Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published in London in November 1865 by Macmillan, with 42 illustrations by John Tenniel. The author is Lewis Carroll, the pen name of Charles Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. In the story a girl named Alice follows a White Rabbit down a hole and meets the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts and a Caterpillar, in a world where logic and language behave strangely. A sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, followed in 1871.¹³

Dodgson first told the tale on 4 July 1862, on a boat trip on the Thames near Oxford with the three daughters of Henry Liddell, the Dean of Christ Church, one of whom was ten-year-old Alice. He wrote it out as a gift for her, and friends urged him to publish it. Earlier children's books had mostly been moralizing, but Carroll mocked the poems that children were forced to memorize and the adult world's rules. The first printing of 2,000 copies was withdrawn because Tenniel was unhappy with the print quality, and a second printing appeared in December 1865.²

The book was a quick success and has never been out of print. It has been translated into more than 100 languages, and it is one of the most quoted books in English. Its wordplay and logic appealed to mathematicians and philosophers, and its images, such as the tea party and the grinning cat, have been used by painters, filmmakers, psychologists and advertisers.³