Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking-Glass; What Alice Found There

First published in 1865, these endearing tales of an imaginative child's dream world by Lewis Carroll, pen name for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, are written with charming simplicity. While delighting children with a heroine who represents their own thoughts and feelings about growing up, the tale is appreciated by adults as a gentle satire on education, politics, literature, and Victorian life in general. All the delightful and bizarre inhabitants of Wonderland are here: the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat, the hooka-smoking Caterpillar and the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Ugly Duchess. . . and, of course, Alice herself - growing alternately taller and smaller, attending demented tea parties and eccentric croquet games, observing everything with clarity and rational amazement.

The literary life of "Lewis Carroll" became familiar to a wide circle of readers, but the private life of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was retired and uneventful. Born on January 27, 1832, in Daresbury, Cheshire, where his father, the Reverend Charles Dodgson, was vicar, the author attended Rugby School for four years and matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in May, 1850. He took first class honors in mathematics in 1854 and the following year was appointed mathematical lecturer at Christ Church, a position he held until 1881. Late in the year 1865, he published, under the pseudonym "Lewis Carroll," Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the "Alice" of the title being patterned after a daughter of Dean Liddell of the college. In 1869 came Phantasmagoria, in 1871 Through the Looking-Glass, in 1876 The Hunting of the Snark, and in 1883 Rhyme and Reason. During the years in which "Lewis Carroll" was delighting children of all ages, C. L. Dodgson was publishing mathematical works, the most famous of these being Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879). Though his authorship of the "Alice" books was well known, "Carroll" shied away from publicity, stating that "Mr. Dodgson neither claimed nor acknowledged any connection with the books not published under his name." The reluctant author died in 1898. His memory is appropriately kept alive by perpetual endowment of a cot in the Children's Hospital, Great Ormond Street, London. Martin Gardner is a science writer who for twenty-five years wrote the "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American. He is the author of some seventy books about mathematics, science, philosophy, and literature, including two novels and a collection of short stories. His Annotated Alice and More Annotated Alice have been combined into a single Annotated Alice. He has also written The Annotated Snark and edited The Universe in a Handkerchief, a collection of Carroll's writings about recreational mathematics, puzzles, ciphers, word play, and games. He and his wife live in the western mountains of North Carolina.