Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
A child falls down a rabbit hole and spends the afternoon among creatures who argue about the meanings of words. Carroll was a mathematician at Christ Church, Oxford, and the book is full of quiet logical jokes: rules that are followed perfectly and lead somewhere absurd.
It is often treated as a nursery book, which it is, but the jokes about language, authority and being asked to explain yourself work just as well for adults. The poem about the crocodile and the trial of the Knave of Hearts repay a slow reading.
Public-domain status
First published in 1865. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Lewis Carroll died in 1898, so this work has been free to republish there since 1969.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 11 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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Keep reading
- Jude the Obscure — Thomas Hardy, 1895
- Apologia Pro Vita Sua — John Henry Newman, 1864
- Culture and Anarchy — Matthew Arnold, 1869
- The Jungle Book — Rudyard Kipling, 1894
- Oxford — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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