Inspired by a boat trip in 1862, during which Lewis Carroll told a fantastic story to the three daughters of his Oxford dean Henry George Liddell, including the titular Alice, this work became the most famous example of the so-called nonsense novel when it was published in 1865. The story of little Alice, who follows a white talking rabbit, falls down its hole, and enters a grotesque alternate world, goes far beyond a children's fairy tale: Carroll, a mathematics lecturer by profession, infused his text with numerous wordplays, logical paradoxes, and satirical references that have inspired a diverse range of authors and artists, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, the surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst, and more recently, Stephen King.