This selection of Carrolls works includes Alices Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel. Through the Looking Glass. both containing the famous illustrations by Sir Iohn Tenniel. No greater books for children have ever been written. The simple language, dreamlike atmosphere, and fantastical characters are as appealing to young readers today as ever they were.

Meanwhile. however, these apparently simple stories have become recognised as adult masterpieces, and extraordinary experiments, years ahead of their time. in Modernism and Surrealism. Through wordplay, parody and logical and philosophical puzzles. Carroll engenders a variety of sub-texts, teasing, ominous or melancholy. For all the surface playfulness there is meaning everywhere. The author reveals himself in glimpses.

The book in your hands is the most accessible of all literary masterpieces, and one of the strangest. A number of books for children, including Kenneth Grahames The Wind in the Willows and A. A. Milnes Winnie the Pooh, have a charm and humour which can survive for the adult reader, partly for the sake of old association, partly in their own right. The Alice books far transcend that category. They are major works at either level. For a child there could hardly be a better, more effortless, introduction to great literature. Here, in simple English, are fast-moving, funny, fantastical stories which repeatedly break out into riddles, puzzles and rhymes. They instantly entertain, yet everywhere seem to offer more than meets the eye, more than can be readily explained. For any intelligent child they leave an aftertaste: they have somehow hinted at new worlds of communication and experience. For the adult these are likewise entertaining works, diversified with paradox and parody, but also astonishing exercises in literary premonition, anticipating, and shedding light on, the work of some of the greatest twentieth-century writers, both in prose and in verse.

It has become academically fashionable to claim that these are childrens books no longer read by children. I cannot see why this should be the case, unless parents have lost their nerve. The historical and cultural impediments are of the trivial kind that an imaginative child can negotiate with ease - a few background details, three or four passages of an unfamiliar kind of sentimentality. The first ten minutes of the film Jurassic Park, a notorious recent child-pleaser, are far more bewildering than anything in Alice. Young readers, like young viewers, are perfectly capable of hanging on through obscurities till the story clarifies. They should be given the chance.

Introduction

Alices Adventures in Wonderland

Through the Looking-Glass

Notes