Digital AliceEverything you need to know about Alice in Wonderland.

Timeline

From a Cheshire parsonage in 1832 to a website in 2026: the documented dates of the Alice story — books, people, and afterlife.

1832 — A mathematician is born

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is born on 27 January 1832 at Daresbury, Cheshire, eldest son of the Rev. Charles Dodgson. Nothing about the parsonage nursery suggests Wonderland — except, perhaps, the family’s love of storytelling and nonsense games.

1852 — Alice Liddell is born

Alice Pleasance Liddell is born on 4 May 1852, second daughter of Henry Liddell — newly appointed Dean of Christ Church, Oxford — and his wife Lorina. The Liddells move into the Deanery; Dodgson, already a Christ Church mathematics lecturer, becomes a family friend.

1856 — The Liddells arrive; photography begins

The Liddell family settles at Christ Church. Dodgson takes up photography in the wet-collodion process and begins photographing Oxford’s great and good — and, soon, its children, including the Liddell sisters.

4 July 1862 — The golden afternoon

Dodgson rows Lorina, Alice (ten), and Edith Liddell up the Thames to Godstow and tells them a story about a girl named Alice and her adventures underground. Alice asks him to write it down. Carroll’s diary documents the trip; “golden afternoon” is his poem’s phrase for it.

Christmas 1864 — Alice’s Adventures Under Ground

Dodgson gives Alice Liddell the handwritten, hand-illustrated manuscript — Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, with 37 of his own pen-and-ink drawings — as a Christmas gift. The manuscript survives in the British Library.

1865 — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Macmillan publishes Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with 42 illustrations by John Tenniel, under the pen name “Lewis Carroll.” The first printing of 2,000 copies is withdrawn over print quality; the edition sold is the same year’s reprint. The book is an immediate success and never goes out of print again.

1871 — Through the Looking-Glass

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is published in December 1871 (dated 1872), again by Macmillan with Tenniel illustrations. Structured as a chess game, it is the more “grown-up” book — and equally permanent.

1876 — The Hunting of the Snark

Carroll publishes The Hunting of the Snark, his nonsense epic in eight fits, illustrated by Henry Holiday. It becomes a cult classic of its own — “the impossible voyage of an improbable crew.”

1880 — Alice Liddell marries

Alice Liddell marries Reginald Hargreaves on 15 September 1880 and settles at Cuffnells, Hampshire. The “real Alice” grows up, as the fictional one never quite does.

1886 — Alice on stage

Henry Savile Clarke’s operetta Alice in Wonderland opens in London with Carroll’s cooperation — the first major adaptation, staged within the author’s lifetime.

1890 — The Nursery “Alice”

Carroll publishes his own abridged edition for very young children — The Nursery “Alice” (“from nought to five”), with Tenniel’s illustrations enlarged and hand-colored. He supervises its production closely.

14 January 1898 — Dodgson’s death

Charles Dodgson dies of pneumonia at his sisters’ home in Guildford, aged sixty-five, and is buried there. Both Alice books are in print; both will remain so.

1903 — Alice on film

Cecil Hepworth’s silent Alice in Wonderland — twelve minutes, real animals in costume — becomes the first film adaptation. The books enter the newest medium within five years of the author’s death.

1928 — The manuscript is sold

Widowed and in need of money, Alice Hargreaves (née Liddell) sells the original Under Ground manuscript at Sotheby’s for £15,400 — then the highest price ever paid for a manuscript at auction. It eventually reaches the British Library.

1934 — The real Alice dies

Alice Hargreaves dies on 16 November 1934, aged eighty-two — having spent her final years as the living original of literature’s most famous child, a distinction she reportedly found tiresome.

1951–today — The afterlife

Disney’s animated Alice in Wonderland (1951) fixes the story in global popular culture; translations multiply past a hundred languages; adaptations span ballet, opera, games, and theme parks; scholars annotate every line. The books Dodgson told on a river in 1862 are now among the most quoted, adapted, and argued-over texts in English — still in print, still growing readers.

A note on dating

Publication dates above follow the standard bibliography: Wonderland 1865 (first printing withdrawn, reprint sold the same year); Looking-Glass published December 1871, title-page dated 1872. Where Victorian dating conventions create ambiguity, it is noted rather than smoothed over.

Source notes

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