Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Description

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first published in 1865, with illustrations by John Tenniel that have become inseparable from the text itself. Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a mathematician and logician at Christ Church, Oxford, and the blend of rigorous logical structure with playful absurdity is the novel’s defining characteristic.

The story begins when Alice, a seven-year-old girl, follows a hurrying White Rabbit down a rabbit-hole and finds herself in a subterranean world where the ordinary rules of cause, size, and consequence no longer apply. She grows to the ceiling and shrinks to the size of a mouse; she swims in a pool of her own tears; she attends a Mad Tea-Party with the Hatter and the March Hare; she plays croquet with a Queen who orders decapitation at every irregularity; and she encounters a cast of characters — the Cheshire Cat, the Mock Turtle, the Gryphon, the Caterpillar — each of whom speaks in a distinctive idiom of nonsense, logic, or both.

The novel is structured as a dream, a framing device that Carroll exploits to its fullest, allowing episodes to follow the logic of dream-association rather than conventional narrative progression. Beneath its surface of whimsy, the book engages with contemporary debates in mathematics, philosophy, and education, often satirizing the schoolroom certainties of Victorian England.

This edition presents the complete text of the 1865 first edition, including Carroll’s original preface, with all twelve chapters and the prefatory poem.