Lewis Carroll Tells Alice: Wonderland Is Born
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Oxford, improvised a story for ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her sisters during a boat trip on the Thames on July 4, 1862. Alice asked him to write it down. The tale grew from a handwritten gift called "Alice's Adventures Under Ground" into two published novels that invented an entirely new form of literature: the nonsense narrative. Carroll populated his world with logical puzzles disguised as absurdity, from the Mad Hatter's unanswerable riddle to the Queen of Hearts' impossible croquet game. The books sold millions in Carroll's lifetime and have never gone out of print, influencing everything from surrealist art to computer science.
July 4, 1862
164 years ago
Key Figures & Places
What Else Happened on July 4
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