Aventures d’Alice au pays des merveilles

12mo, (6) leaves, 196 pp.
Publisher's blue boards, triple gilt fillet framing the covers, gilt medallion depicting Alice holding a pig in her arms on the upper cover, gilt medallion with the Cheshire Cat on the lower cover, gilt edges, spine darkened, slipcase. Contemporary binding.

183 x 124 mm.

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
London, Macmillan and co, 1869.

First French edition, illustrated with a frontispiece and 42 vignettes by John Tenniel.

Translated by Henri Bué.

While she is bored on the bank of a river, Alice suddenly sees a white rabbit go by, which is nothing exceptional, but, more surprisingly, she also sees him pull a watch out of the pocket of his waistcoat. Intrigued, she sets off after him. The rabbit disappears into a large burrow: she decides to go down after him.

It was at the request of a real little girl, also named Alice, that Charles Dodgson, a mathematics professor at Oxford, put the story he had told her during a walk one summer day in 1862 on paper. Three years later, under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, he published it; encouraged by its critical reception, he wrote the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, which was even more successful in 1871.

“Alice, that little girl blessed with eternal youth, has, over time, become even more famous than her creator, Lewis Carroll. Alice in Wonderland, a masterpiece that has sold millions of copies and is the most famous book in England after the Bible, holds a very special and unique place in Anglo-Saxon literature… Victorian and Romantic society saw in it a cult of childhood; later, the Surrealists and André Breton claimed the novel as part of their heritage.

The book was an immediate success. It was translated and published in several languages even during Lewis Carroll’s lifetime. Since then, the fame of this book has continued to grow. In England, Carroll is cited as often as Shakespeare or the Bible.” (B. Lacombe).

Beautiful copy preserved in its publisher’s binding.