Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
Summary
Alice, bored on a riverbank on a warm afternoon, follows a White Rabbit anxiously checking a pocket watch down a rabbit hole and falls into Wonderland, a world governed by nonsense logic rather than the rules she knows. She grows and shrinks according to whatever cake or bottle she happens to eat or drink, exclaiming to herself at one point, after growing suddenly too tall for the room she is standing in, that things are getting "curiouser and curiouser." She talks philosophy with a hookah smoking Caterpillar perched on a mushroom, visits a Duchess whose kitchen is presided over by a grinning, disappearing Cheshire Cat who tells her plainly that everyone she is likely to meet here is mad, including Alice herself, and joins a Mad Hatter and a March Hare at a tea party stuck permanently at six o'clock, a punishment inflicted by an offended personification of Time. The story builds toward the court of the Queen of Hearts, a tyrant who punishes any inconvenience, real or imagined, with the same furious order to "off with their heads," and Alice's own trial there, staged as a chaotic parody of English legal procedure, ends only when Alice, having grown back to her full size, declares the whole court "nothing but a pack of cards" and wakes to find herself back on the riverbank, the entire adventure a dream.
Carroll first told the story aloud on a boat trip up the Thames on 4 July 1862 to entertain Alice Liddell and her sisters, and wrote it out afterward as an illustrated manuscript titled Alice's Adventures Under Ground, given to Alice as a Christmas present in 1864 before he expanded it for publication. The book has none of the moralising typical of children's literature at the time, and its pleasure lies almost entirely in language play, invented logic, and a heroine who stays sensibly skeptical even as everyone around her insists nonsense is normal.
Macmillan published the expanded book in November 1865 with forty two wood engraved illustrations by John Tenniel, whose images of Alice, the Rabbit, and the Hatter have shaped how the characters are pictured ever since.
Historical Context & Significance
Contemporary reaction called the book, in one period description, "exquisitely wild, fantastic, impossible," and the Victorian writer Walter Besant predicted it would belong to every generation that followed, a prediction later readers have had little reason to dispute. It has never gone out of print and has been translated into more than 170 languages.
Carroll's refusal of Victorian children's literature's usual moral instruction, choosing pure invention and wordplay instead, is widely credited with changing what English language children's books were allowed to be, and its influence runs forward through writers as different as James Joyce and Dr Seuss. Wonderland has generated an enormous body of adaptation since its first screen version in 1903, spanning theatre, ballet, opera, and repeated film versions, and Alice herself has become one of the most reproduced characters in English literature.