Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

About this book

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford mathematics lecturer, under the pen name Lewis Carroll. The story began as a tale told to the three daughters of Henry Liddell, dean of Christ Church, during a boating trip in July 1862. One of them, Alice Liddell, asked him to write it down. He produced a handwritten version, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, and then expanded it for publication in 1865. A sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, followed in 1871.

The book is one of the most widely read children’s stories in English and has never been out of print. Its lasting hold comes from a combination that is hard to imitate: a plain, calm heroine moving through a world of talking animals and arbitrary rules, told in prose that is funny on the surface and oddly logical underneath. Adults tend to notice the logic; children tend to notice the fun.

The story

Alice, bored beside her sister on a riverbank, sees a White Rabbit with a pocket watch hurry past and follows it down a rabbit hole. She lands in a hall of locked doors and spends much of the book growing and shrinking as she eats and drinks whatever she finds. Along the way she meets a Caterpillar smoking a hookah, a Duchess with a pig for a baby, the grinning Cheshire Cat, and the Hatter and March Hare at a tea party that never ends.

The story closes with a croquet game played with flamingos and hedgehogs and a trial presided over by the King and Queen of Hearts. The episodes are loosely linked rather than plotted, which suits the book’s dream logic.

Themes and historical context

Dodgson was a logician, and the book’s nonsense is often built on logical and linguistic tricks: words taken literally, syllogisms run backward, rules invented on the spot and enforced with great seriousness. Many of the poems are parodies of improving verses that Victorian children were made to memorize, and part of the original joke was watching those pious lessons collapse into absurdity.

The book also sits inside a particular moment in the history of children’s literature. Mid-Victorian writing for children was expected to instruct. Carroll’s story has no moral and openly mocks the adults who try to impose one, which was unusual in 1865 and helped change what children’s books could be.

John Tenniel’s illustrations for the first edition have become inseparable from the text and have shaped how nearly every later illustrator and filmmaker has pictured Alice and Wonderland. The book has been translated into well over a hundred languages, a feat given how much of its humor depends on English wordplay.

Who should read it

This is a short book, about 27,000 words in twelve chapters, and it reads quickly. The language is simple, with occasional Victorian turns of phrase, and the chapters are self-contained enough to read aloud one at a time. It suits children of about seven and up, adults who have only encountered Alice through adaptations, and readers who like puzzles and puns. Those who want a conventional plot with stakes may find it aimless; that is the point.

Edition notes

Project Gutenberg #11 was prepared by Arthur DiBianca and David Widger. It contains the full English text of the 1865 book, not the shorter manuscript version, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.