Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland.

CARROLL, Lewis. [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson].

$25,000.00

Item Number: 142979

London: MacMillan and Co, 1879.

Early edition with sixty-second thousand stated on the title page of this classic work, boldly inscribed by the author on the half-title page, “Edith Mary Alice Berkeley from the Author, May 15/80.” Octavo, original cloth, gilt titles to the spine, all edges gilt, publisher’s cloth s, all edges gilt, housed in a modern scarlet morocco slipcase and chemise. 7 1/8 x 4 1/2 inches (18 x 12 cm); 192 pp., [2] pp. ads, half-title; electrotyped frontispiece, and 42 illustrations from the woodcuts by Dalziel after John Tenniel. In near fine condition. From the library of actor William E. Self, with his book label on the front pastedown. Housed in a custom half morocco chemise and slipcase. Rare and desirable signed and inscribed.

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. Through the Looking-Glass can be seen as a mirror image of the Alice's Adventures. For example, the latter begins outdoors in the warmth of May 4 and uses the imagery of playing cards, while the former begins indoors on a snowy, cold November 4 and uses the imagery of chess. "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).