Down the Rabbit Hole: Alice in Wonderland Is Published, 1865
On November 26, 1865, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland went on sale in London — after its own illustrator had the entire first printing scrapped.
It began on a rowing trip. On July 4, 1862, the Oxford mathematician and amateur photographer Charles Dodgson took a boat up the Thames with his friend the Reverend Robinson Duckworth and three young sisters — Lorina, Edith, and 10-year-old Alice Liddell. To pass the afternoon, Dodgson improvised a story about a girl named Alice who tumbles down a rabbit hole. Alice loved it so much she begged him to write it down.
He did. He expanded the tale, illustrated the manuscript himself, and presented it to Alice Liddell in November 1864 under the title Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Then he decided the story deserved a wider audience. Writing under the pen name Lewis Carroll, he hired John Tenniel — the celebrated cartoonist of Punch magazine — to draw 42 illustrations, arranged with Macmillan to publish the book, and financed the printing himself.
The first edition, printed by Oxford's Clarendon Press, ran to 2,000 copies. But when Tenniel saw how his drawings had been reproduced, he was appalled at the quality — and Carroll agreed. In an extraordinary act of perfectionism, the entire edition was withdrawn before publication; the handful of advance copies already sent to friends were recalled. Today only 23 copies of that rejected 1865 printing are known to survive, making it one of the most valuable children's books in the world.
Carroll hired a new printer, Richard Clay, and had the book reprinted to Tenniel's satisfaction — at a cost of £600, paid entirely out of the author's own pocket. He received the first copy on November 9, and on November 26, 1865, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published in London, bound in bright red cloth to appeal to young readers. A second edition, dated 1866, was rushed out for the Christmas market — and the sheets of the rejected first printing were sold to a New York publisher, which issued them with a new 1866 title page.
The book was a sensation with children and adults alike, and it has never been out of print since. It has been translated into more than ninety languages, and its characters — the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts — walked straight out of 1865 and into the permanent furniture of the imagination. All because a little girl on a boat ride asked for the story to be written down.
No photograph could be verified under a free license for this story, so it runs without a main image.
