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One of the fantasy classics of the English language is Alice in Wonderland. In present times, the sequel, published several years later, Through the Looking Glass, is considered to be one book with Alice having two parts. Everyone should have read this book by the time they get out of high school, at least for cultural literacy, since pieces of this book have become part of our language. Alice chases the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole – ever “gone down a rabbit hole” on the Internet? Upper elementary school students are capable of and will enjoy reading Alice, but there are puns and bits of satire that only an adult will “get.”
Alice is a little girl (probably modelled after a real girl that the author knew) who chases a curious white rabbit down a rabbit hole and ends up in Wonderland, a bizarre land where everything is different and a bit illogical, or maybe just follows a different logic than exists in our world. Her episodic adventures and unique characters that she meets makes for a very interesting story. If anything, the second part, Through the Looking Glass, when Alice returns to Wonderland, is filled with even more bizarre characters and strange logic. The confrontation of an ordinary little British girl with the crazy characters and situations in Wonderland makes the humor in the story work. Two poems that Carroll wrote, Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark, are also considered to be classics of nonsense verse. Just as a point of interest – a famous 1943 science-fiction short story, All Mimsy were the Borogroves, by Lewis Padgett, draws heavily on the text of Jabberwocky.
George MacDonald, a writer of Biblically-based fairy tales (see my review on The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie), was a mentor to Lewis Carroll and encouraged him to try to publish Alice. However, Carroll’s book is a very different kind of fantasy writing compared to George MacDonald. It is more of an absurd fantasy, quite funny, and not unlike Roald Dahl’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (see my review).
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Dodgson (1832-1898), a mathematics professor at Oxford University in England. Maybe that explains the book – you know, math professors… He was a brilliant mathematician and published widely in technical journals and wrote a number of books on various aspects of mathematics, including different forms of logic, which may have helped him with the many curious twists of thinking found in Through the Looking Glass.
Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914) made the original illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, which are still the best-known today. He was for almost 50 years the cartoonist for Punch, the British satirical literary magazine, which finally shut down in 2002 after being started in 1841. Most of his more than 2000 cartoons for Punch were of a political nature and very satirical. That is probably why, along with how Tenniel exaggerated unreal figures, Charles Dodgson especially wanted Tenniel to illustrate Alice in Wonderland.