Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. by CARROLL, Lewis - 1866

London: Macmillan and Co.,, 1866. An "enormously influential" work of fantasy literature (Stableford) Octavo. Original pictorial cloth gilt, original pale blue endpapers (earliest state; later copies have dark green), binder's ticket to rear pastedown, edges gilt. Housed in a red straight-grain full morocco pull-off case and chemise. Frontispiece with tissue-guard and 41 illustrations by John Tenniel. Spine gently cocked, small mark to front cover, front inner hinge a little split (with partial exposure of webbing), a little faint foxing to contents. A beautiful copy, entirely unrestored, in bright cloth. First published edition, with the earlier pale blue endpapers (rather than the more usual dark green). The book was originally printed in Oxford at the Clarendon Press in June 1865, but Dodgson heard that the book's illustrator John Tenniel was dissatisfied with its quality, so he suppressed the whole edition of 2,000 copies. The book was entirely reset by Richard Clay for this authorized Macmillan edition which, although dated 1866, was ready by November 1865, in time for the Christmas market. The unused Oxford sheets were sold to Appleton's for use in their New York edition, published the following summer. The Macmillan edition was published in an edition of 4,000 copies. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is "especially demonstrative of the fantasy genre; Alice, a stranger to Wonderland, realises the fantastical nature of the world that surrounds her and must constantly work to navigate and understand it" (Carter). The work was "enormously influential, bringing about a sea change in children's fantasy and mounting a defiant opposition to the didactic tendencies of Victorian children's literature" (Stableford, p. 63). Leighton Carter, "Which way? Which way?": The Fantastical Inversions of Alice in Wonderland, 2007; Magill, Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, I, pp. 7-16; Printing and the Mind of Man 354; Brian Stableford, The A to Z of Fantasy Literature, 2009; Williams-Madan-Green-Crutch 46.