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During a summer afternoon of 1862, Lewis Caroll, takes Liddell's three daughters for a ride, one of them is Alice. For them, he invents a tale, about a big white rabbit, who passes very close to a little girl also named Alice. She discovers a fantastic underground world...

The real Alice falls under the spell and asks the rower with this boundless imagination to write this tale for her. Dogson will tackle it for several months: thus was born Alice in Wonderland, or rather its original version: Alice's Adventures Under Ground. The manuscript was completed in the spring of 1863, but the author decided to draw the illustrations himself, which would take him another good year. For Christmas 1864, Alice Liddell receives a divine gift in memory of this summer day. The book was to be published the following year, but this time around, illustrated by the most popular cartoonist of the time, John Teniel, with resounding and almost immediate success.
Alice will treasure Dogson's gift for the rest of her life. She entrusted it in 1885 to Lewis Carroll for a facsimile edition, before putting it on sale at Sotheby's in 1928. It was an American investor and bibliophile, A.S.W Rosenbach, who bought it for £ 15,400. Then another businessman bought it back and his heirs sold it again in 1946. It was bought back by ... Rosenbach for $ 50,000! It eventually passed into the hands of a group of investors, before being offered to the British in recognition of their bravery during World War II.