J. Boo’s Reviews > Uncle Wiggily in Wonderland > Status Update

Wow. I'd never heard of this mash-up.

It's decent. Not the best of Uncle Wiggily's adventures, but I'm not sure the kids notice that. The Wonderland characters appear, do their schtick, and either rescue or are rescued by Uncle Wiggily.

I think starting this in parallel really did help keep the five year old interested in the main storyline of Wonderland/Looking Glass, and maybe made the characters a little more clear.

I've not heard of Uncle Wiggily for years. It seems to me we had a game with that character when I was growing up. Is this part of the Alice series?

I (or rather my grandparents) had the boardgame, too.

The game went through multiple versions over decades; it seems to have been very popular. I bought one because my kids were always big fans when at the appropriate age. It's not a bad game; we play it every so often. (We have the 50s version, I think? Later editions have faster gameplay, and, as an adult, I recommend those.)

Uncle Wiggily is his own thing. The internet says Garis wrote 79 Wiggily books (and more than four hundred others), each of which consisted of multiple short stories, and I think in order to do this, Garis was pretty diligent about mining all possible ideas.

In this one, the characters from Wonderland emerge from their book and UW randomly meets them in the woods; I don't think I'd describe it as part of the Alice series, more like a sidebar.

Thanks for the clarification J! Wonder if Uncle Wiggley appears on Project Gutenberg. I will have to check it out.

That's where I got this one from, so he indeed is there!

Here is the original trilogy, where Uncle Wiggily, advised to travel around for the sake of his rheumatism, is looking for his fortune. (See the last chapter of Uncle Wiggily's Fortune to see how he found it.) You can feel Garis feeling out how to establish the Uncle Wiggily framework in the first one, and by the second, he's definitely established his formula. I like these the best, though admittedly this whole series is definitely written for small children, and it is not as fun unless you have one available to whom you can read.

Oh, for goodness sakes, goodreads isn't allowing links in the comments any more, so I need to edit them out. Search on Gutenberg for:

Uncle Wiggily's Adventures

Uncle Wiggily's Travels

Uncle Wiggily's Fortune

It's not really necessary to read U.W. in order, though I did buy "Fortune" back when it was not available on the internet, because assorted small children (and me) wanted to know how his quest turned out. Otherwise, you're not missing much if you jump straight into the Wonderland one.

Cool! Thanks for the research. I love reading on PG!