Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass [Paperback]

In 1862 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a shy Oxford mathematician with a stammer, created a story about a little girl tumbling down a rabbit hole. Thus began the immortal adventures of Alice, perhaps the most popular heroine in English literature.

Countless scholars have tried to define the charm of theAlicebooks—with those wonderfully eccentric characters the Queen of Hearts, Tweedledum, and Tweedledee, the Cheshire Cat, Mock Turtle, the Mad Hatteret al.—by proclaiming that they really comprise a satire on language, a political allegory, a parody of Victorian children’s literature, even a reflection of contemporary ecclesiastical history.

Perhaps, as Dodgson might have said,Aliceis no more than a dream, a fairy tale about the trials and tribulations of growing up—or down, or all turned round—as seen through the expert eyes of a child.“Only Lewis Carroll has shown us the world upside down as a child sees it, and has made us laugh as children laugh.” —Virginia Woolf“Lewis Carroll,” creator of the brilliantly wittyAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was a pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a shy Oxford don with a stammer.

He was born at Daresbury, Cheshire on January 27, 1832, son of a vicar. As the eldest boy among eleven children, he learned early to amuse his siblings by writing and editing family magazines. He was educated at Christ Church College, Oxford, where he lectured in mathematics from1855 to 1881. In 1861 he was ordained as a deacon.

Dodgson’s entry into the world of fiction was accidental. It happened one “golden afternoon” as he escorted his colleague’s three daughters on a trip up the river Isis. There he invented the story that might have been forgotten if not for the persistence of the youngest girl, Alice Liddell. Thanks to her, and to her encouraging friends,Alicewas published ls4