Florence Adèle Evans' Alice’s Adventures in Pictureland

Alice’s Adventures in Pictureland: Tales inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland

By Florence Adèle Evans

New edition, 2011. Illustrations by Albertine Randall Wheelan. Cathair na Mart: Evertype. ISBN 978-1-904808-63-3 (paperback), price: €12.95, £10.95, $15.95.

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Published first in 1900, Florence A. Evans’ Alice’s Adventures in Pictureland is told about a young girl named Alice, whose mother’s younger sister was the famous Alice of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. The book, illustrated with delightful drawings by Albertine Randall Wheelan, begins with a set of vignettes exploring the exploits of a number of Wonderland characters, and continues with a series of tales told by story-book animals, some of which are reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling’s Just-So Stories.

Alice lay, just as for many months she had lain, in her little iron bedstead in the long hospital ward. Opposite her bed was the window through which the sun and moon often looked to see how the little sufferer was progressing, but on this particular afternoon nothing was to be seen without but whirling snowflakes which hid from view even the bare, shivering trees, which, when clad in their summer suits of green, had so often nodded a cheery greeting from the outer world to the sick child.

It was long past the usual hour for her mother’s daily visit, and the nurse, who had noticed her little patient’s growing restlessness for some time, had just finished reading to her the last chapters of a book of which children never tire—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For a time this diverted the child’s thoughts, and she lay thinking over the various incidents of this tale, which she knew almost by heart. The fact that the heroine was her namesake would naturally have tended to make it more interesting to her, but there was another reason why she especially loved the story, and as she gazed at the fast-falling snowflakes, which hurried past the window as though they had been detained on some most important errand, and were now trying to regain the time they had lost, she thought happily to herself that this most delightfully nonsensical of all children’s books really belonged more to her than to any other child who might ever read it, for the Alice who had been favoured by a peep into that Wonderland which every child who has heard of it has longed to enter was none other than her own aunt, her mother’s younger sister! So that when Alice heard other children speak of the pleasure they had taken in reading the story, she smiled with a superior air and felt very proud of the fact that her aunt was so justly celebrated for her strange adventures.