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Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,

Dreaming as the days go by,

Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream—

Lingering in the golden gleam—

Life, what is it but a dream?6

THE END

INTRODUCTION: ALICES ADVENTURES UNDER GROUND

If Alice’s Adventures really began on 4 July 1862 on the famous boat-trip along the River Isis, their textual life began soon afterwards when, at Alice’s request, he wrote it out for her, with illustrations. As Carroll wrote later:

The germ of Alice was an extensive story, told in a boat to the 3 children of Dean Liddell: it was afterwards written out for her, in MS print, with pen-and-ink pictures (such pictures!) of my own devising: without the least idea, at the time, that it would ever be published. But friends urged me to print it, so it was re-written, and enlarged, and published.1

The manuscript version was completed on 10 February 1863 and the pictures, which proved more recalcitrant, on 13 September the following year, 1864. Having had the completed manuscript bound, Dod-gson presented it to Alice, under the title Alice’s Adventures under Ground, on 26 November as ‘A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer Day’. As a result of her and other readers’ enthusiastic reception of it, he then went on to revise and expand it (enlarging it from 12,715 words to 26, 211), publishing it in 1865 with the new title of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Though we will never know exactly what form the original ‘germ’ of the story took that ‘Summer Day’, the first hand-written and illustrated version remained in Alice Liddell’s possession. Then on 1 March 1885 Dodgson approached her, to ask whether she had ‘any objection to the original MS book of Alice’s Adventures (which I suppose you still possess) being published in facsimile’; though he knows he risks being charged with ‘gross egoism’, he is convinced ‘there must be many who would like to see the original form’.2 She hadn’t, and Macmillan duly brought out a full facsimile edition of 5,000 for Christmas 1886

(though, in respect towards Alice’s wishes, without reproducing the photograph of the seven-year-old heroine at the end).3

Though some previous English editions of Alice have included extracts from Alice’s Adventures under Ground, none have reprinted it complete in readable printed form, as here. The earlier version will never replace the fuller, revised text, but it is of considerable historical interest as the first textual incarnation of one of the classics of children’s literature: it’s also interesting in its own right. If not exactly raw, it is none the less a less cooked version of the story, and it tells us a lot about Dodgson’s original conception as well as his secondary elaboration and development of the primary material when expanding it for publication. Like Goethe’s ur-Faust or the 1799 draft of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Alice’s Adventures under Ground is more than a pretext, it is a fascinating and distinct text in its own right. For this reason, though the bulk of the text was absorbed into the final printed text and is therefore familiar to all readers of Alice, the cumulative effect of the ur-Alice is very different. It is certainly less artfully elaborated and unified, but it has its own dreamy, associative integrity, and it’s altogether more primitive and rooted in a world of physical transformations than the full published version.

In enlarging the book for publication in 1864–5, Dodgson not only more than doubled its length (the first version has only four chapters, the later twelve), he added some of its most memorable characters – the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, the Duchess and the Cheshire Cat; some of its most familiar songs (‘Fury said to a mouse’, ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little bat’, ‘Will you walk a little faster, said a whiting to a snail?’); and some of its funniest satirical episodes, such as the extended pun-studded