Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865 under the pen name Lewis Carroll, the author being Charles Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church in Oxford. The story began as an entertainment for the daughters of the college's dean on a river trip in 1862, and Dodgson expanded it after being urged to write it down. The artist John Tenniel provided forty-two wood-engraved illustrations for the first edition, and their version of Alice, the Hatter and the Cheshire Cat is the one that has been attached to the book ever since.

The novel belongs to the tradition that gets called literary nonsense, and its jokes are mathematical as often as they are verbal: the Mad Hatter's tea party takes place at a fixed time because time has stopped, and the trial at the end is a parody of a legal procedure that does not care what anyone knows. Alice's own running argument with the country is about identity. She changes height, is told she is not herself, and eventually answers the Queen's demand for a verdict by standing up to the whole court, which is the closest thing to a plot the book has.

The book was a success from the start and has never been out of print. It has been translated into well over a hundred languages, illustrated by Arthur Rackham and Salvador Dali among many others, and adapted for the stage, film and animation repeatedly. It is also one of the few Victorian children's books that is read as much by adults, a fact that its author's other career as a logician has done nothing to discourage.