Book description
'"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice (she was so
surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good
English). "Now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that
ever was! Goodbye, feet!"'
'I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole ... without
the least idea what was to happen afterwards,' wrote Lewis Carroll,
describing how Alice was conjured up one 'golden afternoon' in
1862 to entertain his child-friend Alice Liddell. His dream worlds of
nonsensical Wonderland and the back-to-front Looking Glass kingdom
depict order turned upside-down: a baby turns into a pig, time is
abandoned at a disorderly tea-party and a chaotic game of chess makes
a seven-year-old girl a Queen. But amongst the anarchic humour and
sparkling word play, puzzles and riddles, are poignant moments of
nostalgia for lost childhood.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in
English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the
beginning of the First World War.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) was born in 1832. Already
reading
The Pilgrim's Progress
at the age of seven, his exceptional intelligence was apparent from the
outset - his Mathematics master at Rugby wrote of him, 'I have not had a
more promising boy at his age' - and he went on to be awarded a double
first class honours in Maths at Christ Church, Oxford. Despite going on
to hold a lectureship at Christ Church for twenty-six years, however,
Dodgson found it difficult to apply himself to academic work, and it is
for his extraordinary literary works that he is known. His two
Alice
books were originally composed for the daughter of the dean of his
college, Alice Liddell, and are the most famous and enduring of his
works along with
The Hunting of the Snark
, a book of nonsense verse. He also wrote works on logic and satirical
pamphlets on Oxford politics, and became a pioneering amateur portrait
photographer, specializing in Victorian celebrities and children. He
died in 1898, at the age of sixty-five.
