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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a work of children's literature by the British mathematician and author Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. The tale is fraught with satirical allusions to Dodgson's friends and to the lessons which British schoolchildren were expected to memorize. The Wonderland described in the tale plays with logic in ways that has made the story of lasting popularity with children, mathematicians, and users of psychedelic drugs.
In 1998 a first-edition copy of the book sold at auction for $1.5 million USD, becoming the most expensive children's book ever sold. Only twenty-two copies of the 1865 first edition are known to have survived; 17 are owned by libraries, the other 5 being in private hands.
The book has a sequel, called Through the Looking-Glass, and movie adaptations often combine elements from both books.
The American writer Martin Gardner has produced a work entitled The Annotated Alice, incorporating the text of both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. It has extensive annotations explaining them, including the Victorian poems that Dodgson parodies in the two books.
History
The book was published on July 4, 1865, exactly three years after Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed in a boat up the River Thames with three little girls:
- Lorina Charlotte Liddell (aged 13) (Primus in the opening verse)
- Alice Pleasance Liddell (aged 10) (Seconda in the opening verse)
- Edith Mary Liddell (aged 8)
The journey had started at Folly Bridge near Oxford, England and ended five miles away in a village of Godstow. During the journey the Reverend Dodgson made up and told the girls a story, which he later developed into Alice's Adventures Underground which then became Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Contents
Illustration by Arthur Rackham
- Chapter 1 -- Down the Rabbit-Hole
- Chapter 2 -- The Pool of Tears
- Chapter 3 -- A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale
- Chapter 4 -- The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill
- Chapter 5 -- Advice from a Caterpillar
- Chapter 6 -- Pig and Pepper
- Chapter 7 -- A Mad Tea-Party
- Chapter 8 -- The Queen's Croquet-Ground
- Chapter 9 -- The Mock Turtle's story
- Chapter 10 -- The Lobster-Quadrille
- Chapter 11 -- Who Stole the Tarts?
- Chapter 12 -- Alice's Evidence
The plot
A girl named Alice is bored while on a picnic with her sister. She finds interest in a white rabbit, dressed in a topcoat and muttering "I'm late!", which she follows down a rabbit's hole. She drops down into dream underworld of paradox, the absurd and the improbable. As she attempts to follow the rabbit, she has several misadventures. She grows to gigantic size and to half her original height; she meets a group of small animals stranded in a sea of her own tears; gets trapped in the rabbit's house; meets a baby which changes into a pig, and a cat which disappears; goes to a never-ending tea party; plays croquet with an anthropomorphised deck of cards; goes to the shore and meets some more odd creatures; and attends a courtroom trial of the Knave of Hearts, who has been accused of stealing some tarts. Eventually Alice wakes up underneath a tree back with her sister.
Characters in order of appearance
Poems and songs
- "How doth the little crocodile..." (a parody of the Victorian-era child's rhyme, "How doth the little busy bee")
- "You are old, Father William..."
- The Duchess' lullaby: "Speak roughly to your little boy..."
- "Twinkle, twinkle little bat..." -a parody of Twinkle twinkle little star.
- The Lobster Quadrille
- "’Tis the voice of the lobster, I heard him declare..." -a parody of Tis the voice of the Sluggard.
- Turtle Soup
- "The Queen of Hearts..." -an actual nursery rhyme.
- The White Rabbit's evidence
Thematic elements
- Puns
- Games and riddles
- Nonsense
- Sexual undertones
- Psychedelic undertones
Cinematic adaptations
Inspired
In addition to Carroll's own sequel (see the link above), Alice has inspired or influenced many other works of art.
The Goon Show followed similarly skewed ideas of logic. The Beatles had similarly surreal ideas in such songs as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "I am the Walrus" (the Walrus being the one in Through the Looking Glass).
Jefferson Airplane's 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow captures the fantasy's psychedelic undertones, in particular with the song "White Rabbit" (see 1967 in music). Appropriately, journalist Hunter S. Thompson incorporated "White Rabbit" into his classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as part of an LSD trip's scenery. The Blue Man Group also covered "White Rabbit" on their 2003 album The Complex (see 2003 in music).
As a young man, Vladimir Nabokov translated Alice into his native Russian. His later novels include many Carroll allusions, such as the spoof book titles which run through his Ada, or Ardor. Nabokov told his student and annotator Alfred Appel that the infamous Lolita contained no conscious allusions to Carroll (despite the novel's photography theme and Carroll's interest in the art form).
Alice Liddell was a character in the Riverworld series of science fiction books by Philip José Farmer.
Alice has recently been seen in two comic book series by Alan Moore: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (in passing), and Lost Girls (as a grown up). She appears in American McGee's Alice, a dark and bloody computer game, as well as in the RPG Kingdom Hearts. Furthermore, Tom Waits recorded an Alice album.
Allusions to Alice's adventures are also rife in the film The Matrix.
The film Resident Evil also has several references to the stories, including the main character who is revealed to be named Alice in the credits.
The computer game Thief: The Dark Project has an early level that invovles breaking into a huge mansion. The inside is somewhat normal at the front end, but as one gets deeper and deeper into it, it becomes "curiouser and curiouser"—resembling Alice more and more. The game Thief: Gold expanded this idea with an section added to the mansion, affectionaly known to fans as "Little Big World", that involves first going through very small village and then ending up in a gigantic kitchen. Thief was developed by Looking Glass Studios.
External links
da:Alice i eventyrland
de:Alice im Wunderland
fr:Alice au pays des merveilles
nl:Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
ja:不思議の国のアリス
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