The real Alice

Lewis Carroll — the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford mathematics lecturer — published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, with John Tenniel's illustrations. Its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, followed in 1871. Much of what people "remember" from Alice (Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Jabberwocky, the White Queen) is actually from the sequel — one of several conflations this site untangles.

Yes — both Alice books and the original Tenniel illustrations are long out of copyright worldwide, which is why you can read the complete text free (Project Gutenberg hosts it) and why adaptations proliferate. What is NOT public domain: the 1951 Disney film's designs and songs and the 2010 Burton film's inventions. The distinction matters practically — Carroll's text is everyone's; Disney's blue dress is Disney's.

A seven-year-old follows a waistcoated White Rabbit down a hole into a world running on dream-logic — size changes, a mad tea party, a croquet game with flamingo mallets, a trial where the verdict precedes the evidence — and holds her own against it with literal-minded courage until the pack of cards flies apart. Adult readings (satire of Victorian manners, mathematics jokes, logic games) coexist with the children's story because Carroll, a logician entertaining a real child named Alice Liddell, wrote both at once.