Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
12 chapters
3.99from 451,866 ratingson Goodreads
A girl bored on a riverbank follows a waistcoated rabbit down a hole and spends an afternoon growing, shrinking, and being spoken to rudely by a caterpillar, a duchess, a disappearing cat and a hatter who is stuck at six o'clock. It ends in a courtroom where the sentence comes first. Told to a real Alice on a boat and written down at her request.
About the book
Told on a boat trip up the Thames in July 1862 to three sisters, written out at the request of one of them, and published in 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland sends a bored girl down a rabbit hole after a waistcoated rabbit with a pocket watch. She grows, shrinks, swims in her own tears, and is spoken to rudely by a caterpillar, a duchess, a cat that disappears by degrees, and a hatter and a hare permanently stuck at tea time. It ends in a courtroom where the Queen wants the sentence first and the verdict afterwards. Dodgson was a mathematician, and the book runs on logic taken literally: the jokes are about language behaving exactly as it is told to. It was the first children’s book in English with no lesson in it, and it changed what children’s books were allowed to be.
Characters
Alice — Protagonist
A sensible seven-year-old who keeps trying to apply lessons and manners in a place that has neither.
The White Rabbit — The rabbit
Perpetually late, perpetually frightened of the Duchess, and the reason Alice goes down the hole.
The Cheshire Cat — Guide
Grinning, disappearing in instalments, and the only one who admits that everyone here is mad.
The Mad Hatter — Host
Stuck at six o’clock since he quarrelled with Time, and holding a tea party that never clears up.
The March Hare — Host
The Hatter’s co-host, offering wine there is none of and advice about saying what you mean.
The Queen of Hearts — Antagonist
Who plays croquet with flamingos and orders beheadings faster than her gardeners can paint the roses.
The Caterpillar — Adviser
Three inches high on a mushroom, asking who Alice is and unimpressed by her inability to say.
The Mock Turtle — Companion
Weeping through an account of an education in Reeling, Writhing and the different branches of Arithmetic.
About the author
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, who published serious work on logic and geometry under his own name and nonsense under the other. The story began on a boat trip up the Thames in July 1862, told to the three young daughters of the Dean; one of them, Alice Liddell, asked him to write it down. He was also a skilled early photographer. His books include Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass and the poem The Hunting of the Snark.