Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

Lewis Carroll (Author) Lewis Carroll, born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98), grew up in Cheshire in the village of Daresbury, the son of a parish priest. He was a brilliant mathematician, a skilled photographer and a meticulous letter and diary writer. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, inspired by Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church in Oxford, was published in 1865, followed by Through the Looking-Glass in 1871. He wrote numerous stories and poems for children including the nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark and fairy stories Sylvie and Bruno.

“A work of glorious intelligence and literary devices…Nonsense becomes a form of higher sense”–Malcolm Bradbury“Alice in Wonderland is one of the top 25 books of all time. I always loved the book and I always loved the various characters, the psychedelic nature of it and kind-of odd allegorical stories inside stories. I always thought it was beautiful.”–Jonny Depp“Wonderland and the world through the Looking Glass were, I always knew, different from other imagined worlds. Nothing could be changed, although things in the story were always changing…Carroll moves his readers as he moves chess pieces and playing cards.”–A. S. Byatt“It would not have occurred to me even to suspect that the “children’s tale” was in brilliant ways coded to be read by adults and was in fact an English classic, a universally acclaimed intellectual tour de force and what might be described as a psychological/anthropological dissection of Victorian England. It seems not to have occurred to me that the child-Alice of drawing rooms, servants, tea and crumpets and chess, was of a distinctly different background than my own. I must have been the ideal reader: credulous, unjudging, eager, thrilled. I knew only that I believed in Alice, absolutely.”–Joyce Carol Oates“The Alices are the greatest nonsense ever written, and far greater, in my view, than most sense.”–Philip Pullman