ABSTRACT
The cruelties and anthropomorphisms of natural history find their way into the Alice books, because the Alice books are, among other things, a kind of natural history re-written in the mode of fantasy. In the phrase of Lynn Barber, the Victorian age was the 'heyday of natural history'. The governing idea of natural history was natural theology, with its 'hierarchical vision of creation, with humanity at the apex'. Studying nature taught children about God's hierarchy, as well as the important lesson that they were themselves under authority, just as animals and plants were under the authority of human beings. For most early natural historians, such as William Smellie and John Bruckner, the overwhelming fact of animal rapacity 'was a sign not of the degeneration of the post-Edenic nature, but rather evidence of the remarkable 'economy' of nature'.
