December 3, 2015

In 1862, an English mathematics professor at Oxford University and three little girls went rowing on the River Isis, which flows through the city of Oxford and the university. The professor began to tell a story to the children, a fantasy about a little girl named Alice. Later that year, the professor wrote the story down, calling it “Alice’s Adventures Underground.” He enlarged his tale into a book-length version, which was published on Nov. 26, 1865, and celebrated its 150^th anniversary last week.

Illustration from ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll. Credit: Arthur Rackham (1907); Private Collection (© Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images)

The professor was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll. He titled his completed story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For generations, it has been one of the most famous and beloved children’s books in the English language

Alice in Wonderland, as it is commonly called, tells about the adventures of a little girl in a make-believe world under the ground. The character of Alice was inspired by Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean of Christ Church at Oxford, who joined Carroll rowing on the river with her two sisters. Alice falls asleep in a meadow and dreams she enters a “wonderland” after she falls down a hole while following a nervous and fashionably dressed white rabbit. She soon meets many strange characters, including the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the Mock Turtle, and the Queen of Hearts. The book’s popularity increased, in part, because of the illustrations created by the English cartoonist and book illustrator Sir John Tenniel.

Carroll described Alice’s further adventures in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1872). The second book introduced such additional fantasy characters as Humpty Dumpty, the dragonlike Jabberwock, and the silly twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

Carroll wrote both books to give pleasure to children, but over the years, adults also have come to enjoy the humor, fantastic characters, word games, puzzles, and absurd moments in the stories. Scholars study the books to find intricate and elevated meanings in what seems to be nonsense. Thus, Carroll composed a literary classic that appeals, on different levels, to both young readers and adults.