Lewis Carroll · 1865 · Children’s novel
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This volume brings together Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books. In the first, published in 1865, a bored Alice follows a White Rabbit down a hole into Wonderland, where she keeps growing and shrinking and meets the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter and the furious Queen of Hearts. In the sequel, published in 1871, she climbs through a mirror into a world laid out like a chessboard and crosses it as a pawn, meeting Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty and the White Knight.
Carroll, the pen name of the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson, first told the Wonderland story to a real girl, Alice Liddell, and her sisters. Beneath the nonsense, the books play with logic, language, identity and the puzzling rules of the adult world.
Key insights
- The Red Queen’s race, running hard just to stay in place, is a useful model for any field where standing still means falling behind.
- Humpty Dumpty claims words mean whatever he chooses; agree on definitions before arguing, or the conversation soon turns to nonsense.
- The Cheshire Cat tells Alice that if she does not mind where she ends up, any path will do; direction starts with a destination.
- The Hatter’s tea party, stuck forever at six o’clock, is a neat image of routines that carry on long after they stop making sense.
- Alice’s constant changes in size capture the confusion of growing up, when your body and your place in the world keep shifting.
Read it if you enjoy wordplay, logic puzzles and playful nonsense, or want to meet the originals of many familiar characters and phrases.