Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

CARROLL, Lewis. [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson].

$3,000.00

Item Number: 137243

London: Macmillan and Co, 1867.

Finely bound early printing of Carroll’s beloved children’s classic. Octavo, bound in full 20th century scarlet crushed levant morocco by William Bennet, gilt titles and elaborate gilt tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, central gilt ornament of Alice holding a rabbit to the front panel, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers, illustrated by John Tenniel, many with hand-coloring and including tissue-guarded frontispiece. In near fine condition. Bookplate and neat ownership name.

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).