Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

by Harold Bloom

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland began as a tale told by Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson to three young girls (Lorina, Alice, and Edith Liddell) as the group took a rowing expedition up the Thames River. Enthralled by the story, Alice Liddell asked Dodgson to write it down for her, and he eventually did. In 1865, three years after their initial boat trip, Dodgson published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under the pen name Lewis Carroll. Like its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, Alice is a story filled with imagery, symbolism, and unforgettable characters.

As the critics in this volume attest, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has sparked the imagination of countless children and adults alike, and has served as an influence to storytellers the world over. The critical essays in this volume reflect a variety of schools of criticism accompanied by notes on the contributing critics. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is an essential resource for those interested in the interpretations of top scholars in the literary field.

Genres: Classics, Fantasy, Fiction, Childrens, Literary Criticism, Adventure, Literature

150 pages, Hardcover

Published November 15, 2006

About the author

Harold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.

Reviews

[IvyInThePages · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4.32 leaves out of 5
-Characters: 4.75/5
-Cover: 5/5
-Story: 4.5/5
-Writing: 5/5
Genre: Children/Adventure/Classic
-Children: 4/5
-Adventure: 5/5
-Classic: 5/5
Type: Audiobook
Worth?: Yes, especially for CH 10 from the Audiobook!

Being the big age I am and have worked in a daycare as well I have watched the movie and a good portion of the adaptions as well. No matter how many times I have watched, and now read, this book I am still kind of lost. Not that it is a bad thing, some best adventures happen when you are.

[Zoey · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The adventures first… explanations take such a dreadful time.” -the Gryphon

I think that Dodgson created a genuinely charming story. It’s full of nonsense and madness, but the lack of explanations offered is deeply satisfying. It presents itself in all its insane entirety and says ‘take it or leave it.’ You can be like Alice and enjoy the adventure or you can be like Alice and confront the sheer lack of sense. Either way, you’re Alice, and you can’t help being changed by Wonderland.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

My understanding is that this was one of the first real fantasy books for children, and very unconventional in its time because it wasn't particularly didactic and didn't have a lot in the way of morals all of the childrens' stories back then were supposed to have. It's really quite brilliant if you look at it from the perspective of its time period. Linguistically zany, terrifically creative, and even quite funny. Though, personally, it's hard to know quite what to make of it because it's so...random. And kids of our time might have some difficulty understanding and appreciating it because of cultural and linguistic barriers built into the story. On the other hand, children of most ages can appreciate the vivid images and characters. If you're going to read it, you might want to try an annotated version because there's a lot of fun stuff that will probably go over your head if you read it straight.

[Nicholas Talbot · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a big fan of South Park. In South Park Stan Marsh is the 10 year old voice of reason who tries to talk sense to a world of adults who have gone absolutely insane. The creators can get away with edgy language and taboo topics because it is done through the medium of cartoon.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is the 19th centuries South Park. Carroll creates an imaginary world in which the reader can excuse criticisms of kings and queens because it is imaginary. Through all the nonsense are slight jabs at the royal family, the courts, duchesses and the workers who blindly follow orders. Criticism of the royal family was most certainly frowned upon 200 years ago but Carroll walks the line and has these gentle nods to appeal to older readers and a silly story for the young. Throughout the story Alice is the only sane individual and tries to talk sense to all these strange adults. Short and sweet. Worth a read. Even if it is not your flavour it will be over before you know it.

[Suzeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This famous book took me to a different world. I started to imagine things that I couldn't think of. Its amazing. Its about this girl who discovers a new world. She has weird anventures and she tries to scape from them. When you start reading it, you just cant stop. Its super entertaining and fascinating. All in all, this book is a terrific book for people who have a lot of imagination.

[cäty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es la segunda vez que leo este clásico y lo amo cada vez más.

Sin duda, Alicia en el país de las Maravillas ofrece un mundo literario creativo y hermoso. Y ni hablar de los personajes, uno más interesante que el otro.

Literalmente lo leí en una tarde, y es que este es un libro que no solo está escrito de una forma ágil y atrapante sino que además siempre pasan cosas interesantes con cada personaje que aparece.
Se puede decir que cada personaje es un mundo, porque cada uno tiene una historia, una personalidad definida y unos diálogos destacables que te dejan pensando.

Una serie de disparates a simple vista pero que con una lectura más exhaustiva le podés encontrar sentido... o no.

»Pero yo no quiero andar entre locos— señaló Alicia.
—Oh, es algo que no se puede evitar —dijo el Gato— Aquí estamos todos locos. Yo estoy loco. Tú estás loca.
—¿Cómo sabe que yo estoy loca?—preguntó Alicia.
—Si no estuvieras loca—dijo el Gato— nunca hubieras venido aquí.«

»Oh, es el amor, es el amor lo que hace girar al mundo.«

»Es inútil retroceder hasta ayer, porque en ese momento yo era otra persona.«

[sophh !! · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.75 stars. I loved how alice was so sassy and blunt, she was awesome. definitely understand all the hype, this book was great

[Abigail H · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was so chaotic 😂

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mission 2026: Binge reviewing (and rereading on occasion) all previous Reads, I was too slothful to review, back when I read them.

This section brings together a curated collection of reflections on readings—part memoir, part critical appraisal. It encompasses works that have profoundly influenced my intellectual development, those that have offered enduring pleasure, and others that have invited disagreement or critique.

To return to Harold Bloom is to return to a voice that refused to be anything but singular. In an age increasingly governed by critical fashions and theoretical orthodoxies, Bloom wrote as though literature were still a matter of awe, struggle, and inward illumination. From the eruptive brilliance of ‘The Anxiety of Influence’ to the cathedral-like architecture of ‘The Western Canon’, he restored to criticism a prophetic cadence—half scholarship, half incantation. He believed that reading was not method but encounter, not system but destiny, and that great books survive because they remake the minds that dare to love them.

My own encounter with Bloom began not in libraries but in classrooms shaped by generosity. In my student years, my English teachers—Biswajit Chatterjee, Ratna Srinivas, and Mr. John Mason—placed Bloom before me almost as a rite of passage.

What began as guidance slowly deepened into companionship. Over time, Bloom ceased to be merely a critic on a shelf and became a presence: a stern mentor, a quarrelsome friend, and a mind that argued even in silence. These reflections are then not only readings but offerings—acts of gratitude to a master who taught me how to read, and to the teachers who first lit that lamp.

I encountered Lewis Carroll's classic in 2003. That was a a time when I was already steeped in theory and Victorian literature, yet oddly unprepared for the destabilising innocence of ‘‘Alice's Adventures in Wonderland’’.

I had known Alice as cultural furniture—quoted, parodied, and illustrated into familiarity. But through ‘‘Harold Bloom’’, the text ceased to be ornamental. It became urgent and strange again.

The origin of the tale is by now literary folklore. In the summer of 1862, a reserved Oxford lecturer in mathematics took three young sisters on a river excursion near Oxford. To pass the hours, he spun an impromptu fantasy about a restless girl who tumbles into an underground realm governed by absurd logic.

What began as a diversion on the water slowly crystallised into manuscript form, first as ‘Alice’s Adventures Under Ground’, later expanded, polished, and published under his pen name. By the Christmas season of 1865, the revised narrative—now bearing the title the world would remember—had become a publishing triumph.

Its early admirers reportedly included figures as eminent as Queen Victoria and a young Oscar Wilde. A companion volume, ‘Through the Looking-Glass’, followed, together forming a paired work that would secure a permanent place in English letters.

Yet origin myths, charming as they are, do not explain endurance. Why does this slender Victorian fantasy continue to exert such gravitational pull?

Bloom’s introduction proposes no single formula, but it gestures toward several intertwined sources of power—insights that altered my own reading.

First, Bloom insists on something many sentimental readings overlook: Alice is not a saccharine child-heroine. She is irritable, sharp, and occasionally imperious. Her repeated question—“Who in the world am I?”—is not merely whimsical but existential. The narrative may feature talking animals and tea parties, yet its preoccupation is identity under pressure.

Alice’s body shifts unpredictably; her language fails her; authority figures contradict themselves. Childhood here is not pastoral serenity but epistemological crisis.

That recognition reframed the book for me. I had once treated it as clever nonsense. Bloom illuminated its psychological density. The apparent frivolity conceals an interrogation of selfhood. The child’s confusion anticipates modern anxieties: instability of scale, slipperiness of meaning, arbitrariness of power.

Second, Bloom underscores the dreamlike architecture of the narrative. Wonderland operates according to a logic both precise and destabilising.

Time misbehaves; causality loops; conversation turns into combat. The White Rabbit, perpetually late; the Mad Hatter, imprisoned in endless teatime; the Cheshire Cat, fading into a grin; the tyrannical Queen of Hearts—these figures are not merely amusing grotesques. They embody distortions of adult authority and parodies of institutional rigidity.

Reading Bloom, I became attentive to how meticulously this absurdity is engineered.

Dodgson’s training in mathematics surfaces everywhere. Riddles twist back on themselves; syllogisms collapse; puns proliferate. The nonsense is not careless—it is exact.

Bloom’s commentary sharpened my awareness of this structural discipline. What appears chaotic is in fact calibrated.

Third—and conceivably most memorably—Bloom celebrates Carroll’s genius for linguistic play. Dialogue in ‘Wonderland’ does not advance the plot so much as unravel it. Conversations fracture into riddles, reversals, and literalisations of metaphor.

The line often quoted—“What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?”—is not just charming; it is programmatic. Carroll foregrounds the act of reading itself. Language becomes both instrument and obstacle.

Bloom’s introduction heightened my sensitivity to the book’s musicality. The embedded poems and songs—many of them parodies of familiar Victorian verses—extend the comic distortion.

Pieces such as “You Are Old, Father William” or “The Lobster Quadrille”, and later in ‘Looking-Glass’, the delirious “Jabberwocky”, have detached themselves from their original context and entered cultural folklore. Bloom draws attention to how parody functions here not as mere mockery but as transformation. Carroll absorbs the rhythms of his age and turns them inside out.

For contemporary readers, Bloom notes, it is almost irresistible to read ‘Alice’ through psychoanalytic lenses. Though written decades before Freud, the narrative brims with dream imagery, bodily metamorphosis, and unstable authority figures.

Yet Bloom cautions against reducing the book to a case study. Its strangeness resists tidy interpretation. The innocence it portrays is bruised but not pathological; it is questioning without being clinical.

One aspect of the book’s history that Bloom recounts fascinated me. When the tale was first issued in late 1865 by Macmillan, illustrated by ‘‘John Tenniel’’, the initial print run was withdrawn due to dissatisfaction with reproduction quality.

A corrected edition quickly followed, just in time for holiday sales. Even the rejected sheets found new life across the Atlantic, reissued by an American publisher. From the outset, ‘Alice’ straddled markets and continents.

Today, early editions are collectors’ treasures, and the text has been translated into scores of languages, including Latin. Few Victorian works have travelled so widely or remained so continuously in print.

Yet for me, statistics and anecdotes matter less than the shift Bloom effected in my reading. Before 2003, Alice had been a cultural icon—ubiquitous, half-familiar. After Bloom, she became unsettling again.

I began to notice the undertow beneath the whimsy. The trial scene, for instance, with its arbitrary verdicts and nonsensical evidence, reads like a satire of institutional justice.

The croquet game, conducted with flamingos and hedgehogs, becomes a parody of social ritual. Bloom’s insistence on aesthetic seriousness compelled me to slow down, to read not as a nostalgic adult revisiting childhood, but as a critic attentive to structure and tone.

Bloom does not sentimentalise Carroll. He acknowledges the peculiarities of Dodgson’s biography without sensationalism. Instead, he focuses on imaginative achievement. The lasting enchantment of ‘Alice’, he suggests, lies in its balance of control and chaos.

The narrative seems to drift, yet its episodes accumulate into a pattern. Alice awakens at the end, but the dream lingers—less as narrative closure than as cognitive disturbance.

Revisiting the book after reading Bloom, I was struck by its tonal elasticity. It oscillates between playfulness and menace. The Queen’s repeated cry—“Off with their heads!”—is comic in repetition, yet it carries the echo of genuine cruelty.

Bloom highlights this tension: the text hovers between nursery fantasy and satirical allegory. It invites children while unsettling adults.

In my own intellectual journey, Bloom’s edition arrived at a crucial juncture. I was accustomed to treating Victorian literature through historicist frameworks.

Bloom recentred the aesthetic. He encouraged me to ask not only what the book reflects, but how it works—how its rhythms, images, and dialogues create an enduring effect. Through him, Carroll’s prose regained luminosity.

It is tempting to domesticate ‘Alice’, to fold it into childhood memory. Bloom resists that domestication. He restores strangeness to the familiar. In doing so, he made the book newly available to me—not as a relic, not as an ornament, but as a living text.

Lewis Carroll reached me first as a cultural legend. Through Bloom, he reached me as artist. And Alice, forever falling, continues to unsettle the ground beneath certainty.

A classic book and a classic commentary. Literary criticism at its best. A must-read for beginner and scholar alike.

[♡Anna♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Curious and curiouser!!

[Brittany · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' a.k.a 'Alice in Wonderland' is a 247 paged classical novel written by Lewis Carroll is 1865. The book follows a young girl and the peculiar circumstances she comes by after following a rabbit down a rabbit-hole, leading to a somewhat alternate universe in a sense. I thought that the idea and plot behind the book was extremely original especially taking into account the time period it was released. 'Alice in Wonderland' seems more like something that would have come about during the 60s or 70s not the 1800s! Psychedelic and absolutely whimsical this classic is truly a unique read. Although I have all these great things to say about the novel, I actually found it a bit frightening. From the Cheshire Cat to the Queen of Hearts and Mad Hatter...yikes! I would definitely recommend this eloquent yet playful book to anyone looking to add a couple classics to their repertoire of books.

[Faye · Rating 5 out of 5]

How fun!!

This was my first time reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I have watched multiple movies /shows about Alice in Wonderland and they were "ok". I thought I would give the book a try since I have found myself enjoying reading so much this year. (first time ever, and I'm 53!) The book is so fun! Very charming!

[Diony Borja Montoya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked it. I loved all the made-up words and the fact that Alice kept talking about her cat and everyone kept getting offended. Also surprised he just made this up in his head as a story at night and then wrote it down.

[Ella · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a collection of essays that offers a thoughtful, literary-focused exploration of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Edited by Harold Bloom, the volume brings together a range of critical voices that examine Carroll’s work as more than a children’s story, treating it instead as a serious and enduring work of literature.

The essays pay close attention to language, themes, and literary influence, highlighting Carroll’s originality and the way Alice resists easy interpretation. Many contributors emphasize how the stories defy traditional moral lessons, instead embracing playful logic, linguistic experimentation, and a sustained challenge to authority and convention.

My favorite pieces in the collection were “The Balance of Brillig,” an inspiring study of the art and mechanics of writing nonsense, and “Towards a Definition of Alice’s Genre: The Folktale and Fairy-Tale Connection,” which thoughtfully explores the different genres that shape and surround Alice’s story.

At times, the criticism can feel a little dense. Still, for those interested in literary analysis and critical perspectives, this collection provides a compelling look at why Alice continues to fascinate, puzzle, and inspire readers across generations.

[Amelia]

I loved this book as a child, even had huge sections of it memorized. Then a few years ago I re-read it and appreciated it in a whole different way. It is so incredibly WEIRD! And it continues to provide so many accurate metaphors for life in its dreamlike wisdom: falling down the rabbit hole into a place far removed from the "real world" of comforting familiarity where things make sense, drowning in the pool of tears, the awkwardness of growth--of feeling rapidly taller or shorter--and not in proportion to the requirements of navigating life. The Mad Hatter dominating power politics with a very loose tether on rational consciousness, and the White Rabbit so preoccupied with being late that he misses the present moment, and the Cheshire Cat appearing and disappearing at will. Philosophically profound, and profoundly truthful, all the while speaking the language of metaphor and analogy.

[Madison Dore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alice in wonderland is one of my favourite stories and when I was little I wanted read the book so badly but I couldn’t understand the Victorian language. So I decided to read it when I understood it more and I’m so glad I did because it’s such a fun easy story and I can’t believe a grown man wrote this with the imagination of the story. Also Alice is so real for bringing her cat up every two minutes. She is a big inspiration for children with her intelligence and kindness and witty comments she is an amazing character.

[Teresa mcgaha · Rating 1 out of 5]

I avoided reading classics all my life and decided to a new genre challenge this year. If this how it is going to go, it wont work well.


This book was confusing, choppy and muddled all at the same time. It probably was new and exciting when it was first published but how it is still popular today makes my head hurt

[Leila · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful wonderful wonderful. What a wonderful whimsical book! A book full of characters that really come to life as you read, and an Alice that sometimes seems more mad than anyone in Wonderland. I can’t wait to read it to my daughter!

[Ariana Iliescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listened to an audiobook for this one and absolutely loved it. A children's classic everyone should read.

[Steve Herndon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Classic - I don't recall every reading this or having it read to me - was fun to sit down and go through (White Rabbit - Jefferson Airplane)

[Chloe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book dearly with all of my heart. It was creative, it was engaging, it was written well, it was truly something I would recommend to anyone with a creative taste and I would read again.

[Azul · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic fantasy book that I am in love with, I can't get enough of it

[Erica Jenkins-Loranger · Rating 4 out of 5]

very strange

[Carla · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's okay, but so confusing🤯. Now it feels like my head is jelly.

[Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sjov og absurd bog

[Anagha Acharya · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this for $1. That’s why I read it

[HANA · Rating 2 out of 5]

I understand that this book was just amazing when it came out, but how it has managed to stand the test of time is something I will not understand.

[Dorksgetlaid2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of absurdity in this book. But absurdity can also give rise to adventure and a flow of life. Your life might be absurd and sometimes barbaric but it is nevertheless a story.

[Austin Greis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summerween 2025: Owned for More Than a Year

[Tyler Hughes · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is utter nonsense - which I understand is the point. I don't think audiobook is the way to go here.