1865 – 2015: 150 years of the Macmillan Alice

It’s sometimes said that Lewis Carroll’s Alice books were the origin of all later children’s literature, and I’m inclined to agree. There were books for children before 1865, but they were almost all written to make a moral point. Good children behave like this; bad children behave like that, and are punished for it, and serve them right. In Alice, for the first time, we find a realistic child taking part in a story whose intention was entirely fun. Both children and adults loved them at once, and have never stopped doing so. They are as fresh and clever and funny today as they were a hundred and fifty years ago.

This is an excerpt from Philip Pullman’s foreword to The Complete Alice by Lewis Carroll.

The image of Alice we are familiar with is that of her in a blue dress and white apron, but what colour dress did Lewis Carroll envisage when he wrote the story and prepared it for publication?

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, processes were being developed to make it cheaper to mass-produce colour images.

The very first coloured representations of Alice appeared not in the original books but in associated products and were printed using the chromo-lithograph process. An early example of this is a music cover for The Wonderland Quadrilles, composed for the pianoforte and published around 1872. This illustration, which was drawn by Tenniel and approved by Carroll, shows Alice in a red dress - you’ll find her in the top two circles in the picture below.

Alice appeared with a red dress on the front cover of the People’s Edition in 1887, however there was no colour inside this edition - the illustrations were all black and white. Red was also the colour that Carroll had wanted for the cover binding of the very first edition of Alice in 1865, rather than the usual Macmillan green.

The first colour to appear inside any of the books was that in The Nursery Alice. After Tenniel had redrawn and enlarged the illustrations into a more suitable format for nursery readers, the book was engraved and printed by Edmund Evans. Evans was the leading Victorian printer and had a reputation for improving the colour printing of children’s books. In that edition, published in 1889 and approved by Carroll, we see Alice in a yellow dress, a white apron with blue trimming and blue ribbon and stockings. This colour was also used in the postage stamp case invented by Lewis Carroll, which was produced by Emberlin and Son in the same year.

Alice’s initial appearance in a blue dress is in The Little Folks’ Editions of both Alice and Through the Looking Glass, published by Macmillan in 1903. Alice wears a blue dress and headband, white apron with yellow trimmings and yellow striped stockings.

In The Little Folks’ Edition of 1907, Alice appears in a red dress throughout the book.

After Carroll’s death in 1898 and by the beginning of the twentieth century, Tenniel’s eyesight was fading. Harry G. Theaker was commissioned to colour sixteen plates of the Tenniel illustrations for a one volume edition of Alice and Through the Looking Glass published in 1911.

The blue that he used for colouring Alice’s dress, together with the white apron and blue striped stockings, established the iconic dress colour that has remained in the Macmillan editions ever since. It was later adopted by Walt Disney for their 1951 film.

Other colour versions followed. John Macfarlane recoloured the illustrations for the 1927 Macmillan Children’s Edition, maintaining Alice in a blue dress but with a red trim to her apron.

In the 1990s, Diz Wallis was commissioned to add to the Theaker colourings to create a complete set of Alice images for both books.

We might say that it was the yellow dress that he approved for The Nursery Alice. It is the classic image of Alice in a blue dress with a pocketed white apron, blue “Alice band” and ankle strap shoes that is remembered and will be re-enacted in costumes at events around the world.

True to the story of the Macmillan Alice, each edition we have published to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, sees Alice in the original colour she appeared in for each book: yellow in The Nursery Alice, red in The Little Folks’ Edition and blue in The Complete Alice.

by Frances Hardinge

I have always had a soft spot for tricksters, outsiders, and those who survive outside the normal rules. They can be dangerous friends, of course, with their motley of helpfulness and mischief, but they see things that others do not.

Perhaps it is no surprise that when my youthful imagination tumbled headfirst into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I was particularly enchanted by the Cheshire Cat.

The Cat is not exactly a comforting presence. He has “very long claws and a great number of teeth”, and possibly the will to use them. But he is good-natured in his fashion, if treated with courtesy, and a guide in a world of strangeness.

The Cheshire Cat is a law unto himself, even by the anarchic standards of Wonderland. I always admired the way that he goes where he pleases, disappears at will, fears nothing and meets all disapproval with a grin. He is aware of the madness of the world and his share in it, but it does not bother him.

Even the domineering, execution-obsessed Queen of Hearts is helpless in the face of the Cat. How do you decapitate a floating head?

“A cat may look at a king.” The Cheshire Cat tells us that we can peer at the powerful, make up their minds about them, criticise their faults and mock their follies. And sometimes the kings, queens and rulers of the world are more frightened of a mocking grin than anything else...

Frances Hardinge is an award-winning author whose books include Fly by Night, which won the Branford Boase First Novel Award in 2006, Cuckoo Song, shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2015, and The Lie Tree, winner of the Costa Book of the Year 2015.

by Marissa Meyer

Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland almost reads like a catalogue for some of literature's all-time most fascinating and memorable characters. As we travel through the world of Wonderland at Alice’s side, each creature or person she meets seems more fantastic than the last. From the twitchy, waistcoat-wearing White Rabbit to the hookah-smoking, poetry-spouting Caterpillar; from the quirky (and sometimes downright rude) Hatter to the curiously wise Cheshire Cat with his incessant grin.

But while I have loved the characters of Wonderland since childhood, one always stood out to me as one of those characters that is so much more than meets the eye - the infamous, hot-tempered Queen of Hearts.

Her catchphrase—Off with her head!—might be one of the most well-known lines from any book in history, and yet we know surprisingly little about her from her brief run-ins with Alice. We know that she is easily enraged and apparently vain (at least, where her skills at croquet are in question). She has ten children—a full suit—and yet her relationship with the King hardly seems like the stuff of fairy tales. She does not tolerate white roses.

And she bakes. Quite well, one might discern, from how the Knave is willing to risk his head in order to steal a batch of her homemade tarts.

When I set out to write Heartless, my origin story for the Queen of Hearts, taking stock of all these little details felt like gathering clues. Why is so she so angry, so fast to call for someone’s head? What does she have against white roses? And really, what’s with the tarts? I set out to answer all these questions and more in telling her backstory. I took my fair share of liberties with Wonderland, of course, but ultimately I wanted to write Heartless in a way that didn’t contradict anything in the original Alice, but could rather shed light on some of the most baffling elements of the world, and the Queen’s character in particular. I wanted to show who she might have been, many years before Alice fell down the rabbit hole. I hoped to write the story, not of a rage-filled queen, but of a girl with much bigger dreams and passions. A girl wholly unaware that fate had its own plans for her.

Though Heartless is written as a prequel to Alice, and starts the Queen on her path toward infamy, I hope that it will rewrite the Queen’s narrative in some way. Cast a new light on who she is, and who she was, and make sense of some of those baffling details that Carroll gave to us.

I hope that after reading Heartless, readers will feel like I have for so many years—there is indeed so much more to this queen than we thought.

Marissa Meyer is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Lunar Chronicles.

As well as celebrating the heritage of The Macmillan Alice, we also wanted to bring Alice, her curiosity and her friends to a new audience. What better way to do that than ask the next generation of designers over at YCN creative network to interpret the story themselves and come up with a new cover? Watch the video below for a behind-the-scenes look at the wonderful entries and the twelve winners.