Alice in Wonderland and Everything Else by Lewis Carroll, Free Online
There are two Alice books, not one, and the second is better. That is the single most useful thing to know about Lewis Carroll, because almost every adaptation blends them — the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter from the first, Tweedledum and the Jabberwocky and Humpty Dumpty from the second — leaving most people convinced they have read a book that does not exist.
Six of his books are free to read in the library. Here is what each one actually is.
The two novels
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) — a girl falls down a hole and meets a sequence of characters who are all, in their different ways, rude to her. There is no plot and that is the design: it is a dream, it proceeds by association, and it ends by refusing to mean anything. What surprises adult re-readers is how sharp Alice is. She is not a passive visitor; she argues, corrects people's logic, and loses her temper.
- Through the Looking-Glass (1871) — the same girl, six months later, walking into a chess game. This is the stronger book: it has a structure (Alice crosses the board and is promoted to queen), the wordplay is better, and it contains Jabberwocky, Humpty Dumpty on what words mean, the White Knight, and the Walrus and the Carpenter. It is also melancholy in a way the first is not, and the final chapters are close to sad.
Read them in order and read both. If you only read one, read the second.
The nonsense poems
- The Hunting of the Snark (1876) — a crew of ten, all of whose names begin with B, sail to hunt an animal that may be a Boojum. It is 140 stanzas, entirely deadpan, and the ending is genuinely shocking the first time. Carroll denied it meant anything, repeatedly and unconvincingly. Better than either Alice book at the line level and much less read.
- Jabberwocky — the poem on its own, twenty-eight lines, half of which are invented words that nonetheless clearly mean something. Worth having separately because it is the thing to memorise, and because a child who can recite "beware the Jabberwock, my son" at seven has been given something durable.
- Songs From Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass — the verse from both books collected with settings, which is a genuinely nice way to meet them if you sing at all. Skip unless that appeals.
The curiosity, and it is a real one
- Alice's Adventures Under Ground — the original. Carroll wrote this out by hand, illustrated it himself, and gave it to Alice Liddell as a present; Wonderland is the expanded rewrite of it. It is shorter, there is no Cheshire Cat and no Mad Hatter's tea party, and the differences are the most interesting thing on this page for anyone who cares how books get made. Read the finished novel first, then this, and the second reading is a lesson in revision.
What is not here
Sylvie and Bruno and the mathematical writing are not in the library, and neither is much missed by a general reader — Sylvie and Bruno is the book where the whimsy finally collapses under its own sentimentality.
Ages, and the one honest warning
Wonderland read aloud works from about five, and children find it much funnier than adults expect, largely because they are the ones being talked down to by the adults in it. Read alone it is harder than its reputation: the jokes are verbal, the parodies are of Victorian schoolroom poems nobody now knows, and a nine-year-old reading it silently often finds it merely odd. That is not a failure of the child. Read aloud, with someone doing the Duchess's voice, it is a different book.
Snark and Looking-Glass reward eight and up. All of them are short — the whole of Carroll is a couple of evenings — which puts him in short classics you can read in one sitting.
For the neighbouring shelf, fairy tale books free online and classic books for kids both start where this ends, and everything of his is on his author page.