🧠 Alice in Wonderland Quiz

Lewis Carroll was actually the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Oxford University who first told the story to a young girl named Alice Liddell during a boat trip in 1862.

The White Rabbit is famously always in a hurry, checking his pocket watch and muttering 'I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date' — making him one of literature's most iconic symbols of anxiety and time pressure.

The Queen of Hearts shouts 'Off with their heads!' so frequently in the book that the King of Hearts quietly pardons most of the condemned behind her back.

The Caterpillar's dismissive question 'Who are you?' sets off Alice's identity crisis — a theme that runs throughout the whole book as she keeps changing size and losing her sense of self.

In the Queen of Hearts' chaotic croquet game, flamingos serve as mallets and hedgehogs as balls — the trouble being that both animals kept moving at inconvenient moments.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson adopted the pen name Lewis Carroll by Latinising 'Charles Lutwidge' to 'Carolus Ludovicus' and then anglicising it in reverse — a suitably Wonderland-esque piece of wordplay.

As Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole, she wonders aloud whether cats eat bats — and whether bats eat cats — while thinking fondly of her cat Dinah back home.

Alice Liddell was the daughter of Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford — Carroll's dedication 'A boat, beneath a sunny sky' is an acrostic poem whose first letters spell out Alice Pleasance Liddell.

Carroll's pun works on two levels — 'Tortoise' sounds like 'taught us', and a tortoise is of course a type of turtle, making the teacher a fitting figure for a school beneath the sea.

Southey's original poem was a pious moral lesson about healthy living; Carroll's parody gleefully subverts it, turning Father William into an absurdly acrobatic old man who stands on his head and eats geese bones and all.