ChoralSoft Learn
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: study guide
By Lewis Carroll. A spoiler-light guide with themes, characters, vocabulary and questions to discuss.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll · 1865 · public domain
The story
Bored on a riverbank, Alice follows a waistcoated White Rabbit down a rabbit hole and finds herself in a world where size, logic and manners keep changing. She meets the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts, and her attempts to make sense of them test her sense of who she is.
This summary avoids the ending, but later sections of a guide can spoil details.
Main themes
- Identity and growing up
- Nonsense and logic
- Authority that makes no sense
- Curiosity and imagination
Characters
- Alice
- A curious, polite and stubborn child who keeps trying to apply the rules she was taught.
- The White Rabbit
- Always late and anxious; he leads Alice into Wonderland.
- The Cheshire Cat
- A grinning, philosophical cat who appears and disappears.
- The Queen of Hearts
- A bad-tempered ruler whose answer to every problem is “Off with her head!”
Words worth knowing
- antipathies
- strong dislikes. Alice uses it when she means “antipodes”, the opposite side of the world.
- latitude
- distance north or south of the equator, which Alice wonders about while falling.
- curtsey
- a small bow made by bending the knees, once a polite greeting.
- treacle
- a thick, sweet syrup, like molasses.
Questions to discuss
- Alice keeps changing size. What does that say about growing up?
- Which Wonderland rule or conversation is the most absurd, and what does it make fun of?
- How does Alice’s attitude to the strange characters change from the start to the trial?
- Why might the book work for both children and adults?