Carroll’s books of words and pictures, puns and riddles, indefinitely prolong the time of childhood nonsense. Carroll’s Alice books have a moral nonetheless: Like childhood, they end. And yet both books, which end with measured recollection and memory, seem to continue into the future.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865; Through the Looking-Glass appeared six years later in 1871. The first of the books began as an oral tale, told on a rowboat expedition up the Thames on a “golden afternoon,” most likely July 4, 1862. The party in the boat included Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (the mathematician, logician, and photographer who had already created the storytelling pen name Lewis Carroll), his friend the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, and the three Liddell sisters: Alice, who was ten; Lorina Charlotte, who was thirteen; and Edith, who was eight. Carroll was thirty at the time and had been ordained as a deacon the year before. Hardly a recluse, he enjoyed traveling, frequented the theater, took pleasure in giving un-birthday presents on any day of the year, wrote a large number of letters, invented mathematical puzzles, and was an avid amateur photographer who liked “making up pictures,”2 often composing his subjects in tableau-like settings that suggested make-believe stories. His sitters included Tennyson, Ruskin, the Rossettis, Millais, Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Leopold—as well as his favorite subject: Victorian children, particularly young girls. He gained First Class Honours in mathematics and produced a number of treatises on mathematics and symbolic logic, beginning with A Syllabus of Plane Geometry, which appeared in 1860. He was a polymath, albeit a conservative one. He considered Tuesday his lucky day.

The boat trip on that July day covered about three miles. The story that would become Alice, according to Carroll, was extemporized as they went along that day and over several subsequent trips. Carroll remembers how, “in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore,” he sent Alice “straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards.”3 On one boat trip, Carroll tried to amuse the girls with a game but was forced to “go on with my interminable fairy-tale of Alice’s Adventures.”4 With some prompting by Alice Liddell, Carroll began penning the story he initially called Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. For reasons that are not clear, Carroll was banned from the Liddell household before completing the book, making the Alice books very much about a child as absent muse rather than as recipient of either of the books. The book—the title now changed to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—was published on July 4, 1865, to commemorate the date of that first boating expedition.

Despite their differences, both books chronicle the adventures of a girl named Alice, modeled on Alice Liddell, whose father was the dean of Christ Church, Oxford, where Carroll taught. Carroll first came to Christ Church in 1850. He stayed for nearly fifty years. During that time, Dean Liddell was busy attempting to modernize the college, turning it from a kind of genteel seminary into something more like a German university, a process Carroll resisted in characteristic fashion: He produced a series of comic pamphlets in protest. However, he was made a don after only five years, a feat remarkable even then. Carroll met Alice in 1856, when she was four. From that time onward, Carroll took a number of photographs of Alice and her siblings. Both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass begin with Alice on the verge of dreaming, but the books transpire in different seasons and evoke different moods.

Alice commences on a warm spring day, while Through the Looking-Glass is set in midwinter. The looking glass—as an analogue for the confusion of things that are knowable—was probably a relatively late addition by Carroll, added at a time when, according to Alice Liddell, the three sisters were themselves learning to play chess and Carroll was entertaining all three with stories about chess playing, among other things. The initial appearance of the looking glass was prompted by Carroll’s meeting with another young Alice, his cousin Alice Raikes, most likely in August 1868. In his biography of Carroll, Derek Hudson recounts the following incident:

The room they entered had a tall mirror standing in one corner. [Carroll] gave his cousin an orange and asked her which hand she held it in. When she replied ‘The right,’ he asked her to stand before the glass and tell him in which hand the little girl in the mirror was holding it. ‘The left hand’, came the puzzled reply. ‘Exactly,’ said [Carroll], ‘and how do you explain that?’ . .