The escape of Alice: A Christmas fantasy — A Reader’s Guide

Escaping the Page, Entering the Toy Shop

Alice’s escape is literal and symbolic. She climbs down from a shelf, eats cake to grow, and plucks her own book from the counter. The old bookseller, whose wits have been woolgathering for years, barely notices. This sets the tone for a story that treats books as physical objects and characters as autonomous beings. Once outside the volume, Alice navigates a toy shop filled with a Plausible Donkey, a Singing Bird, and a stuck-up Queen of the Dolls. The shop becomes a liminal space where literary and commercial worlds collide, and where Alice’s adventures are reframed as a Christmas errand.

Debating Daisy Ashford and H.G. Wells

Alice’s companion is a wooden man who challenges her literary tastes. When Alice praises Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters, the wooden man scoffs, suggesting Sir James Barrie wrote it and that Ashford’s age is a gimmick. Alice retorts by citing Barrie’s preface. The argument escalates to H.G. Wells, whom the wooden man mocks with a rhyme: “Mr. Britling saw it through, / That was more than I could do!” Alice scolds him for being “Leviticus” (a pun on “levity” and the biblical book). This exchange showcases Starrett’s satirical edge, using Carrollian wordplay to critique early 20th-century literary figures.

The Kitten Quest and Santa’s Strike

The wooden man reminds Alice that a kitten was on her Christmas list. She refuses to return to the menagerie, where the donkeys were impolite. They rush to Santa Claus’s cottony dwelling, only to find a sign: “Gone to the Races. Back Next Year.” The joke—Santa on strike for a shorter day, with seven hundred of him—undercuts the holiday magic. Alice’s exasperated “Oh!” leaves her resigned to a kitten that might eat the bird and scratch the doll. The story ends on a note of comic disappointment, blending whimsy with a gentle mockery of consumerist Christmas expectations.

Starrett’s fantasy is best read as a literary jeu d’esprit rather than a children’s story. The humor depends on familiarity with Carroll, Tenniel, and the authors name-dropped in the toy shop debates. Readers who enjoy spotting period references and puns will find the most pleasure here. The brevity of the tale—under 9,000 words—makes it a quick, amusing diversion, especially for those curious about how early 20th-century writers played with the Alice legacy.

I keep thinking of my grandmother’s tin of glass ornaments, how she’d lift them out one by one. This Carrollian escapade feels like that—holding something fragile. The Candy Country — Background and Themes once gave me the same quiet ache, a winter landscape with rules only its maker understood. I pause there, dusting the memory gently. A kitten, a wooden man, a candy shore—some doors stay ajar.