In the second edition of the Norton Critical Edition of the Alice books, I have again included matter that suggests the important contexts out of which Lewis Carroll's best-known, and best, books were written. Principally, the Alice books, and even the mysteriously disturbing The Hunting of the Snark, are stories told to and written for children. Carroll mocked the conventions of nineteenth-century children's writing, and his books helped to change them. But for those very reasons, much of his playfulness depends for its point and effect on a familiarity with writing for children like that which Carroll's contemporaries, adults as well as children, would have broughtto the reading and hearing of these stories. Carroll also appropriated some of the practices of popular comic entertainments of his time....

This Norton Critical Edition reprints the 1897 editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and the 1876 edition of The Hunting of the Snark.New to the Second Edition is "The Wasp in a Wig," a recently discovered episode Carroll deleted from Through the Looking-Glass, but which fits into the story in interesting ways. Each text is accompanied by ample explanatory notes.

"Backgrounds" reprints new selections from recent biographies of Carroll and from recent editions of his diaries and letters.Our understanding of and appreciation for Carroll’s life and literature are deepened by new contributions from Anne Clark, Tony Beale, E. M. Rowell, and, most revealingly, Carroll himself.

"Criticism" retains seven seminal critiques from the First Edition while adding four important recent essays by Nina Auerbach, Roger Henkle, Robert Polhemus, and Donald Rackin.

A revised and updated Selected Bibliography is also included.

Preface

Texts

　Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland

　Through the Looking-Glass

　　The Wasp in a Wig

　The Hunting of the Snark

Backgrounds

　EARLY LIFE

　　Derek Hudson, [Parents and Childhood]

　　Anne Clark, [School]

　　Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, [Oxford]

　　Lewis Carroll, From the Letters [1855]

　　　From the Diaries [1855–56]

　　　Early Poems

　　　　She’s All My Fancy Painted Him

　　　　Solitude

　　　　Upon the Lonely Moor

　　Derek Hudson, [Ordination

　THE ALICE BOOKS

　　Derek Hudson, [Child Friends]

　　Lewis Carroll, From the Diaries [1856–63]

　　　From Alice’s Adventures Under Ground

　　Alice and Caryl Hargreaves, Alice’s Recollections of Carrollian Days

　　Lewis Carroll, From the Diaries [1863–65]

　　　From Alice on the Stage

　LATER LIFE

　　Helmut Gernsheim, Lewis Carroll-Photographer

　　Lewis Carroll, Letters to Children

　　　From the Diaries [1868–71]

　　　Letter to Mrs. A.L. Mayhew

　　Tony Beale, C.L. Dodgson: Mathematician

　　Derek Hudson, [Rooms at Christ Church]

　　Anne Clark, [Friendships with Women]

　　E.M. Rowell, [To Me He Was Mr. Dodgson]

　　Isa Bowman, [A Visit to Christ Church]

　　Lewis Carroll, From the Diaries [1879–85]

　　Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, [An Old Bachelor]

Essays in Criticism

　Gillian Avery, Fairy Tales with a Purpose

　　Fairy Tales for Pleasur

　Peter Coveney, Escape

　Nina Auerbach, Alice in Wonderland: A Curious Child

　William Empson, The Child as Swain

　Roger Henkle, Comedy from Inside

　Robert Polhemus, The Comedy of Regression

　　Play, Nonsense, and Games: Comic Diversion

　A.L. Taylor, [Chess and Theology in the Alice Books]

　Elizabeth Sewell, The Balance of Brillig

　Michael Holquist, What Is a Boojum? Nonsense and Modernism

　Donald Rackin, Blessed Rage: Lewis Carroll and the Modern Quest for Order

Selected Biblioraphy