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<\/a>Like Alice\u2019s journey down the rabbit hole, the descent into the stacks of the Watkinson Library is a journey filled with wonder, confusion and excitement. Where will you end up? How far down is the bottom? And what curious items will be waiting for you when you get there?\u00a0 I found the Dodgson family waiting for me at the bottom of the stairwell hidden between books on shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings.\u00a0 What I thought was going to be a simple journey just enjoying a childhood favorite opened the door to a much more exciting find.<\/p>\nLewis Carroll\u2019s classic masterpiece Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland<\/em> has been a favorite of children and adults for the 148 years since its initial publication.\u00a0 His nonsensical story of the “exactly seven-and-a-half-year-old-girl” who tumbles through a rabbit hole has been translated into thousands of languages around the globe including rare aboriginal dialects, and has never been out of print.\u00a0 One of the most quoted novels of all time, Carroll\u2019s heroine, Alice, finds herself in the world of nonsense where you take advice from a hookah smoking caterpillar, you\u2019re bombarded with riddles at a mad tea party, you play croquet with the queen and you can grow taller or smaller with cookies and mushrooms.<\/p>\n Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the man behind the legend, used the pen name Lewis Carroll to author his Alice books and much of his other nonsense, poetry and children\u2019s literature.<\/p>\n Dodgson was born 1832 to the Reverend Charles Dodgson in a small village in Cheshire England.\u00a0 In 1843 the Dodgson family moved to Croft, a town in Yorkshire where they remained until 1868 when the elder Dodgson died. Living at the Croft Rectory provided the Dodgson family with more money and a better lifestyle than they had in Cheshire. Among the benefits of this new position was being able to employ servants for the family.<\/p>\n<\/a>Originally set for publication in 1865, the release of Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland <\/em>was held because of both Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel\u2019s disapproval of the poor printing quality of Tenniel\u2019s illustrations.\u00a0 The original run of Alice<\/em> was supposed to be sold as scrap paper but instead the unbound copies ended up in New York where it was issued by D. Appleton and Company in 1866.\u00a0 In November of 1865 with \u201cvery far superior\u201d illustrations and \u201cin fact a perfect piece of artistic printing,\u201d Alice<\/em> was published by Macmillian and Co. with an 1866 publication date and she was finally available in England.<\/p>\n