The Victorian Era

What Is the History of Alice in Wonderland?

Article · Literature & Theatre · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898) under the pen name Lewis Carroll, and was first published by Macmillan on 26 November 1865, with forty-two illustrations by John Tenniel. The story originated on 4 July 1862, when Dodgson told it to Alice Liddell, the ten-year-old daughter of Henry Liddell, the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, during a boat trip on the Thames from Folly Bridge to Godstow. The history of the book is examined in Children’s Literature in the Victorian Era, and the wider literary context is set out in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word.

The Origin of the Story

On 4 July 1862 Dodgson, then a young mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, took a party on the river that included the three Liddell sisters — Lorina, Alice, and Edith — and the family governess, Miss Prickett. To while away the afternoon he improvised a story about a bored little girl who followed a white rabbit down a hole and found herself in a strange underground world. Alice Liddell was so taken with the tale that she asked him to write it down, and Dodgson spent the next two and a half years turning the improvisation into a manuscript.

The manuscript was completed in 1864, under the title Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, and was hand-copied and illustrated by Dodgson himself. The original manuscript is now in the British Library. Alice Liddell received her copy in November 1864, three years after the boat trip.

The Making of the Published Book

Dodgson submitted the manuscript to several friends, including the novelist Henry Kingsley, the writer George MacDonald, and the publisher Alexander Macmillan. Macmillan’s readers were enthusiastic, and the firm agreed to publish the book. Dodgson, persuaded by friends, agreed to have it illustrated by the political cartoonist John Tenniel, then at the height of his reputation on the staff of Punch.

The book was printed and bound in time for the Christmas trade of 1865, with the title altered to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Tenniel was dissatisfied with the first print run of 2,000 copies, and Dodgson agreed to recall the sheets for a fresh setting. The “1865” first edition that survives today is therefore a reissue of the corrected printing. The book sold steadily rather than spectacularly in its first years, and it was the publication of the German translation in 1869, and the stage adaptation by Savile Clarke in 1886, that turned Alice into a runaway success: by 1898 well over 100,000 copies had been sold in Britain alone.

Anecdote has it that Queen Victoria was charmed by the book and asked for Dodgson’s next work, only to receive his mathematical treatise An Elementary Treatise on Determinants. The story is not well documented and may be apocryphal, but it has become a fixed part of the book’s later mythology.

Through the Looking-Glass

Dodgson produced a sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, which was published by Macmillan in December 1871, again illustrated by Tenniel. The book was conceived as a Christmas gift for Alice Liddell and went through several drafts; the famous opening chessboard framing of the action was worked out in correspondence with the child actress Ellen Cookson, who played the White Pawn.

Through the Looking-Glass introduced most of the characters now best known from the Alice books: Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Humpty Dumpty, the Red Queen and the White Queen, the White Knight, the Jabberwock, and the Bandersnatch. It also included the nonsense verse “Jabberwocky”, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”, and “The Hunting of the Snark”, the last of which Dodgson published separately as a small book in 1876.

The Tenniel Illustrations and the Book’s Later Illustrators

Tenniel’s wood-engraved illustrations have remained the canonical images of the Alice books, and Macmillan has continued to issue the volumes with his designs. The illustrations were respected, imitated, and parodied from the start, and Dodgson himself, with characteristic fussiness, kept a tight hold on the visual treatment of his work.

Among the best-known later illustrators, Arthur Rackham produced a celebrated colour edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1907; Harry Rountree illustrated editions in 1916 and 1920; Willy Pogány’s version appeared in 1929; Mervyn Peake, often credited with illustrating Alice, in fact made his name with the Gormenghast novels, not with this text; Lisbeth Zwerger, the Austrian illustrator born in 1954, produced a notable small-format edition in 1999; and Salvador Dalí produced a set of colour illustrations for a 1969 Maeght edition. The original 1865 manuscript, hand-copied and illustrated by Dodgson, has remained a separate object of study in its own right.

Adaptations and Afterlife

The Alice books have generated one of the largest bodies of adaptation in English children’s literature. Dodgson himself produced a stage version, Alice in Wonderland, in 1886; the actor Henry Savile Clarke opened a separate dramatisation at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre, London, in 1886, with the child actress Phoebe Carlo as Alice, and the show ran for a long summer season. Among the most significant later adaptations, the Walt Disney animated feature Alice in Wonderland (1951), directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, fixed a particular visual vocabulary in the twentieth century; Jonathan Miller’s 1966 television film was admired for its black-and-white severity; and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) and its sequel Alice Through the Looking-Glass (2016) were major screen adaptations of the period.

The survival of the Alice books as a continuous presence in print, on stage, and on screen, from the 1860s to the present, is one of the most striking features of modern children’s literature. The parallel history of the period is examined in Children’s Literature in the Victorian Era.