Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - 150 years on -
“A story whose intention was entirely fun”
25 August 2015
Lewis Carroll was born as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on the 27th January 1832 in Daresbury, England as the third of 11 children and oldest son to Pastor Charles Dodgson.
As a child he showed a profound interest in mathematics. He was very well read and wrote small theatre pieces for his younger siblings to escape from the “narrow” world of his pastoral family home.
After unhappy years in a public school he began his studies at Christ Church College in Oxford and later taught mathematics at the college. Passionate about the new medium of photography and later dedicating much of his time to writing, he found great interest and pleasure in inventing logical tasks and word plays.
During his time as a teacher at Christ Church in Oxford, he met a young girl, Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church. A river outing with the Liddell family on 4 July 1862, from Folly Bridge to Godstow, is said to be the beginning of the Alice story.
A bored little girl called Alice goes looking for an adventure…
The Liddell family encouraged Dodgson to write the story down. He took over 2 years to finish the manuscript. In October 1863 Dodgson met the publisher Alexander Macmillan who loved the Alice story and it was agreed to publish it under Dodgson’s nom de plume, Lewis Carroll.
One of the earliest communications between Macmillan and Carroll in November 1864 states that Carroll asks for the book to be covered in “bright red” and not the usual Macmillan “green”. Macmillan sent a copy of an earlier children’s poetry book, The Children’s Garland, edited by Coventry Patmore (1862), covered in “a red cloth such as I fancy you want”.
The book was finally published by Macmillan in 1865 as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
The original 1865 Alice wasn’t very well printed and so was withdrawn after the illustrator, John Tenniel, complained about the poor quality and the printed sheets were shipped to the US and issued as the first American edition, with title pages specially printed by the New York publishers. A few copies of the 1865 edition exist (held mostly in museums and libraries) but it was never commercially published therefore the 1866 printing is the first published edition and the first that anyone could buy back then.
The book has been translated into at least 176 languages.
“It’s sometimes said that Lewis Carroll’s Alice books were the origin of all later children’s literature, and I’m inclined to agree. There were books for children before 1865, but they were almost all written to make a moral point. Good children behave like this; bad children behave like that, and are punished for it, and serve them right. In Alice, for the first time, we find a realistic child taking part in a story whose intention was entirely fun. Both children and adults loved them at once, and have never stopped doing so. They are as fresh and clever and funny today as they were a hundred and fifty years ago.” (Excerpt from from Philip Pullman’s foreword to The Complete Alice by Lewis Carroll., http://aliceinwonderland150.com/)
View the 1st edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, And What Alice Found There in our catalogue here.
Please contact us if you would like to receive more information about the book, a condition report or further images.
Watch a video, produced by PanMacmillan, celebrating 150 years since the 1st publication of Alice in 1865.
