Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Writing, Publication, and Circulation

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics teacher at Christ Church, Oxford. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland originated in stories he told the Liddell children. Collingwood's biography transcribes his diary entry for July 4, 1862, recording a boating trip with the three Liddell sisters. A later addition stated that he had told Alice's Adventures Under Ground during that outing and promised to write it down for Alice.

The text was not completed overnight. Carroll gradually organized the story and drew his own illustrations, presenting the manuscript to Alice Liddell on November 26, 1864. The private manuscript had four chapters; the published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland expanded to twelve, with forty-two illustrations by John Tenniel. Oral story, gift manuscript, and public edition were connected but did not share a single moment of completion.

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The book begins beside a river. Alice follows a White Rabbit carrying a pocket watch into a rabbit hole, drinks liquid from a bottle, eats cake, and repeatedly grows and shrinks. Trying to find a key and a route into the garden, she encounters an animal race, questioning by a Caterpillar, a gathering permanently stuck at teatime, and a croquet game organized by the Queen.

Encounters and exchanges of questions link these scenes. Asked who she is by the Caterpillar, the repeatedly transformed Alice struggles to answer. On the croquet ground, hedgehogs are balls, flamingos are mallets, and even the hoops move about. Her familiar knowledge and rules continually meet new obstacles. At the end, the cards fly at her and she wakes beside her sister's lap. Her sister's reverie reconnects Wonderland with growing up, memory, and everyday life.

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Carroll often turns language itself into an event. The Mouse says its tale is long and sad, but Alice thinks of its long tail, and the text then takes the shape of a tail. At the tea party, characters debate the difference between saying what one means and meaning what one says. A riddle without an answer and a watch unable to keep ordinary time make familiar conversation difficult.

This instability extends to authority. During the trial, the King invents a rule and imposes an interpretation on an obscure poem, while the Queen demands sentencing before the verdict. Alice finally protests aloud, recognizing them as a pack of cards. In these specific scenes, the work's force lies in inviting readers to identify absurdities in language, manners, and procedure rather than accepting every rule a character asserts.

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In summer 1865, Oxford University Press printed two thousand copies for Carroll, with Macmillan as publisher. Dissatisfied with the printed illustrations, Tenniel prompted Carroll to stop distribution and commission a new printing from Richard Clay. Bond's publication study notes that the first copies to circulate were principally gifts, with insufficient evidence that the first printing was ever formally offered for public sale. Its withdrawal should therefore not be described simply as a recall from all purchasers.

The new printing bore 1866 on its title page but was already on sale in November 1865. In April 1866, with Tenniel's consent, Carroll authorized the remaining old sheets to be sold to America. They received title pages bearing the name of New York publisher Appleton, were bound in Britain, and exported. The same printed text thus carried different publishing imprints, demonstrating the need to distinguish title-page dates from actual release dates.

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In 1869, Macmillan issued French and German translations. French translator Henri Bué faced the original's puns and parodies of English verse. Collingwood records that, in handling the crocodile poem, he instead parodied La Fontaine, familiar to French readers. This was not simply word substitution but an attempt to recreate humor within a different body of cultural knowledge.

The 1869 French edition included in the exhibition catalog also shows Tenniel's images circulating with texts in different languages. For English readers, the 1887 “People's Edition” reduced the price. The authorized Nursery Alice of 1890 simplified the text and enlarged and colored twenty illustrations. Price, intended age group, and visual arrangements all helped determine who could enter the story.

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The work moved beyond a single book format early on. Collingwood records that Savile Clarke asked to adapt the two Alice stories for the stage; Carroll agreed and helped supply additional lyrics. In the diary entry for December 30, 1886, reproduced in the biography, Carroll described seeing the performance at the Prince of Wales's Theatre and especially approved of the Mad Tea Party and the song and dance involving Alice and the Cheshire Cat. This provides specific evidence of cross-media circulation during his lifetime.

The stage version combined the rabbit-hole story with Through the Looking-Glass, but this should not obscure the structures of the two original books. From storytelling and illustration to translators' rewriting and actors' performances, Alice's circulation continually involved further transformation. The early evidence presents a work sustained by wordplay and a dream structure, repeatedly reorganized for different settings of reading and viewing.

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