Lewis Carroll's beloved children's classic comes to life with over one hundred whimsical, eccentric and darkly humorous wood engravings, all created by the 'Mad Hatter' of Canadian graphic arts himself, the award-winning George A. Walker.

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By Joseph A. BrabantOn the 27th of January, 1983, Bill Poole, George Walker and I met for lunch at Chives on Queen Street in Toronto. Bin is the kind of chap who remembers birthdays and he was quick to remind us that it was Lewis Carroll''s 151st birthday. We got to talking about Carroll and by the time lunch was over we had decided to publish an edition of Alice''s Adventures In Wonderland. George would do the illustrations; Bill would print the book; and I would be the editor.We then went about our appointed tasks, meeting for lunch about once a month for the next five years to review our progress with the book. There were always two or three pages of freshly printed text to proofread; we would discuss where the illustrations should be placed; and our waitresses soon got used to serving lunch on tables piled high with wood engravings, sketches, books and pageproofs.George cut more than one hundred and fifty wood engravings. At times two or three engravings competed for the same space on a page and some hard choices had to be made. Ninety-six were eventually used. One interesting feature of the book is that George tried, as often as possible, to depict episodes which had seldom or never been illustrated before, like Elsie, Lacie and Tihie at the bottom of the treacle well in the Dormouse''s story.My task was to decide which of the variant texts of the book we would print, and I finally settled on the text as it read in copies printed in 1897 just before Carroll''s death. These copies known as the eighty-sixth thousand copies were the last ones printed under Carroll''s supervision. We followed the 1897 text faithfully and readers interested in such details will note, for instance, that the words 'salt water'' are unhyphenated at page 16, there is no bracket after the declension of 'mouse'' at page 12, and there are missing quotation marks at page 57 when the King is talking to Alice about the Cheshire Cat. We also retained Carroll''s idiosyncratic spelling of words like 'sha''n''t'' and 'ca''n''t''. Bill set the type by hand and in the course of doing so he noted that Carroll had a predilection for words with the letter 't''. (We offer no explanations, Freudian or otherwise.) Bill also did all the printing by hand with all the risks which that entails. Somewhere there is a letter 'f'' with a partly broken stem; it broke during the printing as the heavy press slammed down once more. Bill noticed it much later but will not say where! He printed the illustrations directly from George''s wood engravings, unlike Carroll''s printers who did not use Tenniel''s woodblocks but worked instead with devices like electrotypes taken from the woodblocks.Thus was the tale of Wonderland retold once again. Retold, by the way, for the first time in Canada. We hope the reader will like it.* * * * *How the story came to be told in the first place is another matter. On the 4th of July, 1862, Carroll, who was then a thirty-year-old Mathematcial Lecturer at Christ Church and whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, went on a picnic near Oxford with his friend Robin Duckworth and with Alice, Lorina and Edith Liddell, the children of the Dean of Christ Church and Mrs. Liddell. They took a boat at Folly Bridge near Christ Church and rowed up the Isis, as the Thames is known at Oxford, to a place called Godstow three miles away where they picnicked and Carroll told them a story.There had been many such picnics before, and one of the highlights of these outings was the stories Carroll would tell. The story he made up on the 4th of July, 1862 was all about Alice Liddell herself, and how she followed a white rabbit down a rabbithole and met up with all sorts of strange adventures. It must have been an even better story than usual because at the end of the day Alice asked Carroll to write it down for her.He agreed to do so and produced a little book called Alice''s Adventures Under Ground which he gave Alice as a Christmas present. It was a book of about ninety pages in which Carroll included not only the story he had told on the 4th of July, but also other stories which he had told the Liddell children on other picnics. It was all in his own neat handwriting and he even illustrated it, although by his own admission he was not much of an artist.Alice''s Adventures Under Ground immediately found favour with the Liddells and they showed it to their friends, who were equally enthusiastic. Greville MacDonald, the son of George MacDonald who wrote At The Back Of The North Wind and other books for children, was one of those who read it. Greville was about ten years old and he wished there were sixty thousand volumes of it. Encouraged by all this, Carroll decided to publish the story and reach a wider audience.The book which resulted was called Alice''s Adventures In Wonderland. It appeared in 1865 just in time for the Christmas sales. It was a much longer book than Alice''s Adventures Under Ground, being nearly two hundred pages long. In fact, Carrol had extensively rewritten Alice''s Adventures Under Ground taking out many references to the Liddells and to events at Oxford which were considered too personal to be left in a book which was to be sold to the public. He also added entirely new episodes with new characters like the Cheshire Cat, the March Hare and the Hatter who had not figured in Alice''s Adventures Under Ground.An advertisement for the book in November of 1865 predicted that it would be sought after as one of the most popular works of its class. This certainly proved to be true. Over one hundred and fifty thousand copies were sold just in Carroll''s lifetime and, in 1898, the year of his death, Alice''s Adventures In Wonderland was voted the most popular children''s book of the day.Since then, Alice''s Adventures In Wonderland has been reprinted thousands of times. It has been imitated and parodied. It has been used to advertise everything from beer to refrigerators. It has been dramatized, filmed and choreographed. It has been translated into almost every known language, even into languages like Swahili and Marathi. One wonders, indeed, what Carroll would think of it all. Bill, George and I like to think that at least he would be pleased with our work.TorontoOctober, 1988.