One summer afternoon in 1862, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, his Oxford friend, and three little girls set out on a boat trip. Somewhere along the way, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was created. Although it was not the first story that Dodgson had told the daughters of Henry George Liddell, the dean of Christ Church in Oxford, it was one that immediately captivated Alice Liddell, the prototype for the fictional seven-year-old heroine. Her later requests for Dodgson to “write it down” led to his becoming one of the world’s favorite authors; his work was eventually translated into more than forty-five languages and became part of the heritage of most literate people growing up in Western culture.

Dodgson, who transposed his first two names into the pen name Lewis Carroll, was a shy and seemingly conventional Oxford mathematician who could relate most easily with children, particularly young girls. Later ages regarded his seemingly innocent affinity for children as the sign of a possible neurosis and an inability to grow up. Alice Liddell was only one of many young girls who shared with him the secret world of childhood in which he spent much of his adult life.

Carroll’s attraction to fantasy expressed itself in many ways, among them his love of whimsical letters, gadgets, theatricals, toys, and, of course, fantasy stories. The Alice stories were first prepared for Alice Liddell in a handwritten manuscript and initially given the title Alice’s Adventures Under Ground; the book was published in its present form in 1865 and was an almost immediate popular success. Adding to its originality were the illustrations by Sir John Tenniel (for his model, he did not use the real Alice, who, unlike the pictured child, had short dark hair and bangs).

The book—which was followed in 1871 by the even more brilliant sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There—has always been enjoyed on several levels. It is a children’s story, but it is also a book full of interest for adults and specialists such as mathematicians, linguists, logicians, and Freudians. It may be the suggestion of a philosophical underpinning that gives the work its never-ending appeal for adults.

Viewed as children’s literature, the book offers its young readers a charming new outlook that dispenses with the moralistic viewpoint then so prevalent. Alice is neither continuously nice nor thoroughly naughty; she is simply a curious child whose queries lead her into strange situations. In the end, she is neither punished nor rewarded. A moral, proposing that she do this or that, is absent. Indeed, Carroll pokes fun at many of the ideas with which Alice, a well-bred English child, was imbued. The Mock Turtle, for example, chides the sacred subject of learning by terming the branches of arithmetic Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. Children who read the book are permitted to see adults quite unlike the perfect beings usually portrayed. It is the story’s adults rather than Alice who are rude, demanding, and ridiculous.

As a work for the specialist, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland touches on many puzzles that are subsequently even more thoroughly presented in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. The playfulness with language, for example, involves puns, parodies, and clever phrasing but does not deal as fully with the basic nature of language as does its sequel. Even in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , however, Carroll’s casual amusement with words often has deeper meaning. When he parodies the well-known poems and songs of his day, he is clearly questioning their supercilious platitudes. When he makes a pun (the Gryphon tells the...