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The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition Kindle Edition
Lewis Carroll (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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The culmination of a lifetime of scholarship, The Annotated Alice is a landmark event in the rich history of Lewis Carroll and cause to celebrate the remarkable career of Martin Gardner.
For over half a century, Martin Gardner has established himself as one of the world's leading authorities on Lewis Carroll. His Annotated Alice, first published in 1959, has over half a million copies in print around the world and is beloved by both families and scholars—for it was Gardner who first decoded many of the mathematical riddles and wordplay that lay ingeniously embedded in Carroll's two classic stories, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
Forty years after this groundbreaking publication, Norton is proud to publish the Definitive Edition of The Annotated Alice, a work that combines the notes of Gardner's 1959 edition with his 1990 volume, More Annotated Alice, as well as additional discoveries drawn from Gardner's encyclopedic knowledge of the texts. Illustrated with John Tenniel's classic, beloved art—along with many recently discovered Tenniel pencil sketches—The Annotated Alice will be Gardner's most beautiful and enduring tribute to Carroll's masterpieces yet.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherW. W. Norton & Company
- Publication dateNovember 17, 1999
- File size24409 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Readers who share Alice's taste in books will be more than satisfied with The Annotated Alice, a volume that includes not only pictures and conversations, but a thorough gloss on the text as well. There may be some, like G.K. Chesterton, who abhor the notion of putting Lewis Carroll's masterpiece under a microscope and analyzing it within an inch of its whimsical life. But as Martin Gardner points out in his introduction, so much of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass is composed of private jokes and details of Victorian manners and mores that modern audiences are not likely to catch. Yes, Alice can be enjoyed on its own merits, but The Annotated Alice appeals to the nosy parker in all of us. Thus we learn, for example, that the source of the mouse's tale may have been Alfred Lord Tennyson who "once told Carroll that he had dreamed a lengthy poem about fairies, which began with very long lines, then the lines got shorter and shorter until the poem ended with fifty or sixty lines of two syllables each." And that, contrary to popular belief, the Mad Hatter character was not a parody of then Prime Minister Gladstone, but rather was based on an Oxford furniture dealer named Theophilus Carter.
Gardner's annotations run the gamut from the factual and historical to the speculative and are, in their own way, quite as fascinating as the text they refer to. Occasionally, he even comments on himself, as when he quotes a fellow annotator of Alice, James Kincaid: "The historical context does not call for a gloss but the passage provides an opportunity to point out the ambivalence that may attend the central figure and her desire to grow up." And then follows with a charming riposte: "I thank Mr. Kincaid for supporting my own rambling." There's a lot of information in the margins (indeed, the page is pretty evenly divided between Carroll's text and Gardner's), but the ramblings turn out to be well worth the time. So hand over your old copy of Lewis Carroll's classic to the kids--this Alice in Wonderland is intended entirely for adults. --Alix Wilber
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.From Library Journal
-Thomas L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, GA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Martin Gardner (1914-2010) is regarded as one of the world's leading experts on Lewis Carroll and his work. The author of more than a hundred books, he wrote the "Mathematical Games" column for Scientific American for twenty-five years and has been hailed by Douglas Hofstadter as "one of the great intellects produced in this country in this century."
The many works of Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914) include many humorous and political cartoons for Punch and other periodicals of the time, but he is best known for his illustrations of the original editions of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Class. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Product details
- ASIN : B00FFUSCVO
- Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company; Updated, Subsequent edition (November 17, 1999)
- Publication date : November 17, 1999
- Language : English
- File size : 24409 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 433 pages
- Lending : Not Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #422,953 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #63 in Family & Parenting Literature Guides
- #140 in History of Books
- #202 in Children's Literary Criticism (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Lewis Carroll was born on 27 January 1832. He studied at Christ Church, Oxford and went on to become a mathematics lecturer there from 1855 to 1881. Lewis Carroll's most famous works are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (published in 1865) and the sequel Alice Through the Looking-Glass, which contains the classic nonsense poem The Jabberwocky (published in 1872).
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One of the things I most appreciate in this edition is the generosity of both its annotators, the late Martin Gardner and his successor, Mr. Mark Burstein. Their willingness to read, acknowledge and often accept suggestions of interpretation and emendations from readers, who are not necessarily Carrollian experts, is absolutely unparalleled in the academic world, and only helped to enrich the resulting work.
I was also touched by, and agreed with Mr. Burstein's apologia for the section of "The Wasp In a Wig", originally omitted by Lewis Carroll himself for the final printed book. It sheds a different light on Alice's personality. Throughout both books Alice is presented as a rather snobbish and self-centered person, but in "The Wasp In a Wig" she is shown to be compassionate and ready to help, even though the object of her compassion, the Wasp, is a socially inferior and quite unfriendly creature. It is indeed a pity that Lewis Carroll agreed to omit it under Tenniel's pressure.
Still, there is one shortcoming that I would wish were not in this edition. It is the choice of illustrations. Instead of the multitude of modern-day far-fetched illustrations, I would like to have seen the original colored renditions of Tenniel's drawings for the "Nursery Alice" (in which Alice wears a yellow dress), as well as Harry G. Theaker's renderings of the Tenniel drawings for the 1911 Macmillan edition of the complete Alice (in which Alice wears the now iconic blue dress).
For some reason I put off reading the Alice books for many years. I do not know how, but I got it into my head that I would not really like them. I knew they were not traditional novels in the sense of having a "plot" or dramatic tension. I thought they might be kind of boring. I also thought that I had a basic idea of the story already from the animated Disney movie. I was essentially wrong on all counts. I was literally only a few pages into the first book when I realized that these are definitely works of genius. Not only are they highly entertaining (despite not having any traditional plot), but they are also extremely funny (which is extremely rare, even among 'humor' books). If that is all the books were they would definitely be worth reading, but there is much more to the Alice books.
Anyone who has read the Alice books knows that there is a hidden depth to them, and that one can explore the books endlessly following different paths (logic, linguistics, psychology, literary criticism, Victorian culture, etc.) and never even come close to exhausting what these books have to offer. There is an essay in Lewis Carroll: A Celebration called "Toward a Definition of Alice's Genre" that was written by Nina Demurova. At the very end of the essay she quotes Louis Untermeyer, who apparently claimed in his introductions to the Alice books that they were "the most inexhaustible tale in the world" (86). Normally I do not like statements like that in literary criticism. I think literary criticism should be concerned with analyzing and clarifying the meaning of works, not with "ranking" works, which I think is mostly a useless exercise. In this case, however, I think the statement may actually be correct. I read the annotated version of Alice, I read all of Martin Gardner's annotations as I was reading, I read a number of essays on the books after finishing them, and I read a book called Language and Lewis Carroll by Robert Sutherland, and I genuinely feel like I have not even scratched the surface of these amazing novels. These books will provide the reader not only with entertainment, but enough food for thought, and material for research, to last a lifetime. I am sure I will be reading, and re-reading these works over and over for the rest of my life. I recommend that anyone who is thinking about reading these books get as early a start as possible, and not put it off like I did.
I wanted to say just a few words about the annotations. For the most part I thought the annotations were excellent. The annotations in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland seemed to me to lean towards the biographical. I was ultimately less interested in the biographical details behind the creation of the Alice books (relating to both Dodgson himself, as well as Alice Liddell). I was more interested in some of the philosophical, logical, and linguistic aspects of the book, so I was slightly disappointed there was not more of a focus on those aspects of the work in the annotations to Alice in Wonderland. They were not entirely absent, for sure, and I felt the notes became more interesting in Through the Looking Glass. Despite my slight disappointment, however, I would definitely recommend that anyone thinking of reading this pick up the annotated versions. There is a lot in the books I would have missed without the annotations, and, of course, if you are someone who is interested in the biographical details behind the creation of the works, there is a fair amount of information in the notes.
I would also recommend taking a look at the collection of essays on Lewis Carroll I referenced above, as well as the essays in the Norton Critical Edition of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. There are some very good essays in both collections that should be a good start for anyone wanting to go a bit deeper into these "inexhaustible tales". The book on language and Lewis Carroll by Robert Sutherland that I referenced above is also very good, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the linguistic insights contained within Carroll's Alice books, as well as some of his other works. And finally, the truly ambitious reader might be interested in taking a look at The Logic of Sense by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The book is a VERY technical work of philosophy, not for the faint of heart, and it is not directly about the Alice books, but Lewis Carroll is definitely one of the main "characters" in the book (to the degree that philosophy books have characters) and Gilles Deleuze offers some interesting interpretations of some passages from the Alice books.
Top reviews from other countries

I bought this to replace my Penguin copy of the 1970 revised version of the 1960 original, so I haven't seen the expanded versions which appeared between 1970 and 2015. It's going to take several months to read the whole book; so far I've just flipped through and dipped into a few entries, which are a lot more detailed than in the 1970 edition.
The book is beautiful - the extra colour illustrations make all the difference. If you're a Carroll fan and don't already have one of the expanded versions it's an essential addition to your library. I can't give a link here, but an online search for this edition and "review" will bring up a detailed review published in The New Yorker. You can get a good idea of what it looks like from the page photographs Amazon have included.
At least one of the pages in my copy has a mark from the printing process, but it's of minor importance and I'm not going to change it in case the next copy is worse. Also, check out the measurements of this book before buying - it's more or less square and fits very oddly onto a bookshelf!



Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 28, 2020




