Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Summary

On a hot summer afternoon Alice, bored beside her sister on a riverbank, sees a White Rabbit in a waistcoat take a watch out of its pocket and hurry down a rabbit-hole. She follows, falls slowly down a long well past cupboards and bookshelves, and lands in a hall of locked doors. A tiny golden key opens a door onto a lovely garden, but she is too large to pass. A bottle labelled DRINK ME shrinks her and a cake marked EAT ME makes her enormous, and her tears as a giant form a pool in which, shrunk again, she nearly drowns. The animals who swim out with her dry off by a Caucus-race organized by the Dodo, in which everyone wins, and the Mouse tells a long tale printed on the page in the shape of a tail. Sent by the Rabbit to fetch his gloves, Alice grows so large in his house that she fills it, and kicks Bill the Lizard up the chimney. In the wood she meets a hookah-smoking Caterpillar on a mushroom, who asks her who she is and tells her that one side of the mushroom will make her grow and the other shrink. At the Duchess's house the cook flings pepper and saucepans, the Duchess sings a lullaby about beating a sneezing boy, and the baby Alice carries off turns into a pig. The grinning Cheshire Cat tells her that everyone here is mad and fades away until only the grin remains. At the Mad Tea-Party the Hatter, the March Hare and the sleepy Dormouse sit at a long table where it is always six o'clock and pose a riddle with no answer. Alice at last reaches the garden, where gardeners paint white roses red, the Queen of Hearts orders beheadings for every offence, and croquet is played with flamingos and hedgehogs. The Gryphon takes her to the weeping Mock Turtle, who recounts his schooling in Reeling and Writhing, and the two dance the Lobster Quadrille. Finally the Knave of Hearts is tried for stealing the tarts before the King, while Alice keeps growing. Called as a witness, she protests against the Queen's demand for sentence before verdict, declares that the court is nothing but a pack of cards, and wakes on the bank with leaves fluttering onto her face. Her sister, musing on the dream, imagines the grown Alice keeping her childlike heart and telling such tales to children of her own. Carroll first told the story on a boat trip up the Thames on 4 July 1862 to Alice, Lorina and Edith Liddell, wrote it out as Alice's Adventures Under Ground, and expanded it for publication by Macmillan in 1865 with illustrations by John Tenniel.

Top Lessons

• Holding on to who you are

  Alice's body keeps changing size, and the Caterpillar's question about who she is leaves her unsure. Yet she keeps her manners, her curiosity and her sense of fairness, and those, more than her height, prove to be what makes her Alice.

• Words mean something

  Wonderland's creatures twist puns, take idioms literally and argue that saying what you mean is not the same as meaning what you say. The jokes work only because words normally carry fixed meanings, so the book quietly trains readers to listen closely to language.

• Courage to call nonsense by its name

  At the trial the Queen wants the sentence before the verdict, and everyone is afraid of her. Alice, grown to full size, says plainly that the idea is nonsense and that the court is only a pack of cards. Seeing clearly and speaking truthfully ends the bad dream.

• Rules that make sense and rules that do not

  Alice remembers sensible rules, such as not drinking from a bottle marked poison, and she tries to be polite. Wonderland is full of rules that serve no purpose, like the Caucus-race where everyone wins or the King's Rule Forty-two. The contrast helps children see why good rules exist.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The book is a children's dream fantasy, not a medical text, but several of its images have entered clinical and popular medical vocabulary. In 1955 the psychiatrist John Todd used the name 'Alice in Wonderland syndrome' for distortions of body image and of perceived size (micropsia, macropsia) reported especially with migraine and some infections; links to Carroll's own migraines are sometimes proposed, and should be treated as speculation. The phrase 'mad as a hatter' predates the book, and the association of hatters with mercury exposure from felting is often attached to Carroll's Hatter, though there is no evidence Carroll meant it. The bottle and cake that change Alice's body, the Caterpillar's hookah and mushroom, and Alice's careful recollection that drinking from a bottle marked poison is likely to disagree with you invite a light historical note on Victorian nursery medicines and poison labelling. The Cheshire Cat's 'we're all mad here' is playful logic, not a portrait of mental illness.

• Chapter I

  Alice checks whether the DRINK ME bottle is marked poison before tasting it, then shrinks to ten inches high.

• Chapter II

  Alice grows to over nine feet, weeps a pool, and doubts her own identity, testing her memory with multiplication and geography.

• Chapter V

  The Caterpillar with his hookah gives Alice the mushroom whose two sides make her grow or shrink; her neck stretches above the trees.

• Chapters VI–VII

  The Cheshire Cat's argument that everyone in Wonderland is mad, and the Mad Tea-Party with the Hatter, March Hare and ever-sleeping Dormouse.

• Chapter XII

  Alice wakes on the bank and her sister half-dreams the same scenes, explaining the adventures as a dream.