Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

First published in 1865, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland begins on a drowsy summer afternoon, when a curious young girl follows a hurried White Rabbit down a rabbit hole and tumbles into a world where ordinary rules no longer apply. There she encounters a procession of unforgettable characters, from the enigmatic Cheshire Cat and the philosophising Caterpillar to the perpetually late Rabbit and the irascible Queen of Hearts. As Alice grows and shrinks, navigates absurd conversations and attempts to make sense of a world governed by contradictory logic, Carroll transforms a child’s dream into an extraordinary adventure in language, imagination and identity. Beneath its playful surface lies a deliciously subversive questioning of authority, manners and the curious conventions adults insist upon.

Written by the Oxford mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under his celebrated pseudonym, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland grew from a story told to Alice Liddell and her sisters during a boat trip in 1862. Illustrated in its original edition by John Tenniel, the book helped redefine children’s literature, turning away from moral instruction towards nonsense, linguistic invention and the pleasures of unfettered imagination. Carroll’s mastery of riddles, wordplay and dreamlike absurdity has since influenced generations of writers, artists and thinkers, while Wonderland itself has become one of literature’s most enduring imaginative landscapes. Strange, witty and quietly radical, this is a book that reveals new delights with every return, whether encountered in childhood or rediscovered with an adult’s appreciation for its elegant madness.

From the book

“Curiouser and curiouser!”

— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter II: The Pool of Tears

On Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

“Carroll possessed an unforced genius for the most brilliant nonsense and deliciously mad dialogue.”

— Robert McCrum, The Guardian