Alice’s Day: The Story Told on a Rowing Boat

Alice’s Day falls on July 4, the anniversary of a rowing trip on the Thames in 1862. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, took three daughters of the college’s dean on a three-mile row upriver from Folly Bridge to the village of Godstow. A friend, the Reverend Robinson Duckworth of Trinity College, came along. The girls were Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddell. They asked for a story, and Dodgson told one about a bored girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole.

Alice asked him to write it down. He did, slowly, over the next two years, and the story that started as an improvised afternoon’s entertainment became Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865 under the name Lewis Carroll.

The day is worth marking for writers because the whole arc of a book is visible in it. A story told aloud to a live audience, written down for one reader, revised and expanded for strangers, and then fought over at the printer.

Who was Charles Dodgson before he became Lewis Carroll?

A mathematician. Dodgson lived from 1832 to 1898 and spent his working life at Christ Church, Oxford, lecturing in mathematics and writing about logic. He was also a keen early photographer and a writer of comic verse, parody and puzzles.

The pen name came years before Alice. In 1856 he published a poem called Solitude in a magazine called The Train, and he sent the editor, Edmund Yates, several possible pseudonyms. Yates picked Lewis Carroll. Dodgson had built it by translating his first two names into Latin, reversing them and translating them back into English.

It’s a mathematician’s pen name, a small encoding puzzle hidden in plain sight.

That combination of logic and play is the whole character of the Alice books. They’re full of arguments that follow the rules perfectly and arrive somewhere absurd.

What happened on the Alice’s Day boat trip of July 4, 1862?

Five people went out in a rowing boat on a summer afternoon, and three of them wanted a story.

Dodgson made it up as he went. By the accounts that survive, he’d stop mid-adventure now and then and announce that the rest would have to wait until next time, and the girls would protest until he carried on. Alice herself remembered the sun being so hot that the party landed and sat in the shade of a haystack to hear more. They stopped at Godstow, and the girls went home with a story nobody had written down.

The audience mattered.

The first version of Alice had an audience of three children who could interrupt. Every joke was tested in real time on the people it was meant for. If a bit didn’t land, he’d know immediately from three bored faces. That’s a better editorial process than most published books get. A novelist working alone can spend a year on a chapter without once watching a reader’s face, and by the time anybody reads it the chapter has set. Dodgson got his feedback while the story was still soft enough to change.

Alice Liddell asked him to put the adventures on paper. He agreed to try.

How did a spoken story become Alice’s Adventures Under Ground?

Slowly. According to the Lewis Carroll Society, Dodgson began the manuscript on November 13, 1862, more than four months after the boat trip, and finished the text on February 10, 1863. He illustrated it himself in pen and ink and gave the finished book, titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, to Alice Liddell on November 26, 1864. It was a handmade object for one reader, about 15,500 words long, lettered by hand and bound, more than two years after she’d asked for it.

Most stories told aloud vanish. This one survived because a child asked for it in writing and an adult kept a promise for two years. The same thing is true of most family stories. I interviewed my grandfather about the Second World War when I was seventeen, and the final version of that book, Behind the Wire, wasn’t written until 2025. A spoken story survives only if somebody writes it down, and the writing takes longer than anybody expects.

What did Carroll add when he expanded Alice for publication?

Nearly as much again. Friends who read the manuscript encouraged him to publish it, and he expanded it from about 15,500 words to about 27,500.

The two most famous additions are the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Tea-Party. Neither appears in the manuscript Alice Liddell received. Think of the book without them and it’s a different book. The grin that stays behind after the cat disappears, the tea party stuck forever at six o’clock, the March Hare and the Hatter arguing about the meaning of words. Those scenes are what most people remember, and they were written after the first draft was finished and given away.

I cut a lot when I revise. Most writers should, because first drafts carry throat-clearing and repetition. Carroll’s revision ran the other way, and it worked because the first draft was lean and private and the second had a different job. A story told for three girls who knew the rower could leave things out. A book for strangers needed more invention, more set pieces and more room for the illustrations.

The lesson is that revision follows the audience. Know who the book is for, and the right changes become obvious.

My own notes on that process are in revising your novel.

Why was the first printing of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland withdrawn?

The illustrator hated it. Dodgson hired John Tenniel, the political cartoonist at Punch, to draw the published book, and Tenniel produced 42 illustrations. Macmillan published the book in July 1865 in an edition of 2,000 copies, printed by Oxford University Press. Only about 50 had been bound when Tenniel said he was dissatisfied with how his pictures had printed.

Dodgson withdrew the edition and asked the people who’d received presentation copies to send them back. He had the book reprinted by another printer, Richard Clay, and the new edition appeared in November 1865 dated 1866. The unbound sheets of the first printing were sold to D. Appleton and Co. in New York, and Appleton issued them in America in 1866.

That’s an author paying to protect the art. It cost him money and time, and he did it because the pictures mattered as much as the words.

The withdrawn first printing is now among the rarest books in English. Dodgson’s own copy sold at auction in 1998 for $1.54 million.

What happened to the original Alice manuscript?

Alice Liddell kept it for more than sixty years. In 1928 she sold it at Sotheby’s for £15,400 to an American dealer, Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach, who sold it on to the American collector Eldridge Johnson. When it came up for auction again in 1948, a group of American donors bought it and presented it to the British Museum. It’s now held by the British Library.

The handwritten book that started as a gift to one child is now a national treasure on the other side of an ocean and back again. A facsimile edition was published in 1886, so anyone can read the version Alice received.

Why does Alice in Wonderland still work for readers?

Because Alice argues. She’s a polite Victorian child dropped into a world where every adult figure is rude, illogical or mad, and she keeps trying to apply the rules she was taught. The rules don’t work. She keeps trying anyway, and she gets crosser and more confident as the book goes on, until at the trial she stands up to the whole court and calls them nothing but a pack of cards.

Underneath the nonsense is a mathematician’s logic. The jokes are about language taken literally, rules followed to absurd conclusions and arguments that are perfectly valid and completely mad.

Children like it because the adults are ridiculous. Adults like it because the logic is airtight.

It also never explains itself. There’s no moral at the end and no lesson for Alice to learn. She wakes up, tells her sister the dream, and the book ends. Most Victorian children’s books were built to improve their readers. This one was built to entertain three girls on a boat, and it outlasted nearly all of them.

The adaptations have been trying to catch it ever since, with mixed results. I’ve reviewed Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951), and the sequel gets its own treatment in Behind the Book: Through the Looking Glass. Through the Looking-Glass came out at Christmas 1871, dated 1872, in a first edition of 9,000 copies.

What is Alice’s Day in Oxford?

An annual citywide festival run by the Story Museum in Oxford. It celebrates the Alice books with storytelling, trails, talks, tours, theater, games and afternoon teas, and most events are free or cheap. The Story Museum runs it with partners across the city, including the Bodleian Libraries, Christ Church, the Museum of Oxford, Oxford Botanic Garden and the Lewis Carroll Society. In 2026 it fell on Saturday, July 4, the anniversary itself, with a theme marking 150 years since Carroll’s long nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark.

The date has a second life in America, of course. July 4 is also the day I write about what freedom means to a writer.

What can writers learn from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?

Tell it out loud first. Carroll’s first draft had a live audience. Reading a scene aloud to somebody, even one person, shows you where it drags faster than any amount of rereading.

Write it down before it disappears. Most good stories told at dinner tables vanish because nobody puts them on paper.

Revise for the reader you’ve got. The private version and the public version of Alice had different jobs, and Carroll changed the book to fit the second job. Ask who the book is for before you decide whether to cut or add.

Protect the finished object. Carroll pulled a whole printing because the pictures weren’t right. Most writers will never have to do anything that drastic, but the instinct is sound. A book is the words, the pictures, the cover and the paper, and a reader experiences all of it at once.

How should you mark Alice’s Day?

Read the book aloud to somebody. It was made to be heard, and it plays better out loud than it does on the page.

If you can get to Oxford, the festival runs around the Story Museum and Christ Church, and Folly Bridge is still there at the start of the route.

If you write, tell a story to somebody before you draft it. Watch where they lean in and where they look away. Then write it down the same day.

And if there’s a story in your family that only exists because somebody keeps telling it, get it onto paper. Carroll’s took two years and a promise to a child. If you need help turning a spoken story into a book, that’s work I do. The rest of the calendar is on the literary holidays page.

Frequently Asked Questions