Alice In Wonderland And Through The Looking-Glass

There are children’s books, there are classics, and then there is Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, a work so thoroughly woven into the fabric of the English-speaking world that most people encounter fragments of it long before they ever read it. White rabbits, mad hatters, grinning cats, playing cards, looking-glasses, tea parties, queens with anger-management issues; Lewis Carroll somehow created an entire cultural ecosystem that has spent the last century and a half cheerfully escaping from the pages of his books.

This Pan Books edition from 1947 has an additional layer of charm simply by virtue of existing when it does. The Second World War had only recently ended, rationing was still very much a fact of life, and somewhere amidst all that someone thought, quite rightly, that the nation still needed a girl falling down a rabbit hole and arguing with impossible creatures. It is difficult to imagine a more fitting antidote to reality.

The books themselves remain gloriously resistant to summary. Alice follows a white rabbit and discovers a world governed by dream logic, linguistic acrobatics, and an apparent determination to make sensible behaviour look faintly ridiculous. Then, having survived that, she steps through a mirror into another realm where chess pieces conduct military campaigns, nursery-rhyme characters roam freely, and cause and effect occasionally take the afternoon off.

What makes Carroll’s achievement so remarkable is that nobody has entirely agreed what these books are actually about ever since. They have been analysed as satire, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, political commentary, literary nonsense, childhood fantasy, and perhaps a dozen other things besides. Entire academic careers have been built upon explaining Alice. The books themselves remain serenely unconcerned and continue being strange.

The illustrations, of course, are a huge part of the experience. This edition contains ninety-two illustrations, an impressive quantity of visual oddity to accompany the textual variety. In a development that Lewis Carroll himself might have appreciated, two of those illustrations have been coloured in with crayon by a previous owner. Purists may gasp. We prefer to think of it as an unexpected collaboration across generations. After all, if any book is likely to tolerate a little unauthorised artistic intervention, it is probably the one featuring a disappearing cat and a baby that turns into a pig.

There are also a few light pencil marks on some pages. Again, this seems entirely in keeping with a book that has spent decades passing through the hands of curious readers. One suspects Alice herself would have approved of people scribbling notes while attempting to make sense of the proceedings. The fact that anyone has ever fully succeeded remains open to debate.

As a physical object, this 1947 Pan edition possesses exactly the sort of character collectors of vintage paperbacks enjoy. It has lived a life. It has been read, handled, and evidently loved enough for at least one child to decide that two illustrations required immediate chromatic enhancement. Yet it remains a perfectly nice, workable copy, ready for many more years of baffling, delighting, and occasionally confusing readers.

Condition-wise, it is Good overall. The crayon colouring affects just two of the ninety-two illustrations, and the pencil marks are light. The text remains entirely readable, the stories remain entirely wonderful, and the overall impression is of a book that has survived remarkably well considering that it has spent nearly eighty years inviting people to abandon common sense.

Whether you are revisiting a childhood favourite, discovering Alice for the first time, or simply adding a charming post-war edition to your shelves, this volume offers two of the most influential and imaginative works ever written. Strange, witty, endlessly quotable, and gloriously impossible, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass remains proof that nonsense, when practised at the highest level, can be one of literature’s most enduring forms of sense.

Exactly the sort of delightfully eccentric survivor that Crappy Old Books is proud to send tumbling back down the rabbit hole.

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