INTRODUCTION
On the fourth of July, 1862, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a young Oxford Don, who was then, and for nearly half a century remained, Mathematical Lecturer of Christ Church, took the day off and went a-rowing with the small daughters of the Dean. That eventful picnic was duly noted in his neat and interminable diary that night. The entry runs thus:
"I made an expedition up the river to Godstow with the three Liddells; we had tea on the bank there and did not reach Christ Church until half-past eight."
But at that time he did not deem one subsequently enhanced detail of the day sufficiently important to be worth chronicling. He said nothing of the fairy tale he began to spin "all in the golden afternoon" there in the shadow of the hayrick to which the four Argonauts retreated from the heat of the sun. It was a tale about just such a little girl as the gravely attentive Alice Liddell who used to prod him when he ventured to let lapse for a time this story of another Alice falling down a rabbit-hole into the world of the unexpected. In response to such proddings, he carried the story along on that and other afternoons and finally committed it to manuscript as "Alice's Adventures Underground." Somewhat expanded this was published three years later under the nom de guerre of Lewis Carroll and under the title of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
In the sixty years that have passed since then, this gay,
1
