Summary
Lewis Carroll conjured up "Alice in Wonderland" one afternoon in 1862 to entertain young Alice Liddell, the daughter of the local church dean. A century and a half later, the original "Alice" and its sequel, "Through the Looking Glass," are still entertaining children and adults alike. Full of nonsense and whimsical characters, sparkling word play, puzzles, and riddles, these books also offer poignant moments of nostalgia for lost childhood. Although he published many books in a variety of genres, Carroll will always be best known for these two childhood classics.
In "Alice in Wonderland," the young Alice falls asleep in a meadow and dreams that she follows a White Rabbit down a rabbit hole. She has many wondrous, often bizarre adventures with thoroughly illogical and very strange creatures. Often changing size unexpectedly (she grows as tall as a house and shrinks to three inches), Alice encounters such characters as the March Hare, the Cheshire Cat, the Duchess, the Mad Hatter, the Mock Turtle, and the Red Queen.
In "Through the Looking Glass," Alice, now slightly older, walks through a mirror into the Looking-Glass House and immediately becomes involved in a strange game of chess. Soon, she is exploring the rest of the house, meeting a sequence of characters now familiar to most: Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Red Queen, Humpty Dumpty, and the Walrus, just to name a few. The popular and linguistically playful poem "Jabberwocky" is also featured in "Through the Looking Glass."
Charles Luthwidge Dodgson was born in Daresbury, England on January 27, 1832. He became a minister of the Church of England and a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church College, Oxford. He was the author, under his own name, of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, Symbolic Logic, and other scholarly treatises.
He is better known by his pen name of Lewis Carroll. Using this name, he wrote Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. He was also a pioneering photographer, and he took many pictures of young children, especially girls, with whom he seemed to empathize. He died on January 14, 1898.
(Bowker Author Biography)
