alice's adventures in wonderland by lewis carroll

Photograph: AlamyĪs well as the enchantment of Carroll's prose, both volumes of Alice contain numerous songs and poems, many of them parodies of popular Victorian originals, which have passed into folklore, like Alice herself: You Are Old, Father William The Lobster Quadrille Beautiful Soup and (from Through the Looking-Glass) Jabberwocky The Walrus and the Carpenter and The White Knight's Song.įinally, for 21st-century readers, it is now almost obligatory to point out that these books are pre-Freudian, with a strange, bruised innocence whose self-interrogations also evoke the tormented banality of psychoanalysis.

Together these two short books ( Wonderland is barely 28,000 words long) became two of the most quoted and best-loved volumes in the English canon.Īlice encounters the caterpillar in another Tenniel illustration. A second volume about Alice ( Through the Looking-Glass) followed in 1871. It is said that among the first avid readers of Alice were Queen Victoria and the young Oscar Wilde. Just three years later, extended, revised, and retitled Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, now credited to a pseudonymous Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (its popular title) was about to become the publishing sensation of Christmas 1865. This well-known story marks the beginning of perhaps the greatest, possibly most influential, and certainly the most world-famous Victorian English fiction, a book that hovers between a nonsense tale and an elaborate in-joke. The weather for this trip was reportedly 'overcast', but those on board would remember it as 'a golden afternoon'.

Wordplay, logical conundrums, parody and riddles: Dodgson surpassed himself, and the girls were enchanted by the nonsense dreamworld he conjured up. On the way, to entertain his passengers, who included a 10-year-old named Alice, with whom he was strangely infatuated, Dodgson began to improvise the 'Adventures Under Ground' of a bored young girl, also named Alice. O n 4 July 1862, a shy young Oxford mathematics don with a taste for puzzles and whimsy named Charles Dodgson rowed the three daughters of Henry Liddell, dean of Christ Church, five miles up the Thames to Godstow.

Alice's adventures in wonderland by lewis carroll