Lewis Carroll | 1832-1898 Before Charles Dodgson assumed the name Lewis Carroll and published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, literature for children in England was, for the most part, weighed down with moral training and a vivid seriousness of purpose. In the middle of the century, adults had the titillation of sensation novels such as Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859) and M.E. Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), with their hidden chambers, hauntings, and sexual secrets. But for children, literature was chaste and chastening. There were exceptions -- Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House (1839); Edward Lear's nonsense limericks (1846, and reprinted in the early 1860s); and Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863), which actually had a serious moral purpose buried within its frolicsome pages. But Carroll introduced entertainment into literature for children to a degree unknown until then. This is not to say that the Alice books -- Through the Looking-Glass followed in 1872 -- cannot be read seriously. Indeed, an academic industry has grown up around the books, extracting from the Alice funhouse theories of language, race, gender, law, moral subversion, and any number of other seriously adult topics. Carroll himself, as Dodgson, was a distinguished mathematician (distinguished more for his brilliance than his scholarship, which was erratic) who subscribed to and advanced complex theories of beauty and aesthetics. But with their logical narratives rooted in illogical premises, the Alice books reproduce childhood wonder as a viable system of thought and a viable method of storytelling. Other Victorian fantasy writers, such as George MacDonald and Andrew Lang, embraced the Alice books for their commitment to an alternate fantastic universe, but a universe no less vivid, important, and real for that. Carroll produced other literature for children, also, notably Rhyme? and Reason?, which included the mock-epic "The Hunting of the Snark" (1883) and Sylvie and Bruno (1889). But with suitably fantastic illustrations by Punch alumnus John Tenniel, it was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass that irrevocably changed the landscape of children's literature, turning it from one of moral gravity to one of joyous amazement.