1869 ALICE\'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND BY LEWIS CARROLL - EARLY UK EDITION
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1869 ALICE\'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND BY LEWIS CARROLL - EARLY UK EDITION:
$750.00
Alice\'s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll 1869 Macmillan & Company London, UK.This is an early UK edition with Fourteenth Thousand printed on title page.
Book Condition: Fair
Original burgundy cloth boards with triple ruled gilt borders and gilt Alice on front board and Cheshire Cat on rear, gilt edges, hastissue guard. Boards have soiling, corners show fraying and are bumped, binding and endsheets professionally redone and tight, some foxing to pages, previous owner\'s name written at top of second end pageFrom Lewis Carroll Society web site:
OriginsOn 4 July 1862 Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), accompanied by the three eldest daughters of the Dean of Christ Church, Lorina, Alice and Edith, and The Rev. Robinson Duckworth of Trinity College, took a boat trip ‘up the river to Godstow’.
During the trip, the first outlines of the story of Alice’s Adventures under Ground were narrated. On return to Christ Church, Alice urged Dodgson to write out the story for her. That evening and on a train journey the next day, he set out the main headings. He started a manuscript text on 13 November 1862, completing it on 10 February 1863.
It is likely that he left spaces in the text to be filled with his own illustrations at a later date. The manuscript was seen by the novelist Henry Kingsley and the family of the writer of children’s books George MacDonald, who all urged him to consider publication.
Dodgson retained the manuscript version for reference as he expanded the book into the fuller text of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In November 1864 he presented the manuscript volume of Alice’s Adventures under Ground, complete with his own illustrations, to Alice Liddell.
Meanwhile, the artist John Tenniel was approached and commissioned to illustrate the final expanded text of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
PublicationThe book was published on commission by Macmillan & Co., in July 1865, in an edition of 2000 printed by the Oxford University Press, the copies to be bound in red cloth gilt. Only 50 copies had been bound when Dodgson heard from Tenniel that he was dissatisfied with the way the pictures came out. The book was withdrawn, and recipients of presentation copies asked to return them. The rejected copies were presented to children’s hospitals and institutions – 23 copies of the ‘1865 Alice’ are known to have survived. (See reference 1.)
In November 1865, the second edition of 2,000 copies was published, using a new printer (Richard Clay of Bungay) (See reference 1A). The new edition was said by Dodgson to be a ‘perfect piece of artistic printing’. Copies are known with light blue end papers, and dark green end papers, probably 2000 of each, with the light blue copies having precedence. In April 1866, remaining unbound copies of the 1865 printing were sold to the American firm of D. Appleton & Co.. The sheets were bound in England, the edges gilded and the book published under the Appleton imprint with a cancel title page (printed ‘two-up’ so there are two variants showing slight differences), copies are generally known as ‘the Appleton Alice’.
Later issues of the English Macmillan edition have the date and number of the ‘thousand’ on the title page up to the 98 th thousand in 1932. The last reprint was in 1942.
Up to the 12 th thousand in 1868, the text was printed in letter press, so Dodgson was able to make corrections to the text. After 1868, the pages were set in electrotype, so only minor corrections were possible. (See reference 2.)
In the 1890s Dodgson made major revisions to both books, which were incorporated in the new electrotype settings for the 86 th thousand of Alice’s Adventures and the 61 st thousand of Looking-Glass, both published in 1897.
1869 ALICE\'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND BY LEWIS CARROLL - EARLY UK EDITION:
$750.00