By Lewis Carroll

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:

The adventures young Alice has in Wonderland, a trip of hallucinogenic wildness, begin on a rather unadventurous picnic, when her attention, wandering off from the lesson it was supposed to be glued to, is caught by a passing white rabbit who happens to be wearing a waistcoat and muttering to himself “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!”. As he disappears down a rabbit hole and Alice, for want of anything better to do, follows him, she finds herself in Wonderland – a fantastical world where the characters Alice meets and the situations in which she finds herself have the whiff of symbol and allegory about them, but are much too funny to be pinned down as such.

The story of how Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland came to be written, and the author’s association with the Liddell family – and Alice Liddell in particular – is now the stuff of legend. One summer afternoon in 1862, the author, in the company of the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, took the three Liddell sisters, Lorina Charlotte, Alice Pleasance and Edith Mary out in a rowing boat on the River Thames, near Oxford. On that boat trip, he entertained the girls by telling them a story about a bored little girl called Alice who goes looking for an adventure. Alice, aged 10, loved the story so much, she asked Dodgson to write it down for her.

A year later, Dodgson gave the unfinished manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Underground to his friend and mentor George MacDonald, the poet and Christian fantasy writer who also inspired C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Two years later, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published – and sold out rapidly. Early fans of the story included a young Oscar Wilde and Queen Victoria.

The book is now commonly referred to by its abbreviated title of Alice in Wonderland – made popular by so many film and television adaptations of the story. Its sequel is Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.