Original Alice’s Adventures Under Ground Online

I’m just brimming over with Alice in Wonderland geek joy! You can now read, online, the original manuscript complete with Lewis Carol’s hand drawn illustrations. This isn’t the first published edition, this is Carol’s original hand written and illustrated book. You can also listen to it using the Audio option.

And I thought I was excited when the Library of Congress made a first edition of Wonderful Wizard of Oz readable online.

Now all of us Alice fans owe a big “thanks!” to the British Library. They’ve made images of Carol’s original, hand written book available on their Online Gallery. Each image is accompanied by typed text (which is a lot easier to read than Carol’s handwritting). So now, at last, you can view/read the original story online.

And just when you’d finally bought that plane ticket to England and all that spy gear in order to slip into the British Library’s collections room at night in your best Mission Impossible impersonation. Oh well.

I should mention for those of you who haven’t read books like The Annotated Alice that the published version of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground is rather different from the original. Lewis Carol (which is the pen name for English mathematician and deacon Charles Dodgson) first made up the story for Alice Liddel and her sister during a boat ride and picnic, then later wrote the story into a nice manuscript as a gift for Alice Liddel.

That gift is the book that the British Library has digitized and made available for us to read and listen to online. Yay!

One of things that makes this extra cool is that the published version is very different from the original hand written one. Alice was initially shorter and had private jokes and family references. So, when Dodgson was urged to publish Alice he made it longer and removed the more private passages. He also engaged a professional cartoonist, < a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tenniel" target="_blank">John Tenniel to illustrate the published version. It’s to the illustrator Tenniel that we owe the enduring visual of Alice.

I should note that Dodgson/Carol didn’t like Tenniel’s rendering of Alice and argued often with the artist (for instance, he didn’t like that Tenniel drew Alice with long hair).

“So where am I supposed to find this bit of Alice joy?!”, you wail. Here, silly.

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