Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

The White Rabbit hurries by, dropping a fan and gloves, as a pool of tears collects around Alice.Īlice retrieves the dropped items, but she begins shrinking again and must swim through the pool tears. She hits her head on the ceiling and begins to cry. She then eats a cake labeled “Eat Me” and grows to an enormous height. Now tiny, she sees a miniature door that leads to a beautiful garden, but she cannot enter it because she has left the key on the table far above. She drinks from a bottle labeled “Drink Me” that she finds on a table, and it causes her to shrink. At the bottom of the tunnel is a hall with locked doors of all sizes. She follows the rabbit down a rabbit hole and falls down a long, dark tunnel lined with cupboards and shelves. Alice is bored and sleepy, but she perks up when she sees a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and pocket watch hurry past. On a warm day in May, Alice is sitting on the riverbank with her older sister, who is reading a book. Her adventures in Wonderland are not revealed to be a dream until she wakes up at the book’s end. It is written in the third person past tense, although much of the story is told through Alice’s internal monologues. Set in the author’s present day in the English countryside, Wonderland is about a young girl named Alice who has an extraordinary adventure in a dream when she falls asleep one afternoon. Because Dodgson is more commonly known by his pseudonym, this guide refers to Lewis Carroll as the author. Lewis Carroll is the pen name of the mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

They are the model on which all subsequent illustrated and animated versions of the story are based.

John Tenniel is the original illustrator, and his famous wood block illustrations, which range from whimsical to unsettling, convey the gothic aesthetic of Victorian children’s literature and have become inseparable from the story. Carroll first wrote the story with his own illustrations as Alice’s Adventures Underground and expanded it into the widely known published version in 1865. The novel began as a story that Carroll told to the three daughters of his friend Henry Liddell while on a boat ride on the River Cherwell in 1862.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll