Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass — The Christmas Gift Edition (eBook)

The Christmas gift edition of both Alice books, complete in one volume — with every one of John Tenniel's illustrations restored to its place in the text, a presentation page for your own inscription, and a Twelve Nights reading plan that carries a family from 13 December to Christmas Day.

Alice began as a Christmas present. On 26 November 1864, Lewis Carroll placed a hand-written, hand-drawn little book in Alice Liddell's hands — Alice's Adventures Under Ground, inscribed on its dedication page: "A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer Day." Before it was a famous book, before it was a book at all, Alice was a Christmas gift, and through the Victorian age and long after it stayed one: the handsome illustrated volume given at Christmas year after year. This edition is given in the same spirit.

IT OPENS WITH THE GIFT ITSELF:

• A presentation page carrying Carroll's own 1864 inscription, with ruled lines — Presented To / From / Christmas — for your inscription.
• "The First Christmas Alice," the editor's introduction to this edition: the golden afternoon of 4 July 1862, Alice Liddell asking for the story in writing, the two years of hand-copying, and the Christmas presentation of 26 November 1864.
• The Twelve Nights in Wonderland reading plan — twelve sittings, 13 December to Christmas Day, one each evening, sized for reading aloud after supper; Wonderland takes the first six nights, Through the Looking-Glass the last six, and the final night ends, as the books do, with a poem.

THE BOOKS, COMPLETE:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), printed from the texts of the early Macmillan editions and cross-checked chapter by chapter against them.

THE PICTURES ARE THE POINT.

Tenniel drew 42 illustrations for Wonderland and 50 for Looking-Glass, and Carroll supervised them so closely that he withdrew the entire first printing of 1865 over the quality of their reproduction. Yet the copies of these books that circulate free online today have had the pictures stripped out. This edition puts all 92 back, each one set at the passage it illustrates — plus the Looking-Glass chessboard diagram, the Dramatis Personæ table, and Carroll's prefatory poems, including "All in the golden afternoon," which the online Wonderland text omits altogether.

INSIDE THE COMPANION APPARATUS (the complete standard-edition apparatus, in full):

• An introduction telling the whole story: the boat trip, the hand-written manuscript, the suppressed first edition of 1865, and the making of the sequel.
• Who's Who — Alice, the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Hatter, the Queens (all three, carefully distinguished), Humpty Dumpty, the Tweedles, the Lion and the Unicorn, the White Knight, and more.
• Five explainers: the famous parodies decoded; the logic, language, and mathematics jokes of a Christ Church don; the chess game of Looking-Glass, move by move; nonsense as a genre; and Tenniel and the pictures — how the Dalziel brothers' wood engravings carried his drawings to the page.
• A short life of Lewis Carroll / C. L. Dodgson, told factually and without sensationalism.
• A note on the period — Victorian childhood, Sunday-school verse, and the world the jokes were aimed at.
• Discussion questions for all 24 chapters plus the whole books — written for adult book clubs and for families and classrooms reading together.
• Honest production notes, because readers deserve them: the text of both books is verified against three witnesses; the "Wasp in a Wig" episode is NOT included — Carroll cut it before publication in 1871, and it belongs to a scholarly supplement, not to the book he published.
• Public domain, declared as such; the presentation page, the editor's gift introduction, the Twelve Nights plan, and the companion notes are new.

ALSO IN THE GIFT LINE:

this edition is also available as a large-format 8¼ × 11 in gift hardcover — set big for reading aloud, with the volume open between two readers and the pictures held up for the room — and a printable Christmas Gift Edition Book Club Kit (below) with the Twelve Nights plan, a Christmas Eve read-aloud hosting page, and a printable "Our Twelve Nights" record page.

Give it the way it was first given — inscribed, at Christmas.