Salvador Dali's Rare 1969 Illustrations for "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,"

For both Carroll and the surrealists, what some call madness could be perceived by others as wisdom. Even the creative processes of Carroll and the surrealists were similar. The surrealists practiced automatism in their writing and drawing; Carroll called the initial telling of the tale … “effortless,” saying that “every such idea and nearly every word of the dialogue, came of itself… when fancies unsought came crowding thick upon [me], or at times when the jaded Muse was goaded into action more because she had to say something than that she had something to say.”

In addition, collages were a serious apparatus in the surrealists’ arsenal; Carroll invented the term portmanteau — combining words — and produced “Jabberwocky,” the most famous example of pure neologistic nonsense in the English language (or close to it, anyway). His bestiary of mome raths, toves, and Bread-and-butter-flies, also from Through the Looking-Glass, could easily have been products of the surrealists’ game of Exquisite Corpse.