The Nursery Alice

The Nursery Alice, originally published by Macmillan & Co. in 1890, was the very first colour edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It was intended, wrote Carroll, ""to be read by Children aged from Nought to Five. To be read? Nay, not so! Say rather to be thumbed, to be cooed over, to be dogs'-eared, to be rumpled, to be kissed . . .""

With this new, younger readership in mind, Carroll rewrote Alice himself, simplifying and abridging the original text, while Sir John Tenniel redrew, enlarged and coloured twenty of his iconic illustrations (with Alice in a yellow dress to reflect the 1890s craze for yellow!). The resulting book is a delightfully engaging experience; readers prompted to interact not only with the story but also with the images and even the physical book itself, in a way that is thoroughly modern.