Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Decoded – dives into the text of Lewis Carroll’s classic and unlocks hidden meanings that take you beyond the looking glass. An interesting companion that also includes the full original text. Almost 20 years in the making this work by Scholar David Day started in 1996.
From the publisher’s site: This gorgeous 150th anniversary edition of Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland is also a revelatory work of scholarship. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a book many of us love and feel we know well. But it turns out we have only scratched the surface. Scholar David Day has spent many years down the rabbit hole and has emerged with a revelatory new view of its contents. What we have here, he brilliantly and persuasively argues, is a complete classical education in coded form – Carroll’s gift to his “wonder child” Alice Liddell. Day reveals the many layers of teaching, concealed by manipulation of language, that are carried so lightly in the beguiling form of a fairy tale. His novel is a memory palace, given to Alice as the great gift of an education delivered in coded form because in that age, it was a gift no girl would receive in any other way. Day also shows how the characters in the book are based on real Victorians. Wonderland, he shows, is a veritable Who’s Who of Oxford.