Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Summary

“What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?”

That’s the question seven-year-old Alice asks herself moments before she tumbles into one of the strangest, most beloved adventures in all of literature. Published in 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has delighted readers for over a century and a half. It’s a story that refuses to behave like other stories. It doesn’t teach a moral lesson. It doesn’t follow the rules of logic. It barely even follows the rules of grammar. And that’s precisely why it endures.

Let’s fall down the rabbit hole together.

The Beginning

Alice is sitting on a riverbank with her sister, bored and drowsy on a hot summer day. Her sister is reading a book with no pictures, and Alice is thinking vaguely about making a daisy chain when a White Rabbit runs past.

Nothing remarkable about that, except the rabbit is wearing a waistcoat. And carrying a pocket watch. And muttering, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!”

Alice doesn’t hesitate. She follows the rabbit down a very deep hole, falling so slowly she has time to grab a jar of marmalade from a cupboard on the way down, and to wonder whether she’ll fall straight through the earth and come out among people who walk upside-down.

When she lands, she finds herself in a long hallway full of locked doors. On a glass table sits a tiny golden key. It opens a door fifteen inches high, through which Alice glimpses the most beautiful garden she’s ever seen. But she can’t fit through.

This is Alice’s problem throughout the story: she’s never the right size. She drinks from a bottle labeled “DRINK ME” and shrinks to ten inches. She eats a cake marked “EAT ME” and grows so tall her head hits the ceiling. She cries a pool of tears when she’s nine feet tall, then nearly drowns in that same pool when she shrinks again.

Size and proportion mean nothing in Wonderland. Neither does time, or logic, or politeness. Alice is about to discover that everything she knows is useless here.

The Creatures of Wonderland

Alice meets a dizzying parade of characters, each more peculiar than the last.

There’s the Mouse, who nearly drowns alongside her in the pool of tears and takes offense at every mention of cats and dogs. There’s the Dodo, who organizes a “Caucus-race” where everyone runs in circles with no starting point and no finish line, and where everyone wins and everyone must have prizes.

There’s the Caterpillar, sitting atop a mushroom, smoking a hookah, asking Alice the most unsettling question: “Who are you?” Alice doesn’t know anymore. She’s changed so many times that morning she’s lost track of herself. “I can’t explain myself,” she tells the Caterpillar, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

The Caterpillar gives her cryptic advice. One side of the mushroom will make her taller; the other will make her shorter. Alice nibbles carefully, and her neck stretches so long that a pigeon mistakes her for a serpent.

Then there’s the Duchess, whose cook throws dishes and adds too much pepper to everything. And her baby, who grunts so much that Alice isn’t surprised when it turns into a pig in her arms.

And there’s the Cheshire Cat, grinning from a tree branch, offering Alice the most famous advice in the book:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” says the Cat.

“I don’t much care where—” says Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” says the Cat.

The Cheshire Cat can vanish at will, starting with its tail and ending with its grin. “I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” Alice thinks, “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!”

A Mad Tea-Party

The Cheshire Cat directs Alice to either the Hatter or the March Hare. “They’re both mad,” he says. And when Alice objects to visiting mad people, he replies: “Oh, you can’t help that. We’re all mad here.”

Alice finds them at an outdoor tea table, along with the Dormouse, who keeps falling asleep. It’s always six o’clock for them—always tea-time—because the Hatter once offended Time himself, and now Time refuses to move forward.

The tea party is famous for its absurdity. The Hatter asks riddles with no answers. “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” He doesn’t know. Neither does anyone else. The March Hare offers Alice wine when there is none. They switch seats constantly because the dirty cups pile up. When Alice tries to make sense of anything, they contradict her, insult her, or simply change the subject.

“You should say what you mean,” the March Hare tells Alice.

“I do,” Alice replies. “At least—I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”

“Not the same thing a bit!” says the Hatter. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”

The Dormouse tells a story about three sisters who lived at the bottom of a well and drew pictures of things beginning with M—“muchness,” for instance. When Alice asks too many questions, the Hatter simply says, “Then you shouldn’t talk.”

Alice leaves in disgust. But there’s nowhere sensible to go.

The Queen’s Croquet Ground

Alice finally reaches the beautiful garden—only to find it ruled by the Queen of Hearts, a woman whose solution to every problem is the same: “Off with their heads!”

The Queen invites Alice to play croquet, but the game is impossible. The balls are hedgehogs that uncurl and walk away. The mallets are flamingos that twist their necks to look at the players. The arches are soldiers who keep wandering off.

The Queen sentences people to execution every few minutes. The gardeners painting white roses red. The guests who miss their turns. Anyone who crosses her path. “Off with his head! Off with her head!”

The King follows behind, quietly pardoning everyone. As the Gryphon tells Alice later, “They never executes nobody, you know.”

Alice meets the Mock Turtle, a melancholy creature who sobs constantly while telling his life story. He learned “Reeling and Writhing” at school, along with “Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.” He dances the Lobster Quadrille and sings mournful songs about beautiful soup.

Nothing makes sense. Nothing is supposed to make sense.

The Trial

The story culminates in a trial. The Knave of Hearts is accused of stealing the Queen’s tarts. The evidence is a poem that means nothing. The witnesses are the Hatter, the cook, and eventually Alice herself.

Throughout the trial, Alice has been growing again. By the time she’s called to testify, she’s enormous—so large that she tips over the jury box when she stands.

The King invents a rule: “All persons more than a mile high must leave the court.”

“That’s not a regular rule,” Alice says. “You invented it just now.”

“It’s the oldest rule in the book,” the King insists.

“Then it ought to be Number One,” Alice shoots back.

When the Queen demands “Sentence first—verdict afterwards,” Alice has had enough.

“Stuff and nonsense!” she cries. “The idea of having the sentence first!”

“Hold your tongue!” shouts the Queen.

“I won’t!” says Alice.

“Off with her head!”

But Alice has grown to her full size. She’s not afraid anymore.

“Who cares for you?” she says. “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

At this, the whole pack rises into the air and comes flying down upon her face. She screams, tries to beat them off—and wakes up on the riverbank, with her head in her sister’s lap, dead leaves falling on her face.

It was all a dream.

What It Means

Or was it? Lewis Carroll never explains Wonderland. He never tells us what the dream signifies. He refuses to give us a moral.

Some readers see the story as a satire of Victorian society—the arbitrary rules, the meaningless formalities, the adults who insist their nonsense makes perfect sense. Others see it as a meditation on childhood, on that strange time when the world seems enormous and incomprehensible, when adults speak in riddles and expect you to understand.

Carroll wrote the story for a real girl named Alice Liddell, daughter of a colleague at Oxford. He invented it during a boat trip, making it up as he went along. Later, he wrote it down and expanded it into the book we know.

But the magic of Alice is that it resists interpretation. It simply is what it is: a world where nothing is certain, where identity is unstable, where the rules keep changing, and where the only sensible response is to keep asking questions, even if no one will answer them.

Alice never stops questioning. She argues with the Caterpillar, challenges the Mad Hatter, defies the Queen. She’s polite but stubborn. She’s confused but curious. She doesn’t understand Wonderland, but she refuses to pretend she does.

In the end, when she finally stands up to the Queen—“You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”—she’s not just rejecting the dream. She’s rejecting the tyranny of nonsense that demands her submission. She’s choosing her own reality over theirs.

And that’s why, over a century and a half later, children and adults still fall down the rabbit hole. Because Wonderland reminds us that the world is stranger than we think. That authority figures don’t always deserve our obedience. That asking “Why?” is never the wrong question, even when there’s no good answer.

This has been Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.