Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

Details Of The Book

Title: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Author: Lewis Carroll
Publication: First published in 1865

About The Author

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (January 27, 1832 – January 14, 1898), known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer, mathematician, logician and photographer.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a story that Carroll, on a whim, told to his friend’s daughter Alice, wrote down and then added his own illustrations and gave it to her. Later, with the encouragement of his friend, Carroll revised, expanded and embellished the manuscript and published it in 1865.

About The Story

Chapter 1: Down The Rabbit Hole

One day, Alice sat with her sister by the river. Suddenly saw an eccentric white rabbit walking by – it dressed up, holding a pocket watch, talking to himself, walking in a hurry. Alice ran after it and jumped into the rabbit hole. The hole was an abyss, and after a long time, Alice finally hit the ground. She was surprised to find herself in a strange hall, surrounded by large and small doors, and all the doors were locked. She found a door key, but it only opened a small door. Since the door was so small, she could only look through it, but found a beautiful garden over there. She put the key on the table and found a bottle of drink with “Drink Me” written on it elsewhere in the hall. Alice finishes it off without a second thought and finds herself shrinking, unable to retrieve the door key from the table when she can get through the small door. Panic, she picked up a piece of cake that says “eat me”. This time, Alice ate it and then grew rapidly, so large that even the top of her head was stuck to the ceiling.

Chapter 2: The Pool of Tears

Fell into the water of tears of the mouse and Alice.
Alice could not help but cry, the whole foyer was full of tears. She inadvertently picked up a fan, the body actually became smaller again, she had to swim in their own tears. On the way, she met a mouse who was swimming with her. Alice wants to chat with it, but always put her cat “Dana” in the mouth, the result, of course, offended the cat as the mortal enemy of the mouse.

Chapter 3: The Caucus Race and a Long Tale

The tears washed away the other animals and the finches; in time, Alice had been surrounded by a group of animals. They gathered on the shore and discussed how to dry their bodies. The mouse gave a long speech about ‘William I’; the dodo thought the best way was to hold a fruitless race: everyone ran around in a circle, without a winner. Alice listened, feeling bored and confused, and talked about the house cat, which resulted in scaring all the animals away.

Chapter 4: The Rabbit Sends a Little Bill

The white rabbit that made Alice fall into the ground appeared again. This time, he is looking for the Duchess’s gloves and fan. Mr. White Rabbit ordered Alice to enter the house to get back the items, but Alice just entered the house, saw a piece of cookie and ate it, and the body became bigger. At this point, a group of animals had gathered outside the house, they looked at Alice’s large arms and began to throw pebbles at her. But the pebbles turned into a piece of cake; Alice ate them one by one, and her body shrunk again.

Chapter 5: Advice from a Caterpillar

Alice saw a mushroom with a blue caterpillar sitting on it. He smoked a hookah and asked Alice about it. Alice responded to him that she was in the midst of a personality change and was often so disturbed that she could not even remember a poem. Before the caterpillar left, he told her the secret of mushrooms: eating half of them would make her taller, and eating the other half would make her shorter. So she split the mushroom in two, and sure enough, eating one half made her incredibly short, while eating the other half made her neck grow. Her head reached right into the bushes, and the pigeons in the trees even mistook her long neck for a poisonous snake. After much effort, Alice finally regained her original height. She hobbled along and stumbled into a small estate. Meanwhile, she uses mushrooms again to adjust the most suitable height.

Chapter 6: Pig and Pepper

Mr. Fish wants to deliver the invitation letter to the Duchess in the house, so he entrusts the matter to Mr. Frog. Alice observed the process and spoke a bunch of obscure words with Mr. Frog, but finally let herself into the house. It turned out that the duchess’s cook was throwing dishes around and cooking a thick soup with a lot of pepper. There was so much pepper that Alice, the duchess and her baby kept sneezing, while the cook and the grinning Cheshire cat were unaffected. The baby couldn’t help but bawl, and the always grumpy Duchess, of course, was so disgusted that she finally left the baby in Alice’s care. Alice carried the baby away, but soon realized that the baby had turned into a pig.

Chapter 7: A Mad Tea Party

The Cheshire Cat appears in a tree and shows Alice the direction of the March Hare’s house. Then he disappears, but his toothy smile is still there, floating in the air, which makes Alice notice that she has seen the cat mostly without a smile, but never seen only the cat’s smile without its body.

Then, Alice went to the March Hare’s house. At that time, March Hare, Mr. Hat (now more known as the Mad Hatter) and Sleeping Mouse were holding a mad tea party, Alice thus became a guest of the tea party. In this chapter, Sleeping Mouse is almost always asleep; the others tell riddles and anecdotes to Alice. The Mad Hatter reveals to her that they had to eat tea all day because he was punished by making the time stay forever at 6 p.m., which is tea time. Between words, Alice, insulted and unable to bear the fatiguing bombardment of riddles and stories, decides to leave. Before leaving, she even asserted that this was the most boring tea gathering she had ever been to.

Chapter 8: The Queen’s Croquet Ground

Alice leaves the tea party and enters a garden. She encounters three playful card servants who are painting the white roses on the tree red for the Queen of Hearts, who hates white roses. Then, more cardboard servants, the king and queen all paraded into the garden, and even Mr. White Rabbit came. Alice met with the king and queen. The queen was hard to please, she said she usually shouted her mantra “Cut off his head!” whenever she was slightly displeased with something.

The queen invited (or perhaps some would consider it an order) Alice to play croquet with them, but the game soon degenerated into chaos. They used a live flamingo as a bat and a hedgehog as a ball. Then Alice meets the Cheshire Cat once again. The Queen of Hearts ordered the head of the Cheshire Cat to be cut off, but the executioner complained that he could not do it because he could only see the head of the Cheshire Cat. Since the Cheshire Cat belongs to the Duchess, the Queen has to release the Duchess from prison and then deal with the beheading.

Chapter 9: The Mock Turtle’s Story

At Alice’s request, the Duchess is taken to Croquet, where she ponders the meaning of everything around her. The Queen of Hearts dismisses the idea of beheading the Cheshire Cat and introduces Alice to the Buzzard-headed Flying Lion. The buzzard-headed lion takes Alice to the fake turtles. The fake turtle felt extremely lost, although there was nothing sad about it. He told that he had been a real turtle in school. However, the buzzard-headed flying lion interrupts him so that they can play the game together.

Chapter 10: Lobster Quadrille

The fake turtle and the buzzard-headed lion dance the Lobster Quadrille, while Alice recites “This is the sound of a lobster”. Finally, the fake turtle sang the song “Turtle Soup” (Beautiful Soup) for Alice, then the sound of “trial begins” came from the distance, so the buzzard-headed flying lion took Alice to the trial.

Chapter 11: Who Stole the Tarts?

Alice arrived at the trial site, the Knight of Hearts (Knave of Hearts) accused of stealing the Queen of Hearts’ pies. The jury is served by various animals, including Bill the Lizard, and Mr. White Rabbit serves as the trumpeter. During the trial, Alice finds herself growing larger and larger, and Sleeping Mouse (dormouse) says Alice has no right to grow so tall at such a rapid rate that he is squeezed out of breath. Alice says back that Sleeping Mouse’s accusation is absurd, because everyone grows up, and she herself has no way to stop the process. Meanwhile, the Mad Hatter and the Duchess’s cook are called to testify, and when the questioning of these two is over, Alice is called as the next witness by Mr. White Rabbit.

Chapter 12: Alice’s Evidence

Alice was called as a witness, and when she stood up because she was too big and knocked down the jury box, the king had to order the trial to be suspended until the jurors returned to their seats. The king and queen invoke Article 42, which states that anyone over a mile tall must leave the courtroom, but Alice denies it and refuses to leave. Finally, the queen and Alice, after a quarrel, ordered Alice’s head to be cut off, but Alice was not afraid, she thought they were just cards. The whole deck of cards flew up to the sky at this point and fell on Alice. Alice was about to wave away these cards, but found herself waking up by the river, with her head in her sister’s lap, and her sister was waving away the dead leaves from Alice’s face. Alice told her sister about the dream and left first, while her sister thought about Alice’s strange dream and fell asleep in a trance.