Read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by email.
Nonsense written by a mathematician, which explains a great deal.
A bored girl on a riverbank follows a waistcoated White Rabbit down a hole and into the most quotable dream in English literature. Carroll's 1865 classic: logic run gleefully off its rails, a grinning cat, a mad tea-party, and a queen demanding heads.
Two or three minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Eight weeks from now, you will have read Carroll.
53 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1865
- Installments
- 53
- Each installment
- 2–3 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 26,643
- Reading time
- 1 hour 51 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 3 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 11 days
- At 20 minutes a day
- 6 days
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?
No book of its size has given the language more: down the rabbit-hole, the grinning Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter's tea-party, painting the roses red, sentence first and verdict afterwards. Carroll — an Oxford mathematician writing under a pen name — built a children's story out of logic puzzles, parodies, and puns, and the joke has not aged a day in a century and a half.
It is naturally serial. The story was invented aloud, an episode at a time, on a rowing trip up the Thames in July 1862, and the book keeps that shape: every chapter is its own set piece — the pool of tears, the caucus-race, the Duchess's kitchen, the croquet-ground, the trial of the Knave of Hearts. Each installment lands in your inbox as a scene, two to three minutes long, with a one-line recap above it.
It begins where the telling began: installment 1 is Carroll's prefatory verse about that golden afternoon on the river, when three small voices begged for a story with nonsense in it. Then Alice sees a white rabbit take a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and down she goes.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?
About two hours straight through (26,643 words). By email, it's 53 daily installments of two to three minutes — just under two months, or faster at a premium pace of two or three installments a day.
Does this include the Tenniel illustrations?
Not yet — Inbox Serial delivers the text only, so Sir John Tenniel's forty-two original illustrations aren't in the emails. Carroll's prose stands entirely on its own, but the pictures are worth seeking out; any printed edition carries them.
What is “All in the Golden Afternoon”?
Installment 1 is Carroll's prefatory poem — his verse account of the boat trip on which the story was first told, when the three Liddell sisters begged for a tale of nonsense. The story itself begins with installment 2.
Is this the complete, original text?
Yes — Carroll's full 1865 text, unabridged, in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition. All the poems and songs are here, including the shaped “long tale” the Mouse tells, laid out line by line as Carroll intended.
Is it a children's book?
It's both. Children get a dream full of talking animals and absurd rules; adults get the logic games, the parodies, and the satire of courtrooms and schoolroom morals. It's assigned in university courses and read aloud at bedtime, often in the same week.
Do the recaps spoil anything?
No. Each recap covers only the previous installment — the trial's verdict and how the dream ends stay unspoken until Carroll gets there.
How does it arrive?
One installment per email, one email a day, at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous installment at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.