by Lewis Carroll (Author), Lewis Carroll (Author), Hugh Haughton (Editor), John Tenniel (Illustrator), Lewis Carroll (Author)
Collecting Alice's complete adventures, a source of delight to children and adults alike for generations, the "Penguin Classics" edition of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass" is edited with an introduction and notes by Hugh Haughton. Conjured up one 'golden afternoon' in 1862 to entertain Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean of Carroll's college, the dream worlds of nonsensical Wonderland and back-to-front Looking-Glass kingdom depict order turned upside-down. Following the white rabbit into his warren, Alice falls into a world where croquet is played with hedgehogs and flamingos, a baby turns into a pig, time runs amok at a the Mad Hatter's tea-party, a chaotic game of chess makes Alice a Queen and the Mock Turtle and Gryphon dance the Lobster Quadrille. But amongst the anarchic humour and sparkling wordplay, unforgettable characters, puzzles and riddles, are poignant moments of nostalgia for a lost childhood. Original and experimental, adapted into countless film and television versions as "Alice in Wonderland", the Alice books give readers a window on both child and adult worlds. This is the most comprehensively annotated edition available and includes the manuscript version of "Alice's Adventures Under Ground" and Carroll's 1887 essay '"Alice" on the stage'. Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) was the pen-name of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Educated at Rugby School and Christ Church, Oxford, Carroll was appointed lecturer in mathematics in 1855, where he spent the rest of his life. In 1861 he took deacon's orders, but shyness and a constitutional stammer prevented him from seeking the priesthood. If you enjoyed "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" you might like Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita", also available in "Penguin Classics". "A work of glorious intelligence and literary devices...nonsense becomes a form of higher sense". (Malcolm Bradbury).
Format: Illustrated
Pages: 448
Edition: Revised ed.
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 27 Mar 2003
ISBN 10: 0141439769
ISBN 13: 9780141439761
Children’s book age: 9-11 Years
Prizes: Shortlisted for BBC Big Read Top 100 2003.
Alice in Wonderland is one of the top 25 books of all time. I always loved the book and I always loved the various characters, the psychedelic nature of it and kind-of odd allegorical stories inside stories. I always thought it was beautiful.
-Jonny Depp
Wonderland and the world through the Looking Glass were, I always knew, different from other imagined worlds. Nothing could be changed, although things in the story were always changing...Carroll moves his readers as he moves chess pieces and playing cards.
-A. S. Byatt
It would not have occurred to me even to suspect that the children's tale was in brilliant ways coded to be read by adults and was in fact an English classic, a universally acclaimed intellectual tour de force and what might be described as a psychological/anthropological dissection of Victorian England. It seems not to have occurred to me that the child-Alice of drawing rooms, servants, tea and crumpets and chess, was of a distinctly different background than my own. I must have been the ideal reader: credulous, unjudging, eager, thrilled. I knew only that I believed in Alice, absolutely.
-Joyce Carol Oates
The Alices are the greatest nonsense ever written, and far greater, in my view, than most sense.
-Philip Pullman