The date was July 4th, 1862, a bright summer’s day, when Dodgson, a Christ Church mathematics lecturer, and a university colleague, canon Robinson Duckworth, took the girls on a boat trip and picnic along the river Isis. Dodgson improvised the story as he and Duckworth rowed. “I’m inventing it as we go along,” he declared.

Alice – who was, after all, the heroine of the story – was particularly spellbound and asked Dodgson to write it down for her. He appears to have taken some persuading, but ten-year-old Alice was persistent and the story became Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Later, he produced a second version, this time illustrated with his own drawings, which he presented to Alice as a Christmas gift in 1864.

When Dodgson gave a copy to his friend, the Scottish author and poet George MacDonald, to read to his own children (who loved it just as much as Alice and her sisters had), MacDonald advised him to have it published. The book was renamed Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and eventually published by Macmillan in July 1865, three years to the day after the original boat trip had taken place.

A difficult birth

By now, Dodgson had adopted the pen-name of Lewis Carroll. At his invitation, the book was illustrated by one of the leading political caricaturists of the day, Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914). This proved to be something of a false start, as Tenniel was unhappy with the print quality of the first edition. He worked by drawing each illustration on to a wood block, which was then sent to the engravers to be cut into a relief for printing. Most of the illustrations are intricately detailed, so this was a fairly painstaking way to work. The first edition was withdrawn, but appeared in an improved version towards the end of the year and has remained in print ever since.

Tenniel was at first reluctant to illustrate the second Alice book – full title Through The Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There (1871) – saying he didn’t have the time. But he was eventually persuaded and the second book actually contains more drawings than the first (50, compared to 42). At only one point during the work did Tenniel make a stand: he declared that an episode in which Alice meets a melancholy wasp wearing a wig added nothing to the story, and was too difficult to illustrate. “I can’t see my way to a picture,” he wrote in a letter. Carroll duly dropped it, and it was only published after the original proof, long thought to have been missing, was sold at Sotheby’s in London in 1974. It was bought by Norman Armour Jr. of New York, a private collector, for £1,700.