Carroll, L: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll's real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He was born on 27th January 1832 at Daresbury in Cheshire. He studied at Christ Church, Oxford University and later became a mathematics lecturer there. He wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872) for the daughters of the Dean of Christ Church. He was very fond of puzzles and some readers have found mathematical jokes and codes hidden in his Alice books. His other works include Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1869), The Hunting of the Snark (1876), Rhyme? And Reason? (1882), The Game of Logic (1887) and Sylvie and Bruno (1889, 1893). Dodgson was also an influential photographer. He died on 14th January 1898.

"Only Lewis Carroll has shown us the world upside down the way a child sees it, and has made us laugh as children laugh" -- Virginia Woolf "Precise, dream-like, subversive" -- Quentin Blake Independent on Sunday "The clue to the enduring fascination and greatness of the Alice books lies in language... It is play, and word-play, and its endless intriguing puzzles continue to reveal themselves long after we have ceased to be children" -- A. S. Byatt "Without these two books in my childhood I doubt whether my imagination would have developed at all" -- Kate Atkinson "So what makes these different to any other set of classics? In a moment of inspiration Random House had the bright idea of actually asking Key stage 2 children what extra ingredients they could add to make children want to read. And does it work? Well, put it this way...my 13-year-old daughter announced that she had to read a book over the summer holiday and, without any prompting, spotted The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas...and proceeded to read it! Now, if you knew my 13-year-old daughter, you would realise that this is quite remarkable. She reads texts, blogs and tags by the thousand - but this is the first book she has read since going to high school, so all hail Vintage Classics!" National Association for the Teaching of English