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