GLEAMS FROM A GOLDEN AFTERNOON

The Fourth of July...

The day that saw the birth of American Independence – and the birth of one of our best loved literary characters – Alice in Wonderland, whose topsy-turvy adventures began on this day in 1862, when the Revered Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (later better known as 'Lewis Carroll') took a boating trip in Oxford with a college friend and the three daughters of Dean Liddell of Christ Church.

Dodgson whiled away the afternoon by telling the three girls a fantastical story – with a heroine named after the middle sister. Subsequently written down as Alice's Adventures Under-ground it was eventually published in 1865, with John Tenniel's famous illustrations, as .
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Here's my rather particular copy of that book...

...signed by Lewis Carroll on the half-title page to Ada Chambers Butler, another little girl that, as he recorded in his diaries, he encountered at Margate on 10 October 1870...

And here's my copy of a lovely volume, The Lewis Carroll Picture Book, edited by Dodgson's nephew, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, and published in 1899, the year after Carroll's death...

...not sure what the Gryphon is doing chatting with the White Rabbit (or maybe it's the mad March Hare) but the nicest thing is that, inside, it is  signed by Alice Pleasance Hargreaves –– Alice Liddell as was, the original inspiration for this now so famous story...

HAPPY FOURTH of JULY!