The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass

Lewis Carroll

W. W. Norton & Company, 2000 - Literary Criticism - 312 pages

For over half a century, Martin Gardner has established himself as one of the world's leading authorities on Lewis Carroll. His Annotated Alice, first published in 1960, has over half a million copies in print around the world and is highly sought after by families and scholars alike—for it was Gardner who first decoded the wordplay and the many mathematical riddles that lie embedded in Carroll's two classic stories: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Forty years after this groundbreaking publication, Norton is proud to publish the Definitive Edition of The Annotated Alice, a work that combines the notes of Gardner's 1960 edition with his 1990 update, More Annotated Alice, as well as additional new discoveries and updates drawn from Gardner's encyclopedic knowledge of the texts. Illustrated with John Tenniel's classic and beloved art—along with many recently discovered Tenniel pencil sketches—The Annotated Alice is Gardner's most beautiful and enduring tribute to Carroll's masterpieces yet. The redoubtable Gardner has been called by Douglas Hofstadter "one of the great intellects produced in this country in this century." With The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, we have this remarkable scholar's crowning achievement.

What people are saying

Review: The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition

User Review  - Azella Fernández Castañón - Goodreads

This book was a delight to read. The annotations are interesting as they provide insight into certain aspects of the context and creation of the novel. They are definitely worth a read. For example, I ...

Review: The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition

User Review  - Syahira Sharif - Goodreads

Due to Coursera, I do read multiple of version of Alice and I've reviewed the first story before but this edition is what you should look for if you ever have any critical writing with the both Alice ...

About the author

Born in Daresbury, England,in 1832, Charles Luthwidge Dodgson is better known by his pen mane of Lewis Carroll. He became a minister of the Church of England and a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church College, Oxford. He was the author, under his own name, of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867), Symbolic Logic (1896), and other scholarly treatises which would hardly have given him a place in English literature. Charles Dodgson might have been completely forgotten but for the work of his alter ego, Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll, shy in the company of adults, loved children and knew and understood the world of the imagination in which the most sensitive of them lived. So he put the little girl Alice Liddell into a dream-story and found himself famous as the author of Alice in Wonderland (1865). Through the Looking Glass followed in 1871. In recent years Carroll has been taken quite seriously as a major literary artist for adults as well. His works have come under the scrutiny of critics who have explained his permanent attractiveness in terms of existential and symbolic drama: The Alice books dramatize psychological realities in symbolic terms, being commentary on the nature of the human predicament rather than escape from it. In addition to his writing, Carroll was also a pioneering photographer, and he took many pictures of young children, especially girls, with whom he seemed to empathize.

Martin Gardner is the author of more than seventy books on a vast range of topics including "Did Adam & Eve Have Navels?", "Calculus Made Easy", & "The Annotated Alice". He lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina.

Sir John Tenniel, born in London in 1820 and died in 1914, was an English illustrator and cartoonist. Tenniel was primarily self-taught but he did become a student of the Royal Academy and in 1836 he sent his first picture to the exhibition of the Society of British Artists. In 1850 he was invited to fill the position of joint cartoonist at Punch (a British weekly magazine of humour and satire published from 1841 to 1992 and from 1996 to 2002). Tenniel is most famous today for his illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass but he made numerous contributions to Punch in the late 19th century. Tenniel retired in January 1901 and was honored with a farewell banquet at which the Leader of the House of Commons, presided.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass; The Annotated Bks
• Author: Lewis Carroll
• Editors: Martin Gardner, Sir John Tenniel
• Illustrated by: Sir John Tenniel
• Contributor: Martin Gardner
• Edition: illustrated, reprint, annotated
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000
• ISBN: 0393048470, 9780393048476
• Length: 312 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Classics; Literary Criticism / Books & Reading