The score(s) next to each publication’s review and the average rating is an interpretation of the reviews by Literature’s Pretty Long History.
Critics:
“Nor is the story unreadable, but it is dull. There is no flow of animal spirits in its fur, which is forced and over-ingenious…But Mr. Tenniel’s admirably clever and grotesque illustrations carry us well through “Wonderland.””
“They also publish Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Cassall, with forty-two illustrations by John ; Tennell a story of the improbable and absurd, or harum-scarum adventures in the land of fable. It is beautifully printed, and put up in various fancy bindings.”
“It may please the fancy though it may not instruct in matters of fact.”
“ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, is a curious book, too much like Kingsley’s Water Babies, incomprehensible excepting to children.”
“In Mr. Carroll’s book we have recounted the extraordinary story of a little girl who, having been sitting for some time in the open air with her sister, suddenly falls into dreamland, and in her dream beholds all sorts of grotesque objects—such as a rabbit dressed in coat and waistcoat, a dodo carrying a walking-stick, a caterpillar smoking a hookah, a “Cheshire cat” with a veritable grin, the figures on a pack of cards endowed with life, &c.; and goes through a succession of adventures, which certainly prove the author to possess a most fertile imagination, but which are too extravagantly absurd to produce more diversion than disappointment and irritation.”
Supplemental Notice(s)
“The fifth [sixth?] thousand of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by LEWIS CARROLL, with Forty-two illustrations by John Tenniel, seems to have been reached during the year; and we are glad there is so much good taste and love of quaint riotous fancy in the world as this sale implies. Mr. Tenniel has never done anything better than some of these drawings.” — Illustrated Times (December 22, 1866)
Average Rating
Latest
