Lewis Carroll wrote this story for 10 year old Alice Liddell, one of three young daughters of his friend H.G. Liddell. The orginal illustrator, who created the definitive images of Alice and the other three characters in the book, was Sir John Tenniel.
Alice, a girl with long blonde hair, pursues the White Rabbit down a rabbit hole. She falls a long, long way and lands in Wonderland. She experiences many puzzling changes and meets a host of strange characters: The Cheshire Cat, The Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Caterpillar, the Queen of Hearts and others. She cannot understand their topsy-turvey logic, their parodies of well-known poems and songs, their outrageous puns and other word play.
An Alice in Wonderland is somebody in a world of inspired nonsense, a world in which the rules of logic have been suspended.
~Facts on File Dictionary of Cultural and Historical Allusions.
** There is an amusing anecdote that Queen Victoria liked the novel "Alice in Wonderland" so much that she dispatched a letter to Lewis Carrol saying she would be "pleased to accept any other works by the same pen." She soon received a copy of a book called Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry (he was after all, a professor of mathematics) :).
Links you might enjoy:
The Making of Alice in Wonderland
Alice in Wonderland: An Interactive Adventure
Lenny's Alice in Wonderland Site
My page on the interesting characters of Alice in Wonderland
