Cockney Rhyming Slang, as anyone who has stood at the till in a London
souvenir shop could tell you, is a set of slang expressions based on
taking the original word (say, "stairs") and rhyming it with the final
word of a short phrase ("apples and pears"), and then, in some cases,
shortening the new expression ("apples"). This can lead to a sentence
such as: "Careful you don't slip and fall down the apples". While the
slang is often cited as the "secret language" of the Cockney population
of London, many of its expression have entered into general usage, not
just in the UK, but throughout the English-speaking world. This is not a
translation of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" in the purest sense.
It is, rather, the result of a linguistic game-another sort of
translation. What Charles Dodgson would have loved most about Cockney
Rhyming Slang, and what makes it suited for application to "Alice", is
that it is, as John Ayto writes in his introduction to "The Oxford
Dictionary of Rhyming Slang", "all really part of a giant ongoing word
game, whose product is much more droll artefact that linguists' lexeme".
It is with this idea of Cockney Rhyming Slang as word game, and with the
goal of creating "droll artefact", that this translation has been
approached.