“Begin at the beginning...and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” — the King, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland .
This is what you will end up doing when you pick up a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland . With characters as wild and outlandish as the White Rabbit in a waistcoat, the Mad Hatter, the smoking Caterpillar, and the Card Soldiers who are the loyal servants of the Queen of Hearts, the book will keep you hooked from page one as it did the kids who read it almost a century-and-half ago.
Summertime story
In the summer of 1862, the author Lewis Carroll was out on a boating trip up the river Thames, in London, with 10-year-old Alice Liddell and her sisters. Alice was the youngest daughter of Henry Liddell, the dean of Christ Church College at Oxford, where Carroll taught math.
When the sisters demanded a story, Carroll made one up about a girl named Alice and her adventures. In the story, Alice falls into a rabbit hole and stumbles upon Wonderland. There, she meets unusual characters and situations so bizarre that at one point, she tells the Caterpillar, “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”
With each narration, new characters, plots and twists were added. Alice loved the story so much that she asked Carroll to write it down for her. He obliged, and even illustrated the manuscript, and presented it to her in November 1864. He called the story Alice’s Adventures Under Ground . He included a dedication to her: “A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer’s Day”.
Encouraged by the response from Alice and his friend’s children to his story, Carroll set out to get the story published commercially. Before sending it out for publication, he added more episodes about the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Tea-Party, expanding the story from 15,500 to 27,500 words.
The book was finally published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on November 26, 1865, and was illustrated by John Tenniel.
At a time when children’s books obsessively focussed on preaching morals, Carroll’s book — with its nonsensical plot, focussed solely on entertaining — came as a breath of fresh air. Since then, the book has never been out of print!
Wonders of Wonderland
The other titles considered for the book were Alice’s Hour in Elfland and Alice Among the Fairies .
England’s Queen Victoria loved the book so much that she asked Carroll to dedicate his next book to her. And he did. Only it was An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Equations !
Dormouse, in the book, tells a story of three girls whose names are Elsie, Lacie and Tillie. The names refer to the three Liddell sisters.
In 1890, Carroll released a shortened version of the book for smaller children aged “from nought to five”.
The book’s sequel, Through the Looking-Glass,andWhat Alice Found There , sold out within seven weeks of its publication.
