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The life of Lewis Carroll is the story of a Wonderland which he created for Alice and shared with her, the Dormouse, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. Yet Wonderland was also a real world; a land of wonder may be a world in which the imagined is real and the real sometimes imagined, while people assume a dual role. The imaginative story is not only a product of creative genius, for creation but also serves a purpose for the author who is his own first audience, and the phantasy of Lewis Carroll is only intelligible after study of his life plus a consideration of what he was trying to achieve when he wrote the nonsense stories intended for children but now so jealously cherished by adults.
“Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” have become world property and the story has been published in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Sweden, Spain, and Holland. It was printed in Arabic and Chinese, although the book was banned in Hunan province because the Chinese felt that the human personality was degraded when animals were given the power of speech. The story was immediately popular in America and Great Britain and an American collector paid $150,000 for the original manuscript while over 400,000 people visited a display of Carroll manuscripts when they were exhibited in Philadelphia.
The world appeal of the phantasy of Lewis Carroll suggests that the story has values beyond entertainment for children or mere story telling for the themes of Alice's adventures have been used in the adult world of motion picture, ballet, and the ice show. The characters have appeared in advertising and our speech reflects adopted phrases. Stuart Chase used quotations from the book as chapter headings in a book about the never-never land of economics.