Alice was seven years old, sitting on a riverbank with her sister, bored by a book with no pictures, when a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat ran past checking a pocket watch. She followed it down a rabbit hole and fell for what felt like a very long time. At the bottom she found a world where nothing worked the way it should.
In Wonderland, Alice kept changing size. She drank from a bottle labeled “DRINK ME” and shrank. She ate a cake labeled “EAT ME” and grew. She met a hookah-smoking caterpillar who asked “Who are you?” and she couldn’t answer properly because she had changed so many times she wasn’t sure anymore. She attended a tea party that never ended because Time had stopped, argued with a queen who wanted to behead everyone, and played croquet with flamingos as mallets and hedgehogs as balls.
Lewis Carroll based Alice on Alice Liddell, one of three sisters he told the story to during a boat trip on the Thames in July 1862. The real Alice asked him to write it down. Carroll produced a handwritten manuscript and later published it as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. The sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), sent Alice through a mirror into a world organized as a chess game, where she started as a pawn and ended as a queen.
Alice is one of the most recognizable characters in English literature. She has been adapted into films, stage plays, ballets, operas, and video games continuously since the 1860s. Carroll wrote her as sensible and direct, a child trying to make sense of a world that refuses to follow rules.
Reading Order
See the complete Alice in Wonderland reading order for all books in the series.