Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

On 4 July 1862 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, rowed up the Isis from Folly Bridge to Godstow with his colleague Robinson Duckworth and the three young daughters of the Dean — Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddell — and told a story to fill the afternoon. Alice, who was ten, asked him to write it down. He did so slowly, in his own small hand and with his own drawings, and gave her the manuscript, called Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, in November 1864. Encouraged to publish, he nearly doubled it, adding among other things the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Tea-Party, and Macmillan brought it out in 1865 under the name Lewis Carroll — a pen name he had made in 1856 by turning Charles Lutwidge into Latin and back again — with forty-two illustrations by John Tenniel. The first printing of two thousand was recalled almost at once because Tenniel was dissatisfied with the way his pictures had come out; the sheets were sold off to a New York publisher, and the edition English readers actually bought carries the date 1866.

The book is usually called nonsense, which is right if nonsense is understood as the opposite of randomness. It is a mathematician’s book, and its comedy is nearly always the comedy of a rule enforced without regard to sense: a race in which everybody wins, a tea-party at which time has stopped so that the only remedy is to move round the table, a Mock Turtle’s curriculum of Reeling and Writhing, a trial conducted with perfect procedure and no evidence. The verses are parodies, and Victorian children knew the originals by heart because they had been made to learn them — Isaac Watts’s industrious bee becomes a crocodile, Robert Southey’s old man becomes Father William. Against all of it stands Alice: literal, obstinately polite, and willing to argue with a duchess, a caterpillar and a queen.

It has no moral, and in 1865 that was the point; children’s books until then had had almost nothing else. Read it aloud if you can. The jokes are in the timing, and it was made to be spoken before it was ever written down.

This edition gives the complete text in its twelve chapters, with the parodies set where Carroll placed them, typeset by Bibliomancer. Tenniel’s illustrations, which belonged to the book from the beginning, are not reproduced here; what follows is Carroll’s text alone.