WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

LEWIS CARROLL

With an Introduction and Notes by Michael Irwin, Professor of English Literature, University of Kent at Canterbury

This selection of Carroll's works includes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, both containing the famous illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. No greater books for children have ever been written. The simple language, dreamlike atmosphere, and fantastical characters are as appealing to young readers today as ever they were.

Meanwhile, however, these apparently simple stories have become recognised as adult masterpieces, and extraordinary experiments, years ahead of their time, in Modernism and Surrealism. Through wordplay, parody and logical and philosophical puzzles, Carroll engenders a variety of sub-texts, teasing, ominous or melancholy. For all the surface playfulness there is meaning everywhere. The author reveals himself in glimpses.

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Contents

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland	7
Through the Looking-Glass	125

Contents list

	Author's Note	7
ONE	Down the Rabbit-Hole	13
TWO	The Pool of Tears	20
THREE	A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale	28
FOUR	The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill	35
FIVE	Advice from a Caterpillar	45
SIX	Pig and Pepper	55
SEVEN	A Mad Tea-Party	66
EIGHT	The Queen's Croquet Ground	75
NINE	The Mock Turtle's Story	85
TEN	The Lobster Quadrille	94
ELEVEN	Who Stole the Tans?	103
TWELVE	Alice's Evidence	111

With an Introduction and Notes by Michael Irwin, Professor of English Literature, University of Kent at Canterbury

Author's Note

Enquiries have been so often addressed to me, as to whether any answer to the Hatter's Riddle (see p. 71) can be imagined, that I may as well put on record here what seems to me to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz. "Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!" This, however, is merely an afterthought: the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all.

Christmas 1896