Welcome to the HTML edition of "Alice in Wonderland". My personal project started some time ago, during a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland. Back in 1993, I found myself strolling through a shopping mall at Weaverley Station, where I came across a big (and cheap) volume entitled ``The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll'', published by Chancellor Press, London, UK. (ISBN-0-907486-215)
I couldn't resist the temptation to read the original, before, I had only read French translations of Lewis' writings, and the final consequences of this shopping experience, is now at your fingertips, when you read these lines online, hooked into cyberspace.
However, this is not the first electronically readable version, instead I could build upon former work carried out by Michael Hawley.(1) His OCR scanned ASCII version of the two volumes contained in this edition, is available for everybody connected to the global communications network, the "Internet," for brevity most often referred to as "The Net."
It seems that there are several versions of Alice's Adventures around, that are slightly different in typography and print, and even some sentences seem to be altered, with respect to the language used. The above mentioned book, thus served as the definite reference, whenever questions arose, while converting Michael's version to Texinfo format.
Lewis Carroll, alias Charles Lutwidge Dogdson, was born in 1832 in Daresbury, a village in Cheshire, NW England, a few miles SW of the town of Warrington.
He was not a professor of mathematics and logic at Oxford University, as the rumor goes. Instead, he was (until he resigned) a "Fellow" (student) at Christchurch (a college of Oxford University). Like his father, who was the parson of Daresbury, he was a clergyman.
Carroll published many pieces on Non-Euklidian geometry, and computation of determinants. The classical story is that Queen Victoria was so enchanted by the first Alice book that she asked him to dedicate his next one to her. He obliged by dedicating An Elementary Treatise on Determinants to her; once again, Q-V- was "not amused".
Lewis's mathematical work is not regarded as of being of any significance. However, with Pillow Problems a weekly column he edited, which can be thought of a pre-cursor of the Mathematical Recreations (and Computer Recreations) column in todays "Scientific American," he contributed much to the popularization of mathematics, more than mathematical research.
His two pieces, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", first published in 1865 and "Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there", first published in 1872, have become well-known parts of the history of literature.
Lewis Carroll died 1898 in Guildford, England.
A more complete biography can be found in: Lewis Carroll: An illustrated biography by Derek Hudson. New American Library/A Meridian book, 1977.
The Gutenberg version also contains an extremely read worthy version called The annotated Alice by Martin Garner.
October 23, 1994 Copyright © 1865, 1872 by Lewis Carroll (expired)