On July 4, 1862, a young mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took the three daughters of the college’s dean, Henry Liddell, on a rowing trip up the River Thames, along with a friend. To keep the girls entertained, he made up a story about a girl who falls down a rabbit hole into a strange world. The girl was named after the middle sister, Alice, who was ten. At the end of the day, Alice asked him to write it down.

He did. Over the next two years he wrote out Alice’s Adventures Under Ground by hand, illustrated it with his own drawings, and gave it to her on November 26, 1864, as an early Christmas present. Meanwhile, encouraged by friends, he expanded it for publication, adding new episodes such as the Mad Tea-Party and the Cheshire Cat, and found an illustrator: John Tenniel, the leading cartoonist of the magazine Punch. Dodgson published under a pen name, Lewis Carroll, a playful Latinized twist on his own first two names.

Macmillan printed the published version, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in the summer of 1865, but Tenniel was so unhappy with how his pictures had come out that Dodgson withdrew the run of two thousand copies, and they were reprinted. The new printing went on sale in November 1865, in time for Christmas, though its title page said 1866. Only about two dozen copies of the rejected first printing are known to survive, and they are among the most valuable books in the world.

The story is nonsense, but sharp nonsense. Alice grows and shrinks, recites poems that come out wrong, argues with a caterpillar, plays croquet with flamingos, and stands up to the Queen of Hearts, whose answer to everything is “Off with their heads!” In an age when children’s books were mostly there to teach a lesson, this one was there to delight, and to tease the adults. It has never stopped selling, and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), followed.

Alice Liddell kept the handwritten manuscript until 1928, when, needing money, she sold it at auction. It went to America. In 1948, a group of American admirers bought it back and gave it to the British people, in gratitude for Britain’s role in the Second World War. It is now in the British Library.