ABSTRACT
One of the many ways to gauge the influence and popularity of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures of Wonderland (1865) within the world of children's literature is to consider the many times that the story has been retold by either revising the text, the illustrations, or both. Despite Tenniel's masterful illustrations, which are an essential element to the design and meaning of the Alice books, hundreds of illustrators have attempted to illustrate the books. John Davis has rightfully suggested that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has probably become the most illustrated children's book in history. 1 When he and Graham Ovenden published The Illustrators of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass in 1972, they estimated that, “well over a hundred artists have illustrated the Alice books.” 2 To read an edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland without illustrations is close to unthinkable; it would be like trying to watch Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) without sound. Ovenden and Davis provided a checklist of ninety English-language illustrated editions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, another twenty-one illustrated editions of Through the Looking-Glass (1871), and thirty-three combined editions of the Alice books. 3 The number of illustrated editions of the Alice book has easily doubled since 1974, with a handful of new illustrated editions appearing every year, as well as the re-publication of earlier editions. While children's book illustrators have created many of these volumes, artists for older readers also have designed a good number of these. This number of illustrated book editions does not take into account the many films, plays, computer games, comic books, and music that have been based on the Alice books. In “The Film Collector's Alice,” David Schaefer provides a useful overview of some of the major Alice films and includes a lengthy check list 4 that he updated as “Alice on the Screen” for inclusion in Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (2000). Schaefer has categorized the many of the Alice related films into feature-length films, made-for-television productions, and animated versions. 5 But seemingly every few years a new full-length film version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is released. The quirky film director Tim Burton is the latest to tackle Carroll's text with his Alice in Wonderland (2010). Allusions to and spoofs of the Alice books that appear in children's films and television programming—in fact, all forms of popular culture—are endless.
