Interesting Facts About Alice in Wonderland

When Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland came out in 1865, it was a huge success! The book is widely credited with changing the landscape of children’s literature and adding nonsensical fun to what had been a genre obsessed with moralizing.

However, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (that’s the actual name) doesn’t have a long history to it. The author, Lewis Carroll, supposedly wrote the series of stories after sharing them with the daughters of a family friend. One of the girls, named Alice, liked them so much she asked Carroll to write them down.

But even with the book’s popularity did you know that:

– The original title for the classic Alice in Wonderland was actually going to be called “Alice’s Adventures Underground”.

– The book has never been out of print. It has been translated into 176 languages. Its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, sold out within seven weeks of its publication.

– Mock Turtle soup IS REAL! It was a popular dish in Victorian times, created as a cheaper version of green turtle soup. It was made from various odd parts of a calf, such as brains, head and hoof!

– Lewis Carroll suffered from a rare neurological disorder that causes strange hallucinations and affects the size of visual objects, which can make the sufferer feel bigger or smaller than they are – a huge theme of the book. The disease, first discovered by English psychiatrist John Todd in 1955, was later named Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. It is also known as Todd’s syndrome.

Lewis Carroll’s real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. His pseudonym is an Anglicization of Ludovicus, the Latin version of “Lutwidge”, and the Irish surname Carroll, which bears great resemblance to the Latin forbear of “Charles”, Carolus.