Alice in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll's 1865 nonsense classic sends young Alice down a rabbit hole into a world of shifting size, odd logic and unforgettable characters.

Author

Lewis Carroll

First published

1865

Setting

Victorian England

Genre

Fantasy, nonsense

Read it if you like

Wordplay, logic puzzles and gloriously strange characters.

On screen and stage

Disney animation (1951) and many versions since

Overview

Bored on a riverbank, Alice follows a waistcoated White Rabbit down a hole and lands in a strange underground world. She shrinks and grows after eating and drinking unlabelled things, argues with a Caterpillar and a Cheshire Cat, attends a mad tea party and ends up at the Queen of Hearts' croquet game and trial. The story is a chain of episodes held together by Alice's stubborn curiosity and her attempts to apply ordinary logic where it does not belong.

Themes

• Curiosity and growing up
• Nonsense and logic
• Authority and absurdity
• Identity and change

Background

Charles Dodgson, writing as Lewis Carroll, first told the story on a boat trip in 1862 to Alice Liddell and her sisters, then expanded it for publication in 1865 with illustrations by John Tenniel. Dodgson was a mathematician at Oxford, and much of the book's wordplay and logic jokes come from that.

Why it endures

Its characters and phrases, from the Cheshire Cat to the Mad Hatter, have become part of everyday language. The book works as a children's story and as a playful study of logic and language, which is why adults keep returning to it.

Quotes