Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Alice is sitting by her sister on the bank, and she is bored. The book her sister is reading has no pictures or conversations, the heat of the day makes her sleepy, and she is vaguely wondering whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain is worth the trouble of getting up, when a White Rabbit with pink eyes runs close by her. A talking rabbit is one thing — at the moment it seems quite natural to her. But a rabbit that takes a watch out of its waistcoat pocket, looks at it, and hurries on crying out that it will be too late, is quite another matter. Alice jumps to her feet, darts across the field, and follows it down a large rabbit-hole under a hedge, never once considering how in the world she is to get out again.

The rabbit-hole first dips straight down like a tunnel, then suddenly drops perpendicularly, and Alice falls — for a long time, softly, so softly that she has the leisure to examine the sides of the well lined with cupboards and bookshelves, to grab a jar of orange marmalade as she passes which turns out to be empty, to wonder how many miles she has already fallen, to confuse antipodes with antipathies, to think of her cat Dinah and whether cats eat bats or vice versa, until, thump, she lands on a heap of sticks and dry leaves.

Before her opens a long passage, and the White Rabbit is scurrying away. She loses sight of him, finds herself in a long, low hall with all the doors locked, and discovers on a little glass table a tiny golden key that opens no locks — except that of a minuscule door, behind a curtain, through which she glimpses the loveliest garden in the world, with bright flowerbeds and cool fountains, but her head will not even fit through. On the table then appears a little bottle bearing the label DRINK ME. Alice, who has read in pretty little tales that children who blindly drink from bottles marked Poison meet a bad end, checks first, tastes a mixture that has a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast, and begins shutting up like a telescope. Ten inches high, just the right size — but she has left the key on the table, now completely out of reach. Under the table, a little cake bearing the words EAT ME. Alice eats it, and waits curiously to see whether she will grow or shrink.

She grows, and how. Her head strikes the ceiling, she is more than nine feet tall, she grabs the key but can no longer slip through the little door, and she sheds such abundant tears that a pool four inches deep soon spreads across the middle of the hall. The White Rabbit returns, splendidly dressed, with white kid gloves and a fan, muttering about the Duchess; he flees in terror at the sight of Alice, who picks up the gloves and the fan. She begins to fan herself, shrinks again thanks to the fan, slips, and falls into her own pool of tears where she swims alongside a Mouse whom she offends by talking about cats and dogs. The pool fills with birds and animals that have fallen in too — a Duck, a Dodo, a Lory, an Eaglet — and the whole party swims to the shore.

On the bank, soaking wet and cross, they hold a consultation. The Mouse undertakes to dry them by reciting a passage of history about William the Conqueror, the driest thing it knows, but no one dries off. The Dodo then proposes a Caucus-race: everyone runs in a circle, starts and stops whenever they like, and after half an hour the Dodo decrees that everybody has won and all must have prizes. Alice hands out comfits drawn from her pocket, and receives her own thimble back in solemn return. The Mouse begins to tell its long and sad tale — which Alice's mind confuses with its long tail — then leaves in a huff. Alice mentions her cat Dinah, and all the animals scurry away. She is left alone.

The White Rabbit reappears, searching for his gloves and fan, and mistakes Alice for his housemaid Mary Ann. She runs to his house, finds the gloves and fan, but also a little bottle that she drinks out of curiosity: she grows so boundlessly that she fills the entire room, one arm hanging out the window, one foot up the chimney. The Rabbit sends his servant Bill the Lizard down the chimney; Alice gives a sharp kick that sends him shooting up into the air like a sky-rocket. Pebbles are thrown at her through the window, but the pebbles turn into little cakes on the floor; she eats one, shrinks, escapes from the house, and runs to take refuge in a thick wood.

There, on top of a large mushroom, a large blue Caterpillar is quietly smoking a long hookah. It asks Alice who she is, and Alice no longer quite knows, having changed size so many times that day. The Caterpillar makes her recite verses that come out all wrong, contradicts her at every sentence, and finally reveals as it crawls away that one side of the mushroom will make her grow taller, and the other side will make her grow shorter. Alice breaks off two pieces from the edge, nibbles the wrong side first — her neck elongates dizzyingly high above the trees, a pigeon mistakes her for a serpent — then finally manages, through careful nibbling, to return to her normal size.

She arrives before a little house where the Duchess, sitting in a pepper-filled kitchen, is nursing a howling baby while the cook hurls saucepans at her. A large cat sits on the hearth, grinning from ear to ear. The Duchess tosses the baby to Alice so she can go play croquet with the Queen; Alice carries the child outside, but it begins to grunt, its nose turns up, its eyes shrink, and it transforms into a pig that trots quietly away into the wood. Then the Cat appears on a branch, grinning wider than ever. It tells Alice that in one direction lives a Hatter and in the other a March Hare, that both are mad, that everyone here is mad, including herself, since she has come. Then it vanishes, beginning with the end of the tail, and its grin remains for a time hanging in the air all alone, after the rest has gone.

Under a tree in front of the March Hare's house, a table is set out. The March Hare, the Hatter, and a fast-asleep Dormouse are having a tea party that never ends, for the Hatter has quarrelled with Time and it is always six o'clock. Alice is offered wine when there is none, is asked an unanswerable riddle — 'why is a raven like a writing-desk?' —, is told that one must not waste Time because Time is a 'him', they dip a watch into the tea, they move up a place for every dirty teacup, and the Dormouse tells a story of three little sisters who lived at the bottom of a treacle-well and drew — drew treacle, of course. Alice, exasperated, leaves this ridiculous tea party, finds a tree with a door in its trunk, goes in, and finds herself back in the long glass hall. This time she takes the golden key, nibbles her mushroom, shrinks, goes down the little passage, and finally enters the beautiful garden.

At the entrance to the garden, three gardeners shaped like playing cards are painting white roses red, because the Queen of Hearts hates white roses. The royal procession arrives: spade-soldiers, diamond-courtiers, heart-children, guests including the White Rabbit, the Knave of Hearts carrying the crown, and finally the King and Queen of Hearts. The Queen orders almost everyone's head to be chopped off — the gardeners, the players who miss their turn, anyone who crosses her. Alice defies her with a courage that surprises even herself, and joins a game of croquet where the balls are live hedgehogs, the mallets are flamingos, and the arches are soldiers doubled over who get up and walk away whenever they please. The Cheshire Cat reappears, just its head floating in the air, and the executioner objects that you cannot cut off a head unless there is a body to cut it off from. The Queen wants to fetch the Duchess, the Cat's owner, but the head fades away before the matter is settled.

The Duchess, released from prison, tucks her arm affectionately into Alice's and thrusts a moral upon her at every sentence — 'Tis love that makes the world go round, birds of a feather flock together, be what you would seem to be — until the Queen banishes her with a terrible glare. Then the Queen takes Alice to see the Mock Turtle, sitting sad and lonely on a ledge of rock, accompanied by a lazy Gryphon. The Mock Turtle recounts its underwater education: it learned French, music, washing, and arithmetic — the four branches of arithmetic being Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. It and the Gryphon dance the Lobster Quadrille, a complicated ballet where lobsters are thrown as far out to sea as possible, and sing songs whose verses all come out wrong in Alice's mouth.

Suddenly the cry rings out in the distance: the trial is beginning. The Knave of Hearts is accused of stealing the Queen's tarts. The King sits as judge, wearing his crown over his wig; the twelve jurors write their names on slates so they won't forget them before the end of the trial. The Hatter is called as a witness and trembles so hard he shakes off both his shoes; the cook declares that the tarts are made of pepper; the Dormouse is thrown out for making a disturbance. Then Alice is called. She has begun to grow again without noticing it, she knocks over the jury-box as she rises, picks them up and puts them back in place — little Bill the Lizard upside down. The King invokes a rule that all persons more than a mile high must leave the court; Alice refuses. A letter is produced as decisive evidence, but it is not in the Knave's handwriting and bears no signature. The King finds overwhelming proof in it anyway; the Queen demands sentence before verdict.

Alice, who has now reached her full size and then some, rises and declares that they are nothing but a pack of cards. At these words, the whole pack rises up into the air and comes flying down upon her — and Alice finds herself on the bank, her head in her sister's lap, who is gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face. She recounts her extraordinary dream, then runs off home to have her tea, while her sister, left alone, dreams in her turn of little Alice, of the White Rabbit, of the Mouse splashing through the pool, of the Hatter's teacups, of the Queen shrieking out sentences — and wonders how this little girl would, in the after-time, keep the simple and loving heart of her childhood.