Because of the Alice books, Neo can 'follow the white rabbit' to discover the truth about the Matrix, Jefferson Airplane can sing a psychedelic song about the White Rabbit, and we can all enjoy the strangely comprehensible nonsense of ' Jabberwocky.' Heck, anything that results in an amusement park ride where you get into a teacup is appealing to us. The books also provide a rich shared mythology for our culture. The Alice books, sometimes combined or referred to with the abbreviated title Alice in Wonderland, have been adapted numerous times into films (both live action and cartoon), plays, and musicals. Although one of the original audience members was the real-life Alice Liddell, the stories that Carroll composed for her (and her sisters') amusement have broad appeal for all readers, children and adults, from the nineteenth century until the present day. To entertain three of his favorite 'child-friends,' he began telling the stories that eventually developed into the Alice books.

The author of the Alice books, Lewis Carroll (the pen-name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a shy math professor at Oxford. Wonderland and Looking-Glass paved the way for many of the books that children and adults enjoy today – The Spiderwick Chronicles, the Harry Potter series, the Chronicles of Narnia, and so on. Without the curiosity, fantasy, and downright silliness of the Alice books, children's literature might not have branched out into the world of the imagination. While other Victorian books for children – like Tom Brown's Schooldays and the works of Mary Louisa Molesworth and Mary Martha Sherwood – gave rules for living, these books simply provided space in which to live. The result was a style of writing that simultaneously embraced nonsense and logic. Books that simply created imaginative worlds in which children could let their minds roam free. In fact, these books inaugurated a new era of children's literature in English: books that didn't have to be didactic or moralistic, that didn't teach children lessons. Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, are two of the most famous nineteenth-century children's fantasy novels.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass Introduction

Alice through the looking glass book