Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

• 1. Introduction

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  Alice's Adventures in Wonderland began not on a page, but on a river. On the 4th of July 1862, Lewis Carroll and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed up the river Isis with three girls: Lorina, Alice, and Edith Liddell, daughters of Carroll's friend Henry Liddell. Somewhere between Folly Bridge in Oxford and the village of Godstow, Carroll spun a tale that Alice Liddell liked enough to ask him to write down. She waited more than two years for the manuscript.

  What Carroll eventually published in 1865 was roughly twice the length of what he had told that afternoon. It contained a world where hedgehogs served as croquet balls, clocks were frozen at tea time, and a queen ordered beheadings with the casual frequency of someone swatting flies. And yet the book was not merely a fantasy for children. It was a linguistic puzzle, a satire of Victorian manners, and, some scholars argue, a pointed attack on the direction of mid-nineteenth-century mathematics.

  The novel has never gone out of print. It has been translated into 174 languages. Its illustrations, its characters, and even its heroine's blue dress have become fixed points in the global imagination. How a story improvised on a boat became one of the most influential works in the English language is a journey worth tracing in full.

• 2. The Golden Afternoon

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  Carroll had known the Liddell children since around March 1856, when he first befriended their brother Harry. By June of that year, he was taking the children out on the river. His diary records the story he told on the 4th of July as "Alice's Adventures Under Ground", and Alice Liddell herself recalled asking him to write it down specifically because, unlike other stories he had shared with her, this one she wanted to keep.

  The day has since been called the "golden afternoon", a phrase Carroll used in a prefatory poem to the published novel. The actual weather around Oxford that day was, records suggest, cool and rather wet. Scholars continue to debate whether Carroll conceived the whole story during that single outing or developed it gradually over a longer span of time.

  Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, who wrote a literary biography of Carroll, has suggested that Carroll was drawn to Alice Pleasance Liddell in particular because her name was ripe for allusion. "Pleasance" carries the meaning of pleasure, and the name Alice was already circulating in contemporary literary works. Carroll, an amateur photographer by the late 1850s, produced photographic portraits of all the Liddell children, though of Alice alone, twenty portraits survive.

  On the 26th of November 1864, Carroll presented Alice Liddell with the handwritten manuscript, illustrating it himself and dedicating it as "A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer's Day". The only known copy of that manuscript is now held in the British Library.

• 3. From Manuscript to Book

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  Carroll began writing the story the day after the river trip, though that earliest version has been lost. The manuscript he eventually gave Alice Liddell contained 37 of his own illustrations. When he decided to pursue publication, he was advised to find a professional illustrator, and he approached John Tenniel, a cartoonist known for his work in the magazine Punch.

  Carroll first met the London publisher Alexander Macmillan on the 19th of October 1863. Macmillan's firm had published The Water-Babies, another children's fantasy, earlier that same year, and suggested its design as a template for Alice. Carroll financed the initial print run himself, which gave him unusual editorial authority, allowing him to manage typesetting and engage illustrators and translators directly.

  Two thousand copies were printed by July 1865. Tenniel found the printing quality unsatisfactory, and Carroll halted publication at his request. In August, Carroll engaged a new printer, Richard Clay, for a second run of 2,000 copies. The reprint cost Carroll 600 pounds, entirely out of his own pocket. He received the first copy of Clay's edition on the 9th of November 1865.

  The original print run was either destroyed or sold to the American publishing house D. Appleton and Company in New York. Carroll requested that the new edition be bound in red, which he considered appealing to young readers. A Christmas-market edition was rushed out in December 1865, carrying an 1866 date. The entire run sold quickly. Oscar Wilde was among the book's admirers; Queen Victoria reportedly enjoyed it so much that she asked for Carroll's next book, which turned out to be a mathematical treatise. Carroll denied this story.

• 4. Tenniel's Defining Drawings

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  John Tenniel provided 42 wood-engraved illustrations for the published edition, and they remain, as critics and publishers have long agreed, the definitive visual interpretation of the characters. Carroll's text was often light on description, so Tenniel invented characterisations drawing from fine art, natural history, heraldry, caricature, and his own previous work for Punch. The finished drawings were carved into woodblocks by engravers, and electrotype copies were then made for printing.

  Tenniel's Alice does not resemble the real Alice Liddell, who had dark hair and a short fringe. The blonde Alice with whom the world is familiar was a deliberate artistic choice. In 1911, an artist named Harry Theaker, working with Tenniel's approval, coloured sixteen of Tenniel's plates for a new edition. Theaker gave Alice a blue dress, and it has remained blue in the popular imagination ever since.

  Over the following century, dozens of illustrators tried their hand at the material. Arthur Rackham took the challenge in 1907. Salvador Dali brought his surrealist eye to it in 1969. Tove Jansson, Max Ernst, Ralph Steadman, and Helen Oxenbury all produced editions. To mark the 200th anniversary of Tenniel's birth, the artist Chris Riddell provided illustrations for a new edition in 2020.

  Of the original 1865 edition, only 22 known copies are thought to survive. In 1998, Carroll's own copy of the 1865 first edition, one of only six known surviving copies, was sold at auction for US$1.54 million to an anonymous American buyer, making it at that point the most expensive children's book and nineteenth-century work of literature ever sold.

• 5. Hidden Figures in Wonderland

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  Martin Gardner's 1960 publication The Annotated Alice drew wide attention to the layers of biographical and political encoding buried in Carroll's characters. The members of the boating party that first heard the story on the Isis appear in chapter three. Carroll himself is caricatured as the Dodo: his pen name concealed his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and because he stuttered when speaking, he sometimes rendered it as "Dodo-Dodgson". Robinson Duckworth appears as the Duck. Alice Liddell's sisters Lorina and Edith become the Lory and the Eaglet.

  The Dormouse tells a story about three sisters named Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie. These are the Liddell sisters encoded again: Elsie represents the initials L.C. for Lorina Charlotte; Tillie is Edith, whose family nickname was Matilda; and Lacie is an anagram of Alice.

  Gardner suggested that the Mad Hatter was modelled on Theophilus Carter, an Oxford furniture dealer, and that Tenniel drew the character to resemble Carter on Carroll's suggestion. Bill the Lizard may carry a political joke at the expense of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli; Tenniel's illustrations in the 1871 sequel Through the Looking-Glass include a character drawn as a recognisable caricature of Disraeli in a paper hat.

  The Mock Turtle's reference to a drawling-master who came once a week to teach "Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils" points directly to the art critic John Ruskin. Ruskin visited the Liddell household weekly to teach the children to draw, sketch, and paint in oils. The song the Mock Turtle sings is a parody of a song the Liddell children performed for Carroll himself.

• 6. Language, Logic, and Nonsense

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  Carroll held a position as a mathematician at Christ Church, Oxford, and some literary scholars have read his playfulness with rules and paradoxes as a product of that training. Melanie Bayley, writing in New Scientist, argued that Carroll wrote the final version of Alice as a satire on mid-nineteenth-century mathematics, particularly the non-Euclidean geometry then coming into fashion.

  The linguist Gillian Beer has described Carroll's language play as evoking the feeling of words for new readers, a state where words "still have insecure edges and a nimbus of nonsense blurs the sharp focus of terms". The cross-language pun in Pat's remark about "digging for apples" illustrates the point: pomme de terre, French for potato, translates literally as "apple of the earth", while pomme alone means apple.

  Alice's attempt to address a mouse as "O Mouse" in chapter two rests on her memory of Latin noun declensions from her brother's grammar book. Her recitation covers five of Latin's six cases. The sixth case, the ablative, is absent from her recitation, and one reading connects this gap to the work of her father Henry Liddell, who co-authored the standard A Greek-English Lexicon; ancient Greek, unlike Latin, has no ablative case.

  The riddle posed at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, "Why is a raven like a writing desk?", goes famously unanswered. One proposed solution, offered by the scholar Boe Birns, suggests that a raven eats worms while a writing desk is worm-eaten, a grim image of mortality folded inside a nonsense puzzle that Carroll never intended to resolve.

• 7. Reshaping Children's Literature

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  F. J. Harvey Darton argued in a 1932 book that Alice brought an era of didacticism in children's writing to a close, opening a new phase in which the goal was to "delight or entertain" rather than to instruct. A 2020 review in Time framed the book's impact in terms of the writers it influenced: James Joyce, Douglas Adams, and Dr. Seuss were all named as heirs to its nonsense tradition.

  Joe Sommerlad, writing in The Independent, traced a specific debt from Roald Dahl back to the "Drink Me" episode: in Dahl's George's Marvellous Medicine, a grandmother drinks a potion and expands to the size of a farmhouse, an image that directly echoes Alice's size-changing ordeals. In 2014, the critic Robert McCrum called Alice "perhaps the greatest, possibly most influential, and certainly the most world-famous Victorian English fiction".

  The book entered the public domain in the United Kingdom in 1907, forty-two years after publication and about nine years after Carroll died in January 1898. Once freely available, adaptations multiplied. The first screen adaptation, a British silent film, was released in 1903. John Lennon attributed the fantastical imagery of the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" to his reading of Carroll's work. The Argentine prog-rock band Seru Giran used Alice as a metaphor for the political climate in Argentina during the 1970s.

  The book's copyright expiry also opened the door to the long parade of stage versions. The first major theatrical production, a musical play by Henry Savile Clarke and Walter Slaughter, premiered at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London in 1886. Carroll attended a performance on the 30th of December 1886 and wrote in his diary that he enjoyed it. He had personally selected twelve-year-old actress Phoebe Carlo to play Alice.

• 8. Legacy in Stone and Coin

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  A memorial fund established in 1932 to mark the centenary of Carroll's birth led to a set of stained glass windows depicting Wonderland characters at his hometown church, All Saints', in Daresbury, Cheshire. The windows were dedicated in 1935. Warrington, also in Cheshire, holds a granite sculpture called The Mad Hatter's Tea Party.

  The Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, New York, and a counterpart in Rymill Park in Adelaide, Australia, extend the commemorative reach across two continents. In 2015, the Royal Mail marked the 150th anniversary of the book's publication with a series of UK postage stamps featuring Alice characters.

  The original manuscript that Carroll gave to Alice Liddell had its own long afterlife. In 1928, it was sold at Sotheby's in London on the 3rd of April, fetching 15,400 pounds paid by Philip Rosenbach of Philadelphia. The price set a world record for a manuscript sale at the time. Rosenbach later presented it to the British Library as a gesture of appreciation for Britain's role in two World Wars, and that is where it remains.

  In 2009, children's book collector and former American football player Pat McInally sold Alice Liddell's own personal copy of the published book at auction for US$115,000. In 2021, the Royal Mint issued its first Alice's Adventures in Wonderland commemorative coin collection, including a five-pound coin featuring Alice and the Cheshire Cat drawn from Tenniel's original illustration. A story improvised on a wet afternoon in 1862 had, by then, become currency in the most literal sense.