Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland appeared in 1865, written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pen name Lewis Carroll. The story follows a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole and lands in a strange world populated by talking, human-like animals. Carroll, a mathematician who taught at Christ Church in Oxford, first told the tale to children during a boating trip on the Thames.

The world Alice enters operates on its own peculiar logic. She changes size repeatedly, meets a grinning cat that can vanish, sits through a tea party that never ends, and encounters a queen quick to order beheadings. Carroll's writing belongs to the literary nonsense tradition, a style that plays with language, logic and expectation rather than following conventional storytelling rules. Characters speak in riddles, and familiar verses are rewritten into absurdity.

The book is among the best-known works of Victorian literature, and its structure, characters and imagery have shaped popular culture and later fiction, especially fantasy. Names such as the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat now circulate far beyond the page, in film, music and everyday speech.