Not only was it the first example of a children's book which seeks to entertain rather than teach morals, but the way she enters fantasy worlds has inspired almost every subsequent heroine of the genre - Dorothy into the Land of Oz, Wendy (Peter Pan) into Neverland, and the Pevensie siblings in the C.S. The stories' plots are too well-known to repeat here but they cannot be dismissed merely as an escapist fantasy.Īlice's adventures also mark a paradigmatic shift in children's literature. It was published in November 1865, with illustrations by John Teniel, the long-time cartoonist with Punch magazine (and the first illustrator to be knighted for his work).
#CAT WALKS ON OLD MANUSCRIPT PLUS#
He was thorough in his written work, researching the natural history of the animals featured and taking the opinion of other children before he presented Alice with a 15,500-word plus hand-written manuscript in November 1864.Įven then, he was busy on a more comprehensive work for publication, expanding the work to 27,500 words by adding the episodes featuring the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Tea Party. A month later, he told her the plot while on another boating trip, and in November that year, he began writing in earnest. 'Through the Looking Glass' has at least 65.Īs mentioned, both the stories were born out of the tale recited on that boating trip in May or July 1862, which so entranced its audience - Alice, 10, and her sisters Lorina, 13, and Edith, 8, the three young daughters of then Dean of a top Oxford college (and later varsity Vice Chancellor) Henry Liddell - especially Alice that she requested he write it down for her.ĭodgson began the very next day. Nabokov was the second to translate it into Russian. 'Alice in Wonderland' has at least been translated into 175 languages, including various dialects and even invented languages like Klingon, and has multiple editions in many of them - more than 1,200 versions in Japanese alone, as per one account. The appeal of these two books, by Oxford academic and cleric Charles Luttwidge Dodgson (1832-98), who took the pen name Lewis Carroll, can be gauged by the fact that they have never been out of print ever since their first appearance while being translated into nearly hundreds of languages.
'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' (1865), or 'Alice in Wonderland', as it is more popularly known, and its sequel 'Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There' (1871-2) ('Through the Looking-Glass' more commonly) stand high both by themselves, and the adaptations that they have inspired across various media. Not bad for a story of a bored but determined girl who followed a nervous rabbit, moaning that he was getting late, into a bizarre underground world, and then, climbed through a mirror into a parallel world, set out like a chess board.Īnd in her peregrinations through these strange illogical worlds, she meets the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the King and Queen of Hearts, the Gryphon, the Jabberwock, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Humpty Dumpty, the White Knight, and a host of many more.
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