Article content

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Go down the rabbit hole and take a tour of Wonderland U. Back to video

When David Day was approached by a publisher in the mid-1990s to work on book about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, he assumed the project would come together quickly, taking perhaps a couple of years at the most to complete. The goal was to have a book ready for publication by 1998, in time for the centennial of Alice author Lewis Carroll’s death.

“I’d done several books on [Lord of the Rings author J.R.R.] Tolkien,” says Day, “I thought, ‘How difficult can Alice in Wonderland be? It’s a little book.’ I started looking at it, and I realized I wasn’t going to get it done in two years.”

Nearly two decades later, and Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Decoded is finally hitting bookstores, all 320 full-colour pages of analysis, context, and other insights into Carroll’s 1865 children’s novel. Like Alice herself crawling into a seemingly innocuous rabbit hole and tumbling into a whole new topsy-turvy world, Day’s project took him deep into the recesses of Carroll’s singular thought process.

Casual fans of Carroll’s work may already be aware that his most iconic character was based on a real little girl. Alice Liddell was the daughter of Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church college, Oxford. Carroll (whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a resident Oxford don. He purports that his most famous novel was written after taking a boat ride one summer’s day with Alice and her sisters, in which he kept them entertained by telling them stories. The children begged him to write down the story, so he put pen to paper and Alice the book was born.