Alice in Wonderland, by the English author Lewis Carroll, is a classic children’s fantasy story. Its full title is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford University mathematics professor and an early expert in photography. A pen name is a name an author uses instead of his or her real name.
Carroll began the book as a short story in 1862 under the title Alice’s Adventures under Ground. He expanded it to a full-length book that was published in 1865 and again in 1866 with the now famous illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. Alice in Wonderland tells about the adventures of a little girl named Alice in a make-believe world under the ground. Alice enters this “wonderland” after she falls down a hole while following a nervous and fashionably dressed white rabbit. She meets many strange characters, including the March Hare, Mad Hatter, Cheshire Cat, Queen of Hearts, and Mock Turtle.
Carroll continued the story in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1872). This book introduced new characters, including Humpty Dumpty, dragonlike Jabberwock, the silly twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and the Walrus and the Carpenter.
Carroll created the character of Alice to amuse a little girl named Alice Liddell and her two sisters. Carroll wrote both books to give pleasure to children, but adults also 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.
