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Lewis Carroll | 1865

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland began on a “golden afternoon” in 1862, when Charles Dodgson, the Oxford mathematician known as Lewis Carroll, told an improvised tale to 10-year-old Alice Liddell as they rowed along the River Isis. Her excitement pushed him to write it down, eventually leading to the 1865 publication with John Tenniel’s now-iconic illustrations, later reissued after an initial withdrawn print. Unlike the moral-teaching children’s books of its time, Alice embraced pure imagination, blending whimsy, logic puzzles, and sharp wordplay in a way that still shapes our culture and language today.

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