Audiobook · read by volunteers
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll (1832–1898)
Read by Kristen McQuillin, Brad Bush, Roger W. Barnett, miette, Mark Bradford, Raza Shah, Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), MarinaMechanical, R. Francis Smith, Chris Goringe · 12 chapters · 2 h 58
About the book
Alice is sitting bored on a riverbank when a White Rabbit in a waistcoat hurries past, muttering that he is late. She follows him down a rabbit-hole and tumbles into a world where nothing behaves as it should. She grows and shrinks, argues with a caterpillar, takes tea with a Hatter who never stops, and plays croquet with flamingos on the grounds of a furious Queen. Logic is turned upside down, rhymes go wrong and conversations loop in on themselves, yet Alice keeps her good manners and her curiosity. Lewis Carroll's classic is a wonderfully inventive piece of nonsense, equally delightful for children and for adults who love wordplay. Twelve chapters, about three hours, ten readers, each adding a new voice to the strange parade of characters. Come down the rabbit-hole and see what happens.
Introduction
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), an English mathematician and lecturer at Oxford. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865, began as a story told to a young friend on a boat trip and grew into one of the most famous children's books ever written. Carroll's text is full of rhythm, which is why it works so well as a spoken performance: the songs, the riddles and the Mad Tea-Party dialogue all gain from being heard. In this recording, ten voices allow its eccentric inhabitants to keep their own distinct sound.
What distinguishes the book is its sense of play. Carroll was a logician, and he delights in puns, parodies and paradoxes that bend the rules of ordinary talk. The first edition was illustrated by John Tenniel, whose drawings of Alice and her companions remain the images most people picture. Many of the verses are send-ups of poems that Victorian children were expected to learn, and the characters, from the Cheshire Cat to the Queen of Hearts, have become part of the common imagination. The story was a departure from the moralising tales that dominated children's literature at the time, because it aimed above all to amuse. Alice returned in Through the Looking-Glass, but the first book remains the best known.
This recording follows the twelve chapters of the original and lasts about three hours. It is performed by ten LibriVox volunteers, a fitting choice for a book so full of competing voices.
It is worth hearing today because its humour is quick, its imagination unbounded, and the nonsense, when read aloud, is even funnier than on the page.
Public domain
Lewis Carroll died in 1898: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text