Alice follows a waistcoat-wearing rabbit down a hole and the book never quite lands back on solid ground again, which is the joke and the pleasure of it. Lewis Carroll's nonsense rewards reading aloud especially, since the wordplay and the White Rabbit's fussing come alive far more in voice than on the page.
About this book
First published 1865 · Never out of print · More than 100 languages
On 4 July 1862, Charles Dodgson rowed up the Thames from Oxford with the three young daughters of his college dean, and made up a story to pass the afternoon. Ten-year-old Alice Liddell liked it enough to ask him to write it down. He did, expanded it, and published it three years later under the name Lewis Carroll.
It has never been out of print since. It has been translated into more than a hundred languages, filmed dozens of times, and quoted so often that phrases from it (down the rabbit hole, mad as a hatter) now live in the language itself.
The copy on this shelf is the full original text with Arthur Rackham’s 1907 colour illustrations, the edition many collectors consider the most beautiful Alice ever printed.
Chapters
A long one: read it a chapter a night.
- CHAPTER I. Down the Rabbit-Hole
- CHAPTER II. The Pool of Tears
- CHAPTER III. A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale
- CHAPTER IV. The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill
- CHAPTER V. Advice from a Caterpillar
- CHAPTER VI. Pig and Pepper
- CHAPTER VII. A Mad Tea-Party
- CHAPTER VIII. The Queen’s Croquet-Ground
- CHAPTER IX. The Mock Turtle’s Story
- CHAPTER X. The Lobster Quadrille
- CHAPTER XI. Who Stole the Tarts?
- CHAPTER XII. Alice’s Evidence
Public domain. Source text via Project Gutenberg, PG boilerplate removed. View the source edition