Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865, Classics Club Read)

Read for The Classics Club ❤

The wonky side of my brain loves Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass. Life needs to have a little bit of craziness, a little bit of magic, a little bit of believing that the impossible can be made possible.

“Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.”

The story itself shows Lewis Carroll's love of words. He was an absolute MASTER of play on words. You don't really see a lot of clever wordplay in most books today, so it's refreshing to read Lewis Carroll and find yourself snorting in laughter at similar-sounding words being misunderstood for each other, causing intense confusion for the character and amusement for the reader.

Clever Wordplay Examples in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Alice: You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn around on its axis.

Duchess: Talking of axes . . . chop off her head!"

Dormouse: And so these three little sisters (at the bottom of the treacle well) - they were learning to draw, you know.

Alice: What did they draw? But I don't understand. Where did they draw the treacle from?

Hatter: You can draw water out of a water-well so I should think you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well - eh, stupid?

Alice: But they were in the well.

Mock Turtle: When we were little we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle - we used to call him Tortoise.

Alice: Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn't one?

Mock Turtle: We called him Tortoise because he taught us.

Alice: And how many hours a day did you do lessons?

Mock Turtle: Ten hours the first day, nine the next, and so on.

Alice: What a curious plan?

Gryphon: That's the reason they're called lessons because they lessen from day to day.

I confess that as a child I thought Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was crazy. It didn't make sense, wasn't wholly linear, and I didn't understand or grasp much of the above wordplay. It was only when I became an adult and tried reading Lewis Carroll again did I fully understand and appreciate his talent and storytelling skill.

On that note, I probably wouldn't recommend this for child fiction. It's much too high-end and complex of a story for kids, at least kids whose brains functioned like mine when I was young. It's much more of a story to be appreciated by adults who will understand the complex cleverness that Lewis Carroll incorporated into his book.

Read the book, absolutely. It's a very fun read now that I'm an adult, and I actually had the blessed opportunity to read it out loud to my sister during our stay at home order for the COVID-19 pandemic. We thoroughly enjoyed the experience of me reading aloud so that's always a possibility for families, with or without kids.

I did just review a BRILLIANT YA prequel called Heartless about the Queen of Hearts' origin story by Marissa Meyer. Please do take time to read that review and please READ THAT BOOK. I can't recommend Heartless enough. When going back through my copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for quotes for this post, I had tons of jaw-dropping experiences by how much Marissa Meyer truly incorporated into her story, even down to the three sisters in the treacle well who are learning to draw things originating from the letter M.