Seven years old, literal-minded, and the only person in Wonderland who notices it is nonsense — her politeness under absurdity is the engine of the comedy. Carroll's Alice argues logic with madmen; adaptations soften her into a wide-eyed tourist at their peril.
The waistcoated, watch-consulting herald whose lateness opens the book. He is anxiety in a waistcoat — important-seeming, perpetually behind, and the reason "down the rabbit hole" entered the language.
The grinning cat who vanishes by degrees until only the grin remains, and the book's closest thing to a truth-teller: his exchange with Alice about which way to go — it depends where you want to get to — is the most misquoted passage in the book (see the quotes page).
Hosts of the perpetual tea party — trapped at six o'clock after "murdering the time." Note for pedants and pub quizzes: Carroll never calls him "the Mad Hatter" in the text; he is simply the Hatter, at a mad tea-party.
The playing-card tyrant whose one idea is "Off with her head!" — sentence first, verdict afterwards. Carroll described her as blind, aimless Fury; the trick of her comedy is that nobody actually gets executed, as the Gryphon quietly admits.
Three inches tall, hookah-smoking, and catechizing — his "Who are YOU?" opens the book's identity theme. The 2010 film's name for him, Absolem, appears nowhere in Carroll; searchers looking for Absolem are looking for the film's invention.
The pepper-mad Duchess with her moral-for-everything, and the Mock Turtle — a sob story built from a Victorian soup pun — with the Gryphon as his dry chaperone. The book's deepest-cut characters, and reliably the ones adaptations drop first.
The mirror twins belong to the sequel — imported into "Alice in Wonderland" by the 1951 Disney film, which blended both books. Same for Humpty Dumpty, the Jabberwock, and the White Queen: sequel natives, popularly mis-shelved.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee — but they are not in Alice in Wonderland. They appear in the 1871 sequel Through the Looking-Glass, reciting "The Walrus and the Carpenter"; the 1951 Disney film folded them into its Wonderland, which is why memory shelves them wrong. The search phrase "bald twins" almost always means them as Disney drew them.
No — Absolem is the 2010 Tim Burton film's name for its Caterpillar character (voiced by Alan Rickman). Carroll's Caterpillar is unnamed, three inches tall, and considerably ruder. This is the clearest single example of a film invention overwriting the book in search behavior, which is why we flag it here and on the adaptations page.
Theories abound (an Oxford furniture dealer is the traditional candidate) and none are settled — Carroll left no confirmation. What is documented: "mad as a hatter" predates the book as an idiom (mercury poisoning in hat-making is the usual, debated explanation), and Carroll's character rode an existing phrase rather than creating it.