Synopses & Reviews
Original, experimental, and unparalleled in their charm, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There have enchanted readers for generations. The topsy-turvy dream worlds of Wonderland and the Looking-Glass realm are full of the unexpected: A baby turns into a pig, time stands still at a “mad” tea-party, and a chaotic game of chess turns seven-year-old Alice into a queen. These unforgettable tales—filled with sparkling wordplay and unbridled imagination—balance joyous nonsense with poignant moments of longing for the lost innocence of childhood.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Review
"The Alices are the greatest nonsense ever written, and far greater, in my view, than most sense." Philip Pullman
Review
"It would not have occurred to me even to suspect that the "children’s tale" was in brilliant ways coded to be read by adults and was in fact an English classic, a universally acclaimed intellectual tour de force and what might be described as a psychological/anthropological dissection of Victorian England. It seems not to have occurred to me that the child-Alice of drawing rooms, servants, tea and crumpets and chess, was of a distinctly different background than my own. I must have been the ideal reader: credulous, unjudging, eager, thrilled. I knew only that I believed in Alice, absolutely." Joyce Carol Oates
Review
"Wonderland and the world through the Looking Glass were, I always knew, different from other imagined worlds. Nothing could be changed, although things in the story were always changing…Carroll moves his readers as he moves chess pieces and playing cards." A. S. Byatt
Review
"Alice in Wonderland is one of the top 25 books of all time. I always loved the book and I always loved the various characters, the psychedelic nature of it and kind-of odd allegorical stories inside stories. I always thought it was beautiful." Jonny Depp
Review
"A work of glorious intelligence and literary devices…Nonsense becomes a form of higher sense" Malcolm Bradbury
About the Author
Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898). He wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for the amusement of eleven-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters, who were the daughters of the dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, where Dodgson taught mathematics. The book was published in 1865, and its first companion volume, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, followed in 1871.