About Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

By Lewis Carroll · first published in 1865 · Children's

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland started as a story told aloud. On a July afternoon in 1862 Charles Dodgson, a shy mathematics lecturer at Oxford, took the three young Liddell sisters rowing on the Thames and made up a tale to keep them entertained. Ten-year-old Alice Liddell asked him to write it down. Three years later it was published under the pen name Lewis Carroll.

What makes the book different from the children’s stories that came before it is that it has no lesson to teach. Alice falls down a rabbit hole into a world that runs on its own stubborn logic. She grows and shrinks, swims in a pool of her own tears, attends a tea party that never ends and is put on trial by a pack of playing cards. Everyone she meets is rude, sure of themselves and impossible to argue with, which is very much how adults can look to a child.

Carroll filled the story with puns, riddles and parodies of the poems Victorian children had to learn by heart. Adults find as much in it as children do. This preview covers most of the first chapter, from the riverbank to the golden key and the little bottle marked DRINK ME.