Lewis Carroll (the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson ) was a Victorian nonsense writer for children whose works hold enduring fascination for adults as well. His Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872) are classics of the English language, vying with the Bible and Shakespeare as sources of quotation, and they have been translated into virtually every other language, including Pitjantjatjara, a dialect of Aborigine. Alice's story began as a piece of extempore whimsy spun out to entertain three little girls on a boating trip on the river Isis in 1862, and it continues to delight children and to excite the responses of psychoanalysts,philosophers, mathematicians, linguists, semioticians, and Victorianists; historians of children's literature and of childhood; those studying the sources of the parodies, the genre of nonsense, and the development of Victorian humor; along with biographers and literary critics of eclectic interests. Next to the Alice books, Carroll's The...