Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass [Paperback]

Introduction by A. S. Byatt
Illustrations by John Tenniel
Includes commissioned endnotes
 
Conceived by a shy British don on a golden afternoon to entertain ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her sisters,Alice’s Adventures in WonderlandandThrough the Looking-Glasshave delighted generations of readers in more than eighty languages. “The clue to the enduring fascination and greatness of the Alice books,” writes A. S. Byatt in her Introduction, “lies in language. It is play, and word-play, and its endless intriguing puzzles continue to reveal themselves long after we have ceased to be children.”

Includes a Modern Library Reading Group Guide

“Lewis Carroll,” creator of the brilliantly wittyAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was a pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a shy Oxford don with a stammer.

He was born at Daresbury, Cheshire on January 27, 1832, son of a vicar. As the eldest boy among eleven children, he learned early to amuse his siblings by writing and editing family magazines. He was educated at Christ Church College, Oxford, where he lectured in mathematics from1855 to 1881. In 1861 he was ordained as a deacon.

Dodgson’s entry into the world of fiction was accidental. It happened one “golden afternoon” as he escorted his colleague’s three daughters on a trip up the river Isis. There he invented the story that might have been forgotten if not for the persistence of the youngest girl, Alice Liddell. Thanks to her, and to her encouraging friends,Alicewas published in 1865, with drawings by the political cartoonist, John Tenniel. AfterAlice,Dodgson wrotePhantasmagoria and Other Poems(1869),Through the Lool³!