Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

By Lewis Carroll

With an Introduction and Notes by Michael Irwin, Professor of English Literature, University of Kent at Canterbury

This selection of Carroll's works includes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, both containing the famous illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. No greater books for children have ever been written. The simple language, dreamlike atmosphere, and fantastical characters are as appealing to young readers today as ever they were.

Meanwhile, however, these apparently simple stories have become recognised as adult masterpieces, and extraordinary experiments, years ahead of their time, in Modernism and Surrealism. Through wordplay, parody and logical and philosophical puzzles, Carroll engenders a variety of sub-texts, teasing, ominous or melancholy. For all the surface playfulness there is meaning everywhere. The author reveals himself in glimpses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Oct 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781848703889

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, in 1871. Considered a master of the genre of literary nonsense, he is renowned for his ingenious wordplay and sense of logic, and his highly original vision.

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Contents

General Introduction

Introduction

Further Reading

Alice in Wonderland

Author’s Note

Chapter One: Down the Rabbit-Hole

Chapter Two: The Pool of Tears

Chapter Three: A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale

Chapter Four: The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill

Chapter Five: Advice from a Caterpillar

Chapter Six: Pig and Pepper

Chapter Seven: A Mad Tea-Party

Chapter Eight: The Queen’s Croquet Ground

Chapter Nine: The Mock Turtle’s Story

Chapter Ten: The Lobster Quadrille

Chapter Eleven: Who Stole the Tarts?

Chapter Twelve: Alice’s Evidence

Through the Looking Glass

Dramatis Personae

Preface

Chapter One: Looking-Glass House

Chapter Two: The Garden of Live Flowers

Chapter Three: Looking-Glass Insects

Chapter Four: Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Chapter Five: Wool and Water

Chapter Six: Humpty Dumpty

Chapter Seven: The Lion and the Unicorn

Chapter Eight: ‘It’s My Own Invention’

Chapter Nine: Queen Alice

Chapter Ten: Shaking

Chapter Eleven: Waking

Chapter Twelve: Which Dreamed It?

An Easter Greeting to every child who loves Alice

Christmas Greetings from a fairy to a child

General Introduction

Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

General Adviser

Keith Carabine

Rutherford College

University of Kent at Canterbury

Introduction

The book in your hands is the most accessible of all literary masterpieces, and one of the strangest. A number of books for children, including Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows and A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, have a charm and humour which can survive for the adult reader, partly for the sake of old association, partly in their own right. The Alice books far transcend that category. They are major works at either level. For a child there could hardly be a better, more effortless, introduction to great literature. Here, in simple English, are fast-moving, funny, fantastical stories which repeatedly break out into riddles, puzzles and rhymes. They instantly entertain, yet everywhere seem to offer more than meets the eye, more than can be readily explained. For any intelligent child they leave an aftertaste: they have somehow hinted at new worlds of communication and experience. For the adult these are likewise entertaining works, diversified with paradox and parody, but also astonishing exercises in literary premonition, anticipating, and shedding light on, the work of some of the greatest twentieth-century writers, both in prose and in verse.

It has become academically fashionable to claim that these are children’s books no longer read by children. I cannot see why this should be the case, unless parents have lost their nerve. The historical and cultural impediments are of the trivial kind that an imaginative child can negotiate with ease – a few background details, three or four passages of an unfamiliar kind of sentimentality. The first ten minutes of the film Jurassic Park, a notorious recent child-pleaser, are far more bewildering than anything in Alice. Young readers, like young viewers, are perfectly capable of hanging on through obscurities till the story clarifies. They should be given the chance.

My suspicion is that this view has emerged not in acknowledgement of the complaints of bored young readers but as a consequence of the extent to which the Alice books have been academicised. As hinted above, they have rightly come to be seen as major proto-Modernist texts, pre­figuring and influencing the work of Joyce, Eliot, Kafka and Nabokov, among others. Carroll deals in philosophical and linguistic problems and sophisticated parody, all calling for explanation. Because he chooses to take his heroine into an enigmatic and sometimes dangerous dream-world his work has also been the subject of much Freudian analysis, sensitive to holes and fluids, shrinkages and dilations. For these and yet other reasons the books have attracted copious learned commentary, now brilliantly and entertainingly condensed in Martin Gardner’s various versions of The Annotated Alice. How, some drier academic might ask, could poor puzzled children possibly take account of all this heavy ‘significance’? Let them stick to Harry Potter and Roald Dahl and leave Carroll to the scholars.

That position is, however, reversible – and should be reversed. The two stories, and more especially Alice in Wonderland, were specifically told for the delight of par­ticular children. There is no suggestion that Carroll was covertly writing for an older audience. The only adult he perhaps had it in mind to please and divert was himself. Two interrelated questions would therefore seem to emerge. What was it about the author and the circumstances of composition that gave rise to this multiplication of meaning and suggestion, and this uncanny foretaste of Modernism? Conversely, what is there in the nature of Modernism, an innately self-conscious and intellectual literary movement, that made it possible for an obscure cleric to produce, as though by accident, two masterpieces in that mode, when his starting-point was simply an attempt to improvise a beguiling tale for three small children?

i

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, only much later to be known as Lewis Carroll, was born in Cheshire on 27 January 1832. Lutwidge was his mother’s maiden name. His father, Charles Dodgson, was curate of Daresbury, a small village seven miles from Warrington. The younger Charles grew up in an isolated parsonage, the third of eleven children, most of them girls, in a close-knit family. His father, a serious, devout and scholarly man – a mathematician – had none the less an agreeable taste for anarchic nonsense. Once, when travelling to Leeds, he was asked by his eight-year old son to bring him back a file, a screwdriver and a ring. He responded in a letter:

As soon as I get to Leeds I shall scream out in the middle of the street, Ironmongers – Iron-mongers [ . . . ]. I will have a file & a screwdriver, & a ring, & if they are not brought directly, in forty seconds I will leave nothing but one small cat alive in the whole town of Leeds, & I shall only leave that, because I am afraid I shall not have time to kill it.

Then what a bawling & a tearing of hair there will be! Pigs & babies, camels & butterflies, rolling in the gutter together – old women rushing up the chimneys & cows after them – ducks hiding themselves in coffee-cups, & fat geese trying to squeeze themselves into pencil cases . . .

Here is something of the surrealist extravagance of the Alice books. The younger Charles would happily adopt that manic strain – pigs, babies, chimneys and all. His mother, to whom he was devoted, seems to have been an exceptional woman, widely admired and loved. He himself was very much at the centre of family life, writing poems and sketches, performing conjuring tricks and building a marionette theatre for the entertainment of his sisters. Many commentators have darkly speculated as to what went wrong in Dodgson’s life, as though his creative work was only to be accounted for by childhood misery or psychological impediment. He did have problems – some deafness in one ear and a nervous stammer – but these seem to have been relatively minor disabilities. The prior question, surely, is what went right. A large part of the answer must be that he had an extremely happy childhood that nurtured his diverse talents, encouraged his natural taste for humour and fantasy, and accustomed him to entertaining small children.

His less happy experiences came later. He seems not greatly to have enjoyed Rugby School, where he was for some years a boarder, perhaps finding it too boisterous and invasive after the security of home. A much worse shock was to come. He went up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1851, but within days received news of the sudden death of his mother, an event surely traumatic for him, as for the whole family.

At this point, where most biographical sketches would just be getting into their stride, the story of Dodgson, at least in terms of personal drama and external happenings, would almost seem to start winding down. He lived a quiet life as a student, and having prospered sufficiently in his studies was kept on at Christ Church as Mathematical Lecturer. In Oxford he proceeded to remain, a reclusive bachelor don, ordained as a deacon of the Church of England in 1861. His pursuits were largely private ones, reading, writing, photo­graphy, games, puzzles, small in­ventions. What joy there was in his life came chiefly from his friendships with small girls. The claim is no mere guess: Dodgson kept a diary in which he repeatedly recorded as red-letter days – in his own terminology: ‘marked with a white stone’ – those which he had spent with children, escorting them on small expeditions, telling them stories, perhaps taking photographs. He was in his element as an adopted uncle: there is endless evidence that children loved his company. In his professional life as teacher and mathematician he was competent but apparently unremarkable. He became a notable figure only through the fame of the Alice books – and these were by ‘Lewis Carroll’, an alter ego he was careful to distance from his academic and religious self.

Christ Church was, however, their immediate, if indirect, source. As a young don Dodgson was a photographer of very considerable accomplishment – at a time, of course, when the art was in its infancy, and a camera still a source of wonder. A by-product of this talent, and a delightful one from Dodgson’s point of view, was that it created ready contacts with children. His portraits of small girls were particularly striking and soon attracted attention, oddly combining innocence with unconscious eroticism. What would seem to us a notable ambiguity was presumably less evident to the Victorian eye. Certainly many an Oxford mother would have been only too delighted to see the beauty of a small daughter permanently captured by this brand new art form.

Among the children to whom he thus gained access were those of Henry George Liddell, who had become Dean of Christ Church in 1855. There were four of them, a son, Harry, and three daughters, Lorina, Alice and Edith. With all of them, but most notably with Alice, he struck up an intimate relationship. He photographed them repeatedly, and entertained them with stories, riddles and games. A favourite diversion was a trip along the river in a rowing boat culminating in a picnic. It was on one such trip, on 4 July 1862, that Dodgson improvised the story that was to become Alice in Wonderland. Alice was then ten years old. At her own request he wrote it out within a day or two, adding ‘fresh ideas’, but the finished booklet, entitled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, and illustrated with the author’s own lively drawings, was not presented to her until the Christmas of 1864.

By this time, encouraged by friends who had read the manuscript, Dodgson had already decided to try to publish his story. Further expanded, and with illustrations by the artist and cartoonist John Tenniel, it appeared in 1865 under the new title Alice in Wonderland. The author’s name was given as ‘Lewis Carroll’, a pseudonym Dodgson had used before, a reversed version of ‘Charles Lutwidge’. His book was an immediate critical and popular success.

Within a year he was contemplating a sequel, but it took him some years to complete the undertaking. There were also difficulties in finding an illustrator. Tenniel initially refused the commission, and even at the last changed his mind only reluctantly, after several notable artists had turned it down. Through the Looking-Glass was eventually published in time for the Christmas market in 1871. Once more ‘Lewis Carroll’ enjoyed instant acclaim.

Since that time, as Dodgson’s biographer Morton N. Cohen points out, neither Alice book has ever gone out of print. [1] They have become an international phenomenon, translated into more than seventy languages. Various of the characters have passed into the public consciousness: everyone knows of the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and the White Knight. Text and illustrations have provided a twin source of metaphor for writers, speech-makers and cartoonists. Many of Dodgson’s phrases have become proverbial: ‘Curiouser and curiouser’; ‘Everybody has won, and all must have prizes’; ‘Off with his head!’ His invented verb ‘to chortle’ has entered the language. Somehow this shy man accomplished infinitely more than he had set out to do. While the forward-looking novelists of his day, post-realists such as Hardy and James, were writing large books in pursuit of new objectives as yet not clearly in view, Carroll implausibly achieved still greater novelty through chancing on an accidental short-cut. If those writers dealt with relationships and emotional intensities on the one hand, yet with ‘ideas’ and new techniques on the other, so, in his own way, did Carroll.

ii

Both the Alice books are located in a dream-world. Alice falls asleep and finds herself confronting, and conversing with, transformed elements from her normal life – a mouse, a playing-card, a Frog-Footman, a chess piece, a gnat. The mode produces interesting by-products. For example there is an immense gain in the area of tempo: the books move with exhilarating speed. Exposition is unnecessary since little is explicable, and the absence of ordinary narrative logic means that transitions may be instantaneous. Carroll can cross-cut like a film director. This confusing realm is full of surprises – flowers speak, a caterpillar smokes a hookah, a goat and a beetle travel by train. There is instability everywhere: the Knights fall off their horses, the Cheshire Cat appears and disappears, a baby turns into a pig, the Butterfly is transmogrified into the Bread-and-butter fly. Alice herself repeatedly changes size. Any of the creatures she meets may prove friendly, touchy, patronising or threatening. Her own abilities and feelings are put to unexpected tests. She proceeds warily through this alien world, not knowing the rules by which it operates. Carroll has hit on a whole new sphere of operations for the story-teller. Alice’s adventures prepare the ground for those of Bloom and Stephen in the ‘Circe’ episode in Joyce’s Ulysses, or of Kafka’s K. in The Trial. The transformations she witnesses and experiences point forward to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which famously begins: ‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.’ [2]

Carroll also shares with Joyce an obsessive interest in the oddities and limitations and potentialities of the very words through which he creates his narrative. The numerous puns in Alice books are only the most obvious symptoms of this interest, suddenly swinging disparate ideas into unlikely contiguity. He regularly interrogates what he writes. No sooner has the Mouse said that ‘the patriotic Archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable – ’ than the Duck interrupts with the awkward question ‘Found what?’ (p. 53) Alice is brought up short when invited to consider what a ‘muchness’ might be, as in the phrase ‘much of a muchness’ (p. 97). The Mock Turtle is actually conjured into uncertain existence from a wilful misreading of ‘Mock Turtle Soup’. ‘Jabberwocky’ is an interesting extended exercise in communicative possibilities. At a first reading Alice ‘couldn’t make it out at all’, but reflects ‘ "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate – " ’ (p. 169). With Humpty Dumpty’s help, however, she makes great strides in comprehension, as does the reader. The explanation that ‘slithy’ is ‘like a portmanteau’ in comprehending the two words ‘lithe and slimy’ (p. 225) harks forward to a favourite technique of James Joyce. ‘Jabber­wocky’ reminds us that we can apprehend meaning of sorts merely from implied syntactical structures and from verbal association.

Carroll anticipates both Joyce and Eliot in his dense cross-referencing to earlier writings, particularly in verse. What we would now call his ‘inter-textuality’ works in diverse ways. His various nursery-rhyme characters multiply the surrealistic possibilities, demonstrating that not only Alice’s daily doings but also her imaginative life are to be constituent elements in her dream. The Mother Goose stories are pre-emptive in that the protagonists move in the shadow of predestination: the Queen of Hearts will have her tarts stolen, the Tweedle brothers must in­evitably fight, as must the Lion and the Unicorn; Humpty Dumpty is doomed to tumble to destruction. The frequent parodies that Carroll includes would seem to have a number of functions. Several of the originals were ‘improving’ works for the young. Carroll’s absurdist, blackly humorous transcriptions both mock the pietism concerned and suggest that it was likely to have fallen on deaf ears. But in a peculiar way those very poems achieve a shadowy presence in his text, lurking behind the burlesque versions. Eliot and Joyce, of course, incorporate constant allusions to earlier writings, and Joyce deals generously in parody and pastiche – most obviously in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses. For their more serious purposes both authors assert, as Carroll does, the dependence, positive and negative, of their work on the literature of the past. Nabokov, who as a young man translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian, compounds the complexities with direct references to Carroll. The poem which constitutes the main substance of Pale Fire begins with a version of looking-glass penetration. A bird dies when dashed against a pane of glass whose mirror-like surface has seemed to it to be a continuation of the sky:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the window-pane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff – and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

The title Through the Looking-Glass signals to readers that they should look for reflections of the ‘real’ world. Post-Modernist texts can offer reflections of a reflection.

iii

The techniques so far mentioned, however, need not have proved more than ingenious verbal or imaginative tricks, discovered before their time. After all Dodgson liked such tricks for their own sake. Various of the parodies and devices in the Alice books had their origin in earlier independent sketches. For example, the first verse of ‘Jabberwocky’, complete with ‘explanations’, dates from 1855. ‘The Aged, Aged Man’ is a revision of the parody ‘Upon the Lonely Moor’, published in a magazine, The Train, when Dodgson was twenty-four. Might not the Alice books, indeed, be best regarded as mere anthologies of such minor pleasures – more elaborated versions of A Tangled Tale (1885), a largely forgotten work of Carroll’s in which a series of mathematical problems is embedded in a light narrative diversified with puns? Was it simply that Carroll, by an accident of taste and temperament, inconsequentially hit on certain ideas and technical practices that Joyce, Eliot and others were later to explore for substantial creative and conceptual reasons? If that had been all, the resulting works could properly be regarded as intriguing literary curiosities but they would lack an obvious sustaining purpose, would be devoid of feeling. Nothing could be further from the case. To understand why, it is necessary to follow the ramifications of Carroll’s most far-reaching and prescient device. It is most conveniently summed up in the brilliant episode where Alice is taken to see the sleeping Red King and told that she is ‘only a sort of thing in his dream!’

‘If that there King was to wake,’ added Tweedledum, ‘you’d go out – bang! – just like a candle!’

‘I shouldn’t!’ Alice exclaimed indignantly. ‘Besides, if I’m only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?’

‘Ditto,’ said Tweedledum.

‘Ditto, ditto!’ cried Tweedledee.

He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn’t help saying, ‘Hush! You’ll be waking him, I’m afraid, if you make so much noise.’

‘Well, it’s no use your talking about waking him,’ said Tweedledum, ‘when you’re only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you’re not real.’

‘I am real!’ said Alice, and began to cry.

‘You won’t make yourself a bit realer by crying,’ Tweedledee remarked: ‘there’s nothing to cry about.’

‘If I wasn’t real,’ Alice said – half-laughing

Reviews for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

[takeitorleaveit_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

so, he liked little girls. a bit quirky but if he didn't, he wouldn't have had no motivation to write this ultimate classic that activates any odd-thinkers thinking capacities and should be made into a musical not another movie for the songs in it are brilliant.

[catherine_gv · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is my favorite book EVER! Love the stories, love the nonsense, the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter..the tea party scene...the rhymes and the little children songs turned to Lewis Carroll's thinking way. AWE-SOME!! It's my fave ever!

Really! Own them all!!!

[kemilyh1988 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Who doesn't love Alice in Wonderland?

[phoenixterran · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There are two well-loved, oft-adapted, and extremely influential novels written by Lewis Carroll, the pseudonym of English author Charles Lutwidge, in 1865 and 1871 respectively. I was initially a little surprised when Seven Seas announced that it would be publishing a newly illustrated omnibus edition of the novels in 2014, especially as the company had moved away from publishing prose works in recent years in order to focus on manga and other comics. However, the novels do nicely complement Seven Seas' releases of the various Alice in the Country of manga. What makes Seven Seas' edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass stand out from others are the incredibly cute and charming manga-influenced illustrations by Kriss Sison, an International Manga Award-winning artist from the Philippines. In addition to a gallery of color artwork, hundreds of black-and-white illustrations can be found throughout the volume.Alice was enjoying a leisurely afternoon on a riverbank with her older sister when a very curious thing happened—a rabbit with a pocket watch hurries by talking to itself. When Alice follows after it she tumbles down a rabbit hole to find herself in a very strange place indeed. What else is there to do for an inquisitive and adventurous young girl but to go exploring? And so she does. As Alice wanders about she discovers food and drink that cause her to grow and shrink, animals of all sizes and shapes that can talk, and people who have very peculiar ways of thinking about and approaching life. Eventually she returns home to her sister, but several months later she finds herself once again slipping into a fantastical world when she crawls through the mirror above a fireplace mantel. Of course, Alice immediately sets off exploring, encountering even more strange and wondrous things and meeting all sorts of new and perplexing people.Despite already being familiar with the story of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (mostly through the seemingly infinite number of adaptations and otherwise Alice-inspired works) and despite having been encouraged for years by devotees of Carroll's writings, I had never actually read the original novels for myself until I picked up Seven Seas' edition. I'm really somewhat astonished that it took me so long to do so and it truly is a shame that I didn't get around to it sooner. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass is absolutely marvelous and an utter joy to read. It's easy to see why the novels have been treasured and continue to be treasured by so many people for well over a century. The books are incredibly imaginative and delightfully clever. Carroll liberally employs puns and other wordplay, turning nonsense into logic and vice versa. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass has been translated into something like seventy different languages; though certainly worthwhile, I can't imagine these interpretations were easy to accomplish due to the novels' linguistic complexities.What particularly impresses me about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are the novels' broad appeal. Both children and adults can easily enjoy the works. Younger readers will likely be amused and drawn to their silliness while more mature readers will be able to more fully appreciate the cleverness of Carroll's prose, poetry, and song. I would wholeheartedly encourage just about anyone to read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Even without counting the multitude of adapted works, there are a huge number of editions of the original two novels available. There is bound to be a version that will appeal, whether it be Martin Gardner's extensively annotated editions, which reveal references that modern readers are apt to miss, or one of the many illustrated releases. While I may one day move on to The Annotated Alice, I was very pleased with Seven Seas' Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Carroll's novels and Sison's illustrations are a delightful combination. I am very glad to have finally read the novels and anticipate reading them again with much enjoyment.Experiments in Manga

[laurochka-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Having first read Alice as a child - whilst sick with tonsilitis - I never really fully appreciated it.
There is perhaps some irony in the fact that I enjoyed Alice more as an adult than a child.
Carroll's use of language puns and nonsense is extremely clever and entertaining and definitely my favourite aspect of the book. Exposing the inadequacies and ambiguities of the English language as a means of highlighting the illogical and confusing nature of Wonderland and the land Through the Looking Glass works perfectly. I loves these stories!

[leslitgs · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Avoiding the humdrum happenstance of her quotidian existence, Alice wanders off and finds herself in new worlds of remarkable impossibilities. She goes on many disjointed adventures and meets the most unlikely of creatures and characters. A cheap summation, to be sure, but it's Alice's freaking Adventures in Wonderland. How are you supposed to accurately summarize that chaos? Sheesh. I have honestly never known what to do with these books. Aside from read them, of course. But even in reading them, one not only is transported away from one's base reality [as should occur while reading in the first place], but also from almost all things sensical. Even our protagonist is completely off the beaten path. Alice is seven years old, but she is an overly bright child with a peculiar penchant for daydreams and etiquette. But perhaps both of those relate to the period-based upbringing [which I know little about]. Moving on. While wandering the plotless paths of these texts, I was struck by Caroll's power as an author. Plotless is regularly regarded as a pejorative term; here he has not only managed to carry it off with some style but also to entrance generations with his madness. We practically relish the fairytale chaos. How is it that something so odd and so frequently against our understanding and order be beloved? The easiest answer, I imagine, is escape. Alice's story is to us what Wonderland is to her. Escape. Freedom. She and I are, perchance, not so different then. Tired of being bound within the constrictions of a purportedly ordered life, we take leave of our senses. Now, I am ill-equipped for any quality kind of examination or technical analysis of the text, and have no real interest in picking Alice's story apart for signs of Caroll's depravity. Alice is to me a rest from order, and will forever be so.

[psychedelicmicrobus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A favorite book of mine. I love the silly and the surreal, and this satisfies. It will be a permanent fixture on my shelf for life, and read to my own children someday.

[rickyhaas · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are filled with unusual and unforgettable characters. I have to admit I was hesitant about reading this because as a child I despised the Disney Film, but I decided to give it a go anyways. I'm certainly glad I did. The books is filled with all sorts of weird situations and it's amusing to watch Alice try to figure how the entire world looks. Also I love that the author often clues you in on Alice's thoughts which are cute and provide a lot of comedy. While I loved this book, I know not everyone will and I suggest when reading it just to have fun and not try to think to hard about what's actually going on. I would recommend this book to both children and adults. Also I loved this edition. It was filled with awesome illustrations and I love all the phrases and character's names written on the front of the book.

[lord_boris-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Maybe two stars is harsh given that this book must have been ground breaking in its day and for the fact that there is a lot of clever wordplay within it. However, the longer the book went on the more I began to really dislike it. It was one set piece with different characters after another and it got pretty tedious. Ok, it's a children's book but even as a child I was never drawn to this book or the Disney film. This version also contained Through the Looking Glass but although I generally strive to complete books I just couldn't face it when I saw Tweedledee and Tweedledum were to feature in it. Even John Tenniel's illustrations appeared slightly sinister. I was also disappointed to discover that the Dormouse never actually said 'feed your head'.

[stef7sa-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Delicious nonsense. I liked the second part more than the first, with such characters as Tweedledum and Tweedledee and Humpty Dumpty.

[brakketh-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fantastically surreal and enjoyable.

[wilwarin_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

So brilliantly whimsical - or whimsically brilliant!

[oscarwilde87_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is one of the most well-known books ever written. Even people who have never read the novel have heard of characters such as Humpty Dumpty and Tweedledum and Tweedledee. When Alice falls into a rabbit hole her adventures begin and one is stranger than the other. In Through The Looking-Glass Alice walks through a mirror and finds herself in a live-action chess game. These fantasy stories are not just popular with children, they are also quite well-liked by adults. And there is a reason. The novel and its sequel Through The Looking-Glass play with language in a very intelligent way.'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.' 'The question is', said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean different things.' (p. 223)This quotation describes quite nicely what I enjoyed most about the novel. Sometimes, words have to be taken quite literally, and then there is always a second layer added to them. This interplay of literal and figurative meaning makes Alice's story work on more than just one level. However, I did not care for the fantasy part as much. While Alice's adventures are sure strange and sometimes funny I rather enjoyed the book for the how than for the what. The way the story is told was much more important for me than the story that is actually told. In the end of the second story, Alice asks herself whether it had all just been her dream or the dream of the Red King, one of the other characters in the novels. In the last line then, the reader seems to be included in the discussion: 'Which do you think it was?' (p. 278). I guess you have to see for yourself. I can recommend this book especially to adult readers interested in linguistics and logic as well as to kids, of course. is very enjoyable, rather short and easily read. On the whole, 3.5 stars.

[jechtshot · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Our dear friend Alice sets out once again on an adventure through Wonderland. However, rather than following a rabbit down a hole this time she travels through a mirror (looking glass) to a chess-like version of this magical realm. We follow Alice across the "squares" as she advances from the land of pawns to that of the queens. I prefer the story of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland slightly to this, but still a very enjoyable and fun read.

[audreyjane_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is a my absolute favourite book ever. It delights me and reminds me of all the fun I had when I was young. It’s innocent and dark all at the same time. It makes me laugh and think and begin to speak in a very formal way after yet another re-read of this classic. Alice is a typical girl, she can be stubborn and isn’t afraid to pout or throw a tantrum, but she also seems genuinely concerned about these new friends she meets and also the absurdity of this alternate universe she’s plummeted into. I adore the mad hatter and the white rabbit, in fact I love all the characters in this book, even the tyrannical Queen of Hearts. I love that they are all insane. I find that after reading Alice in Wonderland I take more notice of my surroundings, finding things that I would usually dismiss or barely notice to be completely riveting or entertaining. Perhaps every time I read this book, I lose another piece of my sanity. If that’s the case, I’m thinking that crazy people might just be the happiest people alive.

[klefort_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I absolutely love Lewis Carroll and I would gladly read anything with his pseudonym on it, regardless of length. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass are both full of creativity and imagination. Even though you can find them in the children's section, I wouldn't recommend it for younger readers because it's not an easy read. It's more suitable, perhaps, for middle-school aged children. At the end of the book, we find out that Alice had been dreaming throughout the entire story. I find it curious that, at times, Alice can not understand the characters that her very own sub-conscience mind has made up. The characters that she meets in Wonderland often speak in riddles that have no answers, as Alice once pointed out. Certainly if Alice made up these characters, she of all people should be able to understand them. Just an interesting thought.

[alanwpowers · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I taught this book in college Freshman Composition 2 off and on over a decade, as the last in a five-book course--sometimes replaced with local memoir, Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World, or with Saul Bellow's Seize the Day, or occasionally Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer with its myriad insights into education and language. None gave any better insight into language than the brilliant mathematician's Alice. I love the account of Queen Victoria's appreciation, her order to "order whatever this author produces." His next book was a mathematical treatise that befuddled the Queen, where did we get this?

[tullius22 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's not that I'm not willing to take children's literature seriously-- although it is true that I do not consider "Grimm's Fairy Tales" to be children's literature, but merely the finest book ever written (since Angela's Ashes is actually written *too* well)-- but I'm not sure that this meandering little adventure deserves to be compared to 'Stuart Little'-- or 'Charlotte's Web', if you like-- although I suppose that, in the field of children's literature, age must be equivalent to innocence. Tolstoy, for example, would have made a fine author of children's literature.... or Charlotte Lucas! (Actually Charlotte Lucas might have done a fine job.) But I suppose that I ought to be fair and admit that this 'Alice' of Lewis here is somewhat of an improvement over *that other Lewis*....Although, fine, full disclosure-- it's a little bit difficult for me to take Mr Lewis seriously after knowing that he wanted to use Euclid's original Greek manuscript as a learner's textbook-- and not just that, but as *the only one*!-- which is a stupid idea, and *not just* a stupid idea. It's as pedantic as possible, and it's the sort of thing that makes me wonder how open he really was to 'persuasion'~~ which in turn makes belief in his 'friendly uncle with small girl-child friend' story seem like a rather credulous sort of thing.... He starts to sound more like "Uncle Jack" from "Meet the Fockers" to me. Those little kids, like frightened little hens, can be so.... credulous. Although I know that all that might come off as being unduly in favor of the little goat-children, hahaha, but....Well, I will say that it is mildly less mildly disturbing than your average Tim Burton movie-- ha! ....But. But even though I thought that it was surely better than Tim Burton or C.S. Lewis, but, then, I saw that it was so boring, that it was.... pretty much the same. I mean, Latin grammar and French history? Really? I mean, is this a book for girls, or bearded old men gone cracked and gone off to climbing trees like boys? I mean, I was waiting for him to start going, 'Fifteen birds in five fir trees....'.... but at least *that* was not put out as being for *girls*! Oh! And chess! Yes, sir!Chess and Mr Collins for Alice! .... God, it almost makes me wish that Dvorak-- I mean, if Euclid's buddy can, then why not.... oh no, wait. 'Stabat Mater'. Never mind. Anyway, it's certainly not happy like Mozart or the Hugh Grant film about the pirates. (7/10)

[seriousgrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Everyone knows the story of Alice in Wonderland. If they don't remember the duchess with the baby piglet or the gryphon they surely remember the queen who was constantly crying, "off with his head" or the white rabbit with the pocket watch and white gloves who was always late. And who can forget the caterpillar smoking the hookah on the giant mushroom or the episodes of Drink Me, Eat Me? There is no doubt that Lewis Carroll had a strange imagination. In rereading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland I was taken back to a fantastical world where flamingos and hedgehogs were used as croquet pieces, Alice's tears could create a flood, fish wore wigs and Alice grew and shrank so many times I lost count. My favorite scene was the trial and the king who wanted a sentence before the verdict. It's satirical and funny. Perfect for kids and adults.

[bryndahlquis · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is easily one of my favorite books of all time. Alice is so adorable, because she's so little and clueless and imaginative and curious. All the characters are amazing, and I feel like each time I read it, I get a new pun or joke.I know I will read this book over and over again for the rest of my life, and it's definitely one everyone should read at least once.

[lhlogan1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Crazy read. You'll feel all out of sorts, but want to keep reading.

[snukes-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Possibly my favorite book of all time. Before I understood the mind-altering influences that led him to write this, I was captivated by the world of wonder and fantasy he created. It was everything I wished my own adventures could be.

[marcoguarda-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Charles Dodgson taught maths at Christchurch college, Oxford.

Beside knowing well the matter he was teaching, he was aware it's a teacher's duty to present his lessons in an exciting way to keep his pupils interested. Dodgson was eternally on the lookout for wits, mots and wordplay that dealt with maths, logic and the games which have to do with numbers—as cards and chess. The study of general and symbolic logic (syllogism,) united with a love for pure storytelling, are at the basis of many of his works.

Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass deal with a game of cards and a game of chess, respectively. Especially in the first book, Dodgson uses traditional figures of storytelling, as the shape shifter (who better than the Caterpillar embodies the skills of the shape shifter—he turns from an egg, to a cocoon, to a caterpillar, to a butterfly;) and the trickster (as the Cheshire Cat is, with his puzzling grin and his maddening skill of disappearing, deceiving the eye.)

Nonetheless, both books deal with logic and the elements which are the building blocks of mathematics. Alice confronts perspective; she's either too tall, or too small—establishing perspective when studying a system is often critical in maths. The Hatter is stuck in a time paradox, because his watch stopped at six o'clock—tea time. There are also many hilarious jokes, as in the Mock Turtle chapter, where they have shorter lessons because they less-on. The White Queen in the second book runs so fast because she actually darts from one corner to the other of the chessboard in one move, and promoting a pawn (Alice) to a Queen is a chess move.

Dodgson weaves in his telling the fondness for his little, beloved friends whom he told these tales first; it's no wonder the strong human dimension they contain has survived mere time.

[auntieknickers · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've read this at least twice, once as a child and once in a children's literature class. I think as a child I found it a bit too scary and maybe that's why I don't recall reading it aloud to my own children. But, it's certainly an important part of our culture.

[rrainer-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Along with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I reread this one nearly ever year. I enjoy it a lot, but it will never be quite as beloved as Alice.

[wethewatched · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Alice in Wonderland is a story that I knew but never read. I finally picked up the illustrated version (via Kindle), and it surpassed my expectations -- it's refreshingly absurd and a great escape from the working life.

I wasn't as hooked on Through the Looking-Glass, perhaps due to the abundance of nonsensical poetry. But it's well worth reading too if you can get the two books in a set.

[quaintlittlehead · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

SLOW DOWN. This book is full of stories you think you know from the cobbling together of many movie versions and society's collective memories, and it jumps from one bit of nonsense to another, so it's easy, particularly as an adult, to dash through it like a white rabbit. But, though these works were ostensibly written to a young girl and are often treated as children's books (even by Carroll himself in the preface to a second edition of "Through the Looking-Glass," which is included in this volume), they are chock-full of ingenious language that you really need to stop and think about to truly appreciate. Lovely thing that, how the English don't write down to children. I've heard that "Alice" is some sort of allegory for the new mathematical ideas of the time. I don't know whether that's true. But from a linguistic standpoint alone, this book is a treasure trove. The poetry and punnery are second to none, and constructed not just with an eye on artistry, but with a real intent to comment on how language (and by extension society) works.The Barnes and Noble edition of this book is a great buy, featuring the original Tenniel illustrations and a very informative introduction. Unlike other volumes in the series, this one is not overly annotated, nor do the footnotes and endnotes presuppose that the reader must be seven years old. As always with these editions, the end of the book offers up works inspired by what you have just read, along with a variety of critical comments. As a 2004 edition, the former of these things is not up-to-date enough to acknowledge the recent Tim Burton adaptation, and is certainly not an exhaustive list anyway (after all, how could they forget the Star Trek episode "Shore Leave?"), but, as W. H. Auden suggests in the critical comments, Carroll is probably near the top of the list of the culture's "most frequently cited without attribution" authors, so where would one begin?

[silva_44 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

While the book is vastly better than any of the movie versions I've seen, it still fell short of the mark. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more as a juvenile reader.

[est2lm · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I think most people are familiar with Alice to some degree; as children (and maybe more often as adults) we go through periods of complete and utter boredom. We sit with a vacant expression that provokes the dreaded question -

"Don't you have something to do?"

Or, during a lesson about how 12 times 1 is 12, 12 times 2 is 24, 12 times 3 is 36...

It is so easy to slip into a daydream when one is faced with boredom. For Alice, this daydream is a white rabbit with a pocket-watch, muttering some complete nonsense about how it is late! The next thing Alice knows, she is taken into a series of absurd adventures in a land where she is the most logical person there.

In a way, the Alice books are a parody of those children's stories that are very clearly written to teach a moral lesson to its young readers; Alice already knows what is right and wrong, as demonstrated by the way she handles conflicts with unreasonable characters. She even understands on some level how, as people grow up, they sometimes forget (or neglect) their common sense.

Alice, being a child, struggles with communicating her feelings and often runs into fake words that try to articulate those emotions. It is a very accurate representation, I think, of how children react to their emotions. There is a great deal of crying when they fail to string words together in order to articulate their thoughts or feelings.

This is a book full of wonderful nonsense - riddles not meant to be solved, poetry that sounds gorgeous but doesn't necessarily make sense at first glance, puns on words and names and situations; and despite all the improbable things that happen, it is not impossible to find true meaning in Alice's dreams. I think anyone who had a childhood can find a bit if familiarity and even comfort within the pages of these fantastic tales.

[flying_monkeys_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rating: 3.5 of 5These two novellas (added together equal one short novel) were what I expected and NOT what I expected. I think the movies might be better than the books ... maybe, I haven't decided for sure yet. Your enjoyment of these two stories will probably hinge on your enjoyment of and attachment to any previously viewed TV or film adaptations.Fave quotes:"and even if my head would go through,' thought poor Alice, 'it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin." (p.67)---------------------"And how do you know that you're mad?'Well, then,' the Cat went on, 'you see a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.'" (p. 115)---------------------"'How is it you can all talk so nicely?' Alice said.'Put your hand down and feel the ground,' said the Tiger-lily.Alice did so. 'Its very hard,' she said.'In most gardens,' the Tiger-lily said, 'they make the beds too soft -- so that the flowers are always asleep.'" (p.169)---------------------"Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said: 'one can't believe impossible things.''I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast...'" (p.207)