Alice in Wonderland.

CARROLL, Lewis. [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson]. With Illustrations by Eileen A. Soper.

Item Number: 145925

London: George G. Harrap and Company Ltd, 1947.

First edition thus of Carroll’s beloved children’s classic with illustrations by Eileen A. Soper. Octavo, bound in full contemporary calf by Bayntun Riviere with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised bands, gilt ruling and  fleuron corner pieces to the front and rear panels, gilt central ornament of the White Rabbit to the front panel, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt, tissue-guarded colored frontispiece of the Mad Tea-party, illustrations by Eileen A. Soper. In very good condition.

Alice's Adventures were "born on a golden afternoon" in July 1862, when the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) took the three small daughters of Dean Liddell of Christ Church on a boating trip up the Isis. Carroll delighted the three children by relating Alice's adventures, and eventually promised his favorite among the three, Alice Liddell, to write the story down for her. "The two Alice books completed the reinstatement of the imagination, so long disapproved of by the opponents of fairy stories, to its proper place. ‘Alice is, in a word, a book of that extremely rare kind which will belong to all the generations to come until the language becomes obsolete’" (Carpenter & Prichard, 102).