Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, written by the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pen name Lewis Carroll, was first published by MacMillinan and Co. in 1865.
The book is a retelling of a story invented for Edith, Lorina and Alice Liddell, daughters of Carroll's friend Henry Liddell, to entertain them during a boating trip in 1862. Ten-year-old Alice liked the story so much that she asked Carroll to write it down for her, and he began to work on the manuscript. The book would be published three years later.
Carroll attempted to illustrate his manuscript on his own, but his artistic shortcomings soon became clear. He reached out to John Tenniel, best known at the time as a cartoonist for Punch, a liberal British weekly magazine. Tenniel completed 92 Alice illustrations, 42 of which were included in the original copies of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Carroll was unsatisfied with the quality of the first edition, so this run of 2000 copies was sold off in the United States. The book was reprinted in Decmeber of 1865, but carried the date 1866.