It makes sense to examine Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass not in terms of satire or fantasy, as such, but as a series of games. The roots of the Alice books are difficult to uncover because of the identity games that Carroll played with his contemporaries and that his family, circle of friends and acquaintances, and biographers have been playing ever since he died in 1898. The immediate origins of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are elusive thanks to the memory games that Carroll played in his various accounts of the day in 1862 when he might have told the initial version of the story to three daughters of the dean of Christ Church, his Oxford college.

Finally, drawing on the work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, I will try to make the case that the structure of the Alice books, and much of the humour they contain, should be understood as a series of language games, where the normally agreed upon rules of grammar and sense are turned gleefully topsy-turvy. (From the Introduction by Todd Webb)