vulgar modernisms. Alice, that archetypal Victorian child, has been transformed into what can only be described as a Valley Girl caricature. “Like, what’s even the point of a 📖,” this degraded Alice thinks, “if it doesn’t have pictures or people talking to each other?”

Gone is Carroll’s carefully calibrated voice of innocent curiosity. In its place: “super bored,” “so lame,” “totally sleepy and brain-dead.” The accumulation of these linguistic atrocities becomes genuinely painful. We are subjected to “OMG,” “for real,” “kinda,” and the particularly odious “SUPER CURIOUS” (rendered, incomprehensibly, in capital letters).

When Alice samples the bottle’s contents, Carroll’s original described a taste “very like a cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast.” This was a deliberate absurdity, a carefully constructed impossibility that respected the reader’s intelligence. Slavenskoj gives us: “like a mix of 🍒 🥧, 🍮, 🍍, roast 🦃, 🍯 macchiato, and buttered toast.”

The intrusion of “honey macchiato”—a beverage that would have been utterly foreign to Carroll’s Victorian world—betrays the adapter’s complete indifference to historical authenticity. But more offensive still is the replacement of actual words with these childish pictograms, these hieroglyphic abominations that reduce the English language to a series of simplistic images.

The Emoji Plague

And what of these emoji themselves? These garish little pictures that infest every paragraph like a digital plague? They are not merely ugly—though they certainly are that—they represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what literature is. Literature operates through the medium of language, through the precise deployment of words to evoke images, emotions, and ideas in the reader’s mind. The emoji short-circuits this entire process, replacing the reader’s imaginative engagement with a crude visual dictation.

When Carroll wrote of the White Rabbit, readers were invited to imagine this creature according to their own faculties. Some might picture it large, others small; some might emphasize its waistcoat, others its pocket-watch. This was not a deficiency of the text but its glory—it engaged the reader as a co-creator of the narrative experience. Slavenskoj’s 🐰, 🕳️, ⏱️, and 🪭 obliterate this collaborative relationship, imposing a single, reductive visual interpretation upon every reader.

The effect is infantilizing in the extreme. Are we to believe that contemporary readers—even young ones—are so degraded in their capabilities that they require a pictogram of a rabbit to understand the word “rabbit”? This is not accessibility; it is intellectual impoverishment masquerading as democratization.

The Death of Nuance

Perhaps most galling is the complete annihilation of Carroll’s subtle wit and his mastery of tone. Consider the original passage:

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice ‘without pictures or conversations?’”

This is deceptively simple prose. The rhythm is carefully controlled; the diction is precise; the thought, while presented as Alice’s, contains an implicit irony that sophisticated readers will recognize—for we are, after all, reading a book that contains both pictures (Tenniel’s illustrations) and conversations aplenty. Carroll is playing a subtle game with his audience.

Slavenskoj’s version? “Alice was getting super bored of just sitting with her sister on the riverbank with literally nothing to do.” The word “literally” here is particularly offensive—a tic of contemporary speech that has been justly condemned by every serious stylist. But beyond individual word choices, the entire rhythm has been destroyed. The careful pacing, the building of Alice’s thought toward its conclusion—all sacrificed on the altar of a spurious “relatability.”

A Symptom of Cultural Decline

The very concept of a classic—a work that transcends its particular historical moment to speak to universal human concerns—is implicitly rejected by projects like this. If Carroll’s prose must be translated into the argot of 2025 to be comprehensible, then it follows that in another twenty years, this translation will itself be incomprehensible and will require yet another updating. We are caught in a hamster wheel of perpetual contemporaneity, forever unable to encounter the past on its own terms.

There is, moreover, something deeply presumptuous about this entire enterprise. Carroll was a brilliant mathematician, a gifted photographer, a skilled logician, and a masterful prose stylist. Slavenskoj is... someone who knows how to insert emoji into a text file. The hubris required to imagine that one is “improving” Carroll’s work by larding it with 🐰s and 🕳️s is simply breathtaking.

The Question of Audience

One imagines that the defense of this travesty will run something like: “But it’s meant to engage young readers! It makes Carroll accessible to a generation raised on digital communication!” This argument is both condescending and counterproductive.

It is condescending because it assumes that young people are incapable of rising to meet a challenging text, that they must have everything pre-digested and simplified for their consumption. This is precisely backwards. Young readers are capable of remarkable sophistication when texts are presented to them with appropriate context and support. They do not need Carroll dumbed down; they need to be educated up to Carroll’s level.

It is counterproductive because it deprives young readers of the very experience that makes literature valuable: the encounter with a voice, a perspective, a use of language that is genuinely foreign to one’s everyday experience. Literature should estrange us from our ordinary habits of thought and perception. It should challenge us, expand us, transform us. A Carroll who speaks in the debased idiom of contemporary teenagers cannot perform this function. He merely confirms readers in their existing linguistic poverty.

On the Corruption of Childhood

There is also something particularly sinister about targeting a children’s classic for this treatment. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been for more than 150 years a gateway to literary culture for young readers. It has introduced countless children to the pleasures of wordplay, of nonsense verse, of narratives that reward careful attention and rereading. It has, in short, been an educational force of the first importance.

This “Emoji Edition” threatens to cut off a new generation from that inheritance. A child who encounters Alice first in this degraded form may never subsequently feel the need to seek out Carroll’s original. Why would they? They will believe they have already read the book. The damage done may be irreparable.

Moreover, there is something insidious about teaching children that classic literature must be constantly updated and modernized to be comprehensible. This instills from the earliest age a presentist bias, a sense that the past is foreign and incomprehensible rather than a living part of our cultural inheritance. It encourages the very intellectual provincialism that education should be combating.

Conclusion: A Call to Resistance

In closing, I can only express my profound hope that this volume finds no audience, gains no foothold, inspires no imitators. We stand at a crossroads in our literary culture. We can continue down this path—toward ever more aggressive presentism, toward the reduction of all literature to the lowest common denominator of contemporary taste, toward a world in which nothing is permitted to remain genuinely challenging or strange. Or we can resist.

We can insist that young readers are capable of meeting Carroll on his own terms. We can affirm that the language of the past, even when it requires some effort to comprehend, is worth preserving and studying. We can reject the notion that everything must be updated, modernized, emoji-fied to be valuable.

This “Emoji Edition” represents everything that is wrong with contemporary literary culture: its presentism, its anti-intellectualism, its compulsive need to reduce all works to immediately consumable entertainment, its fundamental lack of reverence for the achievements of the past. It deserves not merely to fail, but to be actively opposed by everyone who cares about literature and about the transmission of culture across generations.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has survived for more than 150 years without requiring emoji. With any justice, it will survive for another 150 years after this aberration has been mercifully forgotten. But such survival is not guaranteed. It requires the active defense of those who understand what is at stake.

We are the guardians of a great literary inheritance. Let us not fail in our duty to preserve it intact—not dumbed down, not “updated,” not emoji-fied—for those who will come after us. The stakes could not be higher.

Harrison Pemberton-Clarke is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the White Knight Academy and author of The Defense of Literary Tradition and Against Modernization: The Case for Classical Education.