CARROLL, Lewis [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (illus. Chris Riddell). Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. London: Macmillan Children's Books, 2020.

Quarto. Original cream boards, gold-foiled, with colour-illustrated vignette of Alice and the White Rabbit to the front cover. Spine lettered in black, illustrated in colour, with a vignette of the Five of Hearts. Original unclipped dust jacket. 304 pp. Illustrated throughout in full colour by Chris Riddell. First edition thus, first printing. Signed and dated by Chris Riddell to the half-title, with an original unique pencil drawing of the Queen of Hearts by the artist. Bears the verification stamp of Pea Green Boat Books confirming this as a true signed first edition.

Sir John Tenniel (1820–1914) — already the principal political cartoonist for Punch magazine when Lewis Carroll approached him — produced the illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) that have shaped the visual imagination of the story for every subsequent generation of readers, illustrators, and filmmakers. His White Rabbit in waistcoat and pocket watch, his Mad Hatter, his imperious Queen of Hearts, remain the images against which every later interpretation of Wonderland is measured, whatever form that interpretation takes. This edition was published by Macmillan in 2020 to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Tenniel's birth, and the choice of illustrator carries an unusually direct and personal connection to that anniversary.

Chris Riddell OBE — UK Children's Laureate from 2015 to 2017, political cartoonist for the Observer, and three-time winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal — has spoken openly and at length about Tenniel's illustrations as the direct catalyst for his own decision to become an illustrator, recalling as a child reader his fascination above all with Tenniel's waistcoated White Rabbit. To be commissioned, two centuries after Tenniel's birth, to produce the definitive new illustrated edition of the very book that first inspired him is a genuine full-circle moment in Riddell's career, and one he has described in his own words as both "daunting and exhilarating" — sifting through Carroll's text "as if I were on an archaeological dig," attempting, in his own account, to reconstruct Wonderland's landscape and characters through his own imagination while remaining in conscious dialogue with his childhood hero's example.

The resulting illustrations have been widely and warmly reviewed. The Times noted that where earlier illustrators such as Helen Oxenbury had made Carroll's text "fresh and cosy," Riddell "reinstated its oddness with his glamorous, fantastical caricatures and super-skillful line" — going so far as to reimagine the Mad Hatter as female, one of several distinctly Riddell-esque reinventions layered over the story's familiar architecture. The Spectator praised his rendering of the Gryphon and Mock Turtle in particular, while The Bookseller called the whole reimagining "every bit as sumptuous as you would expect."

This copy is further distinguished by an original, unique pencil drawing of the Queen of Hearts by Riddell — a one-off work of art rather than a printed illustration, executed directly into this specific copy — alongside his signature and the date to the half-title, and carries the verification stamp of Pea Green Boat Books confirming the authenticity of the signing.

Fine in fine dust jacket. Meticulously preserved. Dust jacket unclipped, showing only very light and uncommon signs of handling. Volume near fine throughout, inside and out, free from markings.

This book is currently on display in the rare book section of our Penrith store.
If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: rarebooks@harryhartog.com.au

Catalogue Number: HH000350