This perennially popular Norton Critical Edition again reprints the 1897 editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass along with the 1876 edition of The Hunting of the Snark. Each text is fully annotated and the original illustrations are included.

An unusually rich “Backgrounds” section is arranged to correspond with three clearly defined periods in Lewis Carroll’s life. Letters and diary entries interwoven within each period emphasize the biographical dimension of Carroll’s writing. Readers gain an understanding of the author’s family and education, the evolution of the Alice books, and Carroll’s later years through his own words and through important scholarly work on his faith life and his relationships with women and with Alice Hargreaves and her family.

Reflecting the wealth of new scholarship on Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll published since the last edition, Donald Gray has chosen eleven new critical works while retaining five seminal works from the previous edition. Two early pieces—an essay by Charles Dickens and poem by Christina Rossetti—take a satirical look at children’s literature. The nine new recent essays are by James R. Kincaid, Marah Gubar, Robert M. Polemus, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Gilles Deleuze, Roger Taylor, Carol Mavor, Jean Gattégno, and Helena M. Pycior.

The Selected Bibliography has been updated and expanded.

Lewis Carroll is a pseudonym of the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who was born on January 27, 1832, and died on January 14, 1898. His most famous works are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There; and The Hunting of the Snark. Donald J. Gray is Professor Emeritus and Culbertson Chair Emeritus of English at Indiana University. He is the coeditor of the fourth Norton Critical Edition of Pride and Prejudice and of the anthology Victorian Poetry and Prose and has written on Victorian poetry and fiction, popular journalism, and the history of literary publishing.