SOURCE: "Wonderland Revisited," in The Kenyon Review, Vol. XXVII, No. 4, Autumn, 1965, pp. 591-616.

Levin is an American educator and critic whose works reveal his wide range of interests and expertise, from Renaissance culture to the contemporary novel. In the following essay, he provides a centennial re-assessment of the Alice books and of their author, Charles Dodgson (Carroll).

In the twentieth century's commemoration of the nineteenth, we have reached the centennial of Alice. Not uncharacteristically, the date has been somewhat blurred. The author, whose fussiness has endeared him to bibliophiles, was dissatisfied with the first edition, so that Alice in Wonderland was not publicly issued until 1866. Moreover, if we wish to celebrate the occasion on which the tale was first told, we must look back to that famous boating party of three little girls and two dons on July 4, 1862. That "golden afternoon," as Lewis Carroll describes it in his...