This textual commentary looks at "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" quite simply, as a children's novel, investigating the book's narrative structure, analysing how Carroll successfully constructed a pioneering book for children that was to stand the test of time, remaining remarkably relevant to the present day. There are many depths and subtleties in this book that can only be properly appreciated by examining the text line by line. The writing is supremely skilful, and will stand the closest scrutiny-even virtually to every line of the narrative. Most books would crumble under such close...

Lewis Carroll is a pen-name: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was the author's real name and he was lecturer in Mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford. Dodgson began the story on 4 July 1862, when he took a journey in a rowing boat on the river Thames in Oxford together with the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, with Alice Liddell (ten years of age) the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, and with her two sisters, Lorina (thirteen years of age), and Edith (eight years of age). As is clear from the poem at the beginning of the book, the three girls asked Dodgson for a story and reluctantly at first he...