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Alice’s Day – various locations

July 6, 2019

One golden afternoon on 4 July 1862, Charles Dodgson, an Oxford don, took the 10-year-old Alice Liddell and her sisters on a boating picnic up the River Thames from Folly Bridge in Oxford. To amuse the children he told them a story about a little girl, sitting bored by a riverbank, who finds herself tumbling down a rabbit hole into a topsy-turvy world called Wonderland.

The story so delighted Alice that she begged him to write it down ā€“ the result was the 1864 handwritten manuscriptĀ Aliceā€™s Adventures Under Ground. This original manuscript, which was prepared as a gift for Alice Liddell, is now in the British Library and is available to view on theirĀ website. The following year the manuscript was published asĀ Aliceā€™s Adventures in WonderlandĀ under the pen name Lewis Carroll, with illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. A sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, was published in 1871.

Aliceā€™s Day commemoratesĀ an important moment for childrenā€™s literature and for Oxford. Alice became one of the most popular, most widely quoted and most widely translated childrenā€™s book ever written, with editions even in Esperanto and shorthand. It marked the birth of modern childrenā€™s literature. After Alice, childrenā€™s books became less stuffy and more entertaining. Oxford became a world centre of childrenā€™s stories and inspirational home to many authors and illustrators including Kenneth Grahame, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and Philip Pullman.

View programme here.

Details

Date:
July 6, 2019
Event Category:
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