[Alice 01] • Alice's Adv.in Wond &Looking G

In 1862 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a shy Oxford mathematician with a stammer, created a story about a little girl tumbling down a rabbit hole. Thus began the immortal adventures of Alice, perhaps the most popular heroine in English literature. Countless scholars have tried to define the charm of the Alice books–with those wonderfully eccentric characters the Queen of Hearts, Tweedledum, and Tweedledee, the Cheshire Cat, Mock Turtle, the Mad Hatter et al.–by proclaiming that they really comprise a satire on language, a political allegory, a parody of Victorian children’s literature, even a reflection of contemporary ecclesiastical history. Perhaps, as Dodgson might have said, Alice is no more than a dream, a fairy tale about the trials and tribulations of growing up–or down, or all turned round–as seen through the expert eyes of a child.

ReviewA book of wonder and nonsense laced with lethal wit (Guardian )

Without these two books in my childhood I doubt whether my imagination would have developed at all (Kate Atkinson )

A marvellous confidence in the primacy of the imagination (Will Self )

Two nightmare destinations. Wonderland and Looking Glass. The more I read these books, the darker they shine.. Carroll operates on language like a cruel, crazy surgeon (Jeff Noon )

Precise, dream-like, subversive (Quentin Blake Independent on Sunday )

Book Description'So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible' Alice in Wonderland