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Parodies of Alice in Wonderland – An illustrated bibliography

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Lewis Carroll’s two books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass have served as the basis for many subsequent works since they were published. They have been adapted into various other media and their characters and situations have been appropriated into many other works. Minor references to the two books are too numerous to list so this list of books focuses on those works based specifically and substantially on Carroll's Alice books. Carolyn Sigler (Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll's "Alice" Books. Lexington, KY, University Press of Kentucky, 1997) has shown that Carroll's two great fantasies inspired dozens of imitations, responses, and parodies during the remainder of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth, so many that, she reports, Carroll at one point began his own collection of Alice imitations. The primary wave of Alice-inspired works may have slackened after about 1920, though Carroll's influence on other writers has never fully waned; it can be seen in recent books like The Looking-Glass Wars by Frank Beddor and Otherland by Tad Williams.

This is an attempt to list a wide range of these books with images of the front covers of, in the main, British first editions. The list is by no means exhaustive but covers most of the more interesting titles and a few little known ones. There are a number of list available but I have referred to those in ‘The Book Collector’ November 2008 and ‘Under the Quizzing Glass’ 1972. The Guinness booklets (1933-59) are not included and I have only list a few US editions as they are too many to include here. It is debatable that classics such as ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and ‘Peter Pan’ are parodies or imitations, it could be said that they are unique and owe little to the Alice books, I will leave it to you to decide so these also are not listed.

This is hopefully a useful resource for collectors and book sellers. This site, together with the others in the series (see links below) should be all the Lewis Carroll collector needs to guide his or her search and ensure that the true first editions are obtained.

If you have any books you think should be listed on this site please send a scan with date of publication, author, title, illustrator & publisher to steveandgeoff@aol.com.