Contrariwise… if it were, then it might; and if it were, then it would be; but since it isn’t, it isn’t. That’s logic. Charles Dodgson wrote, “I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit hole… with no idea what would happen next,” when describing how Alice was conceived one “golden afternoon” in 1862 to entertain his childhood friend Alice Liddell. His dreamworlds of the absurd Wonderland and the inverted Looking-Glass Realm show the world upside down: a baby is turned into a pig; time is suspended during a chaotic tea party; and a chaotic game of chess turns a seven-year-old girl into a Queen. But amid the anarchic humor and sparkling puns, puzzles, paradoxes, and riddles, there are touching moments of elegiac nostalgia for lost childhoods. Strikingly original and experimental, the Alice books offer readers a dual perspective on both childhood and adult worlds. This is the most extensively annotated edition available and includes the manuscript version of Alice's Adventures Underground and Carroll's essay 'Alice on the Stage' written for The Theatre in 1887.