Alice in Wonderland

Alice In Wonderland is based on real characters.

Is the girl shown here in this oil paint Alice Liddell, the main character of Alice in Wonderland, the all-time hit in the children and adult's literature?

(Picture: One Summer's Day by William Brymner - 1884)

Maybe not, but the picture title and the walking little girl are evocative of the dedication that Lewis Carroll made for Alice in the book he wrote for Alice Liddell, which at this time he titled: Alice's Adventures Under Ground.

In fact, Lewis Carroll wrote the following dedication in the manuscript he handled to Alicia in November of 1864:

A Christmas Gift
to Dear Child
in Memory
of a Summer Day

Now you can download Alice in Wonderland in EBook format from Datum.

Alice's Adventures In Wonderland.

This masterpiece of the children's literature is more than a fantastic narrative from the imagination of a prolific writer, photographer, and mathematician. Alice in Wonderland is also the product of an epoch in the search for new horizons in the science.

Previous to Alice in Wonderland, Ludvig Holberg, near a century before, in 1741, wrote an adventure story about a character that goes down a cave to explore the underground world: Niel’s Klim’s Underground Travels. And in 1692, Edmund Halley, a British astronomer, and mathematician put forth the idea of a hollow Earth when he tried to explain the deviations of the magnetic field of the Earth,

Not to mention that Athanasius Kircher, in 1664 published a geological and geographical investigation that culminated with his Mundus Subterraneus (Subterranean World) in which he suggested that the ocean tides were caused by water moving to and from a subterranean ocean.

Niels Klim's Journey Under The Ground.

Almost simultaneously with Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, in France, Jules Verne, in 1864, published his Journey to the Interior of the Earth.

So, the idea of a “habitable” underground was not new to the fiction and fantastic literature writers, and possibly Lewis Carroll was related with some of those published works.