Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
#4143.99 in the official ranking · full ranking
Books 2 books Status Complete 1865–1871 Reading commitment Low Lewis Carroll Last reviewed 2026-08-13
Overview
A girl named Alice falls through a rabbit-hole, and in the sequel steps through a looking-glass, into a nonsensical, dreamlike world populated by the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the Red and White Queens, and other enduring figures. Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), grew out of stories Carroll told to Alice Liddell and her sisters, and both use dream logic, wordplay, and parody of Victorian verse and etiquette to build Wonderland's shifting, rule-bending world. The books are among the foundational texts of English-language portal fantasy and of literary nonsense as a form, and their imagery, the Cheshire Cat's grin, the Mad Hatter's tea party, the chess-board structure of the sequel, has been continuously reinterpreted across illustration, theater, and film for more than a century and a half.
Portal fantasy · For All ages
Core Canon: Reading Order (2 works) counts toward ranking
Alice Lewis Carroll
| Work | Year | Internal chron. | Canon | Rating | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland | 1865 | 1 | core | 3.99 (453,175 ratings) |
 | Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There | 1871 | 2 | core | 4.00 (145,953 ratings) |
Lewis Carroll's 2-book Alice sequence -- both Core Canon. 'The Hunting of the Snark' (1876), a separate nonsense poem sharing no setting or characters with Alice, is explicitly out of scope, not part of this universe. Pre-award-era classic; no formal literary award existed for this genre/period, per the same convention already applied to The King of Elfland's Daughter/The Worm Ouroboros/Lud-in-the-Mist.
Quick answers
- How many books are in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? Alice's Adventures in Wonderland's Core Canon is 2 books.
- What is the reading order for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? Publication order, starting with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Full list and years in the Core Canon table above.
- Is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland finished? Complete (1865–1871).
- How much reading does Alice's Adventures in Wonderland take? Low reading commitment (estimated from 2 Core Canon books · ~320 pages).
- How is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ranked? #414 in this site's official ranking, based on 599,128 reader ratings across 2 Core Canon books. See the full ranking for how this is calculated.
Why is it ranked #414?
Ranked #414 in the official ranking.
- Average reader rating of 3.99 across 2 core books.
- Backed by 599k reader ratings.
- Remarkably consistent across the whole series: all 2 rated core books rate within 0.01 of each other.
- 0.02 behind #413, The Mabinogion Tetralogy.
- Below the top-10 average of 4.45.
Why explore this universe?
Well rated · 2 books · Complete · 599k ratings · Ranks #414 overall
Good choice if you want a quick, low-commitment portal fantasy universe that's already finished, so there's no wait for the next book.
Reading order
Publication order (2 Core Canon books)
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
- Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
Documented internal/story chronology is recorded for every Core Canon book here, and matches publication order exactly, with no divergence to show separately.
Awards (verified)
- No formal literary award existed for this genre/period at the time of original publication.
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- The Princess and the Goblin Fairy-tale retelling / Portal fantasy · Complete · Low commitment · 4.04
Official resources
Research details
Ranking metrics: weighted average 3.99 across 599,128 ratings on 2 Core Canon books. See Why is it ranked here? above for the full breakdown, or the full ranking.
How do we know this?
Admission: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland admitted; Core Canon = both Alice novels (1865, 1871) accepted 2026-08-13
Sources: (see source tier definitions)
Last reviewed: 2026-08-13
Rule: Core = both Alice novels: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871).