DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

Lewis Carroll author John Tenniel illustrator Hugh Haughton editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd

Published:27th Mar '03

Should be back in stock very soon

This paperback is available in another edition too:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass cover

'A work of glorious intelligence and literary devices . . . Nonsense becomes a form of higher sense' Malcolm Bradbury

'I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole . . . without the least idea what was to happen afterwards,' wrote Lewis Carroll, describing how Alice was conjured up one 'golden afternoon' to entertain a young girl. His dream worlds of nonsensical Wonderland and the back-to-front Looking-Glass kingdom depict order turned upside-down: a baby turns into a pig, time is abandoned at a disordered tea-party and a seven-year-old girl is made Queen. But amongst the anarchic humour and sparkling word play, puzzles and riddles, are poignant moments of nostalgia for lost childhood.

Edited with an Introduction and notes by Hugh Haughton

“A work of glorious intelligence and literary devices…Nonsense becomes a form of higher sense”
 –Malcolm Bradbury

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

“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

“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

“The Alices are the greatest nonsense ever written, and far greater, in my view, than most sense.”
 –Philip Pullman

  • Short-listed for BBC Big Read Top 100 2003

ISBN: 9780141439761

Dimensions: 197mm x 129mm x 26mm

Weight: 327g

448 pages