Alice in Wonderland, the most famous work of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, is the enduring tale of a girl's journey in a world of extravagance and imagination. The story was written for the enjoyment of all children, as Carroll had a strong love and attachment for them, especially little girls. However, it was written more specifically for a dear and close friend of hers named Alice Liddell, who was the inspiration for the title character. Alice in Wonderland has, over the years since its publication in 1865, been endlessly deconstructed, analyzed, and studied for hidden meaning in the text (as in Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice). One of the most obvious and famous aspects of the story are the numerous size changes that Alice goes through. Alice changes size eleven times to adapt to her changing situation in the story. This can easily be seen in the Disney animated interpretation of the story that came out years ago. Throughout the book, Alice is given the opportunity to change size numerous times, helping her enter and exit different situations and places in Wonderland. Alice manages to achieve this by eating and drinking various tonics and pieces of mushrooms. Interestingly, the period in which Carroll wrote and published Alice was the same period in which Charles Darwin wrote and published his landmark book The Origin of Species in which he expounded the now universally known ideas of evolution and survival of species. the most suitable. Darwin developed these ideas while serving as a naturalist on the ship Beagle from 1831 to 1836. During this time he studied the wildlife of the Galapagos Islands and was amazed by the great diversity of life. He was particularly interested in the island's birds, which had beaks highly adapted to their particular feeding habits and lifestyle. (Coincidentally, in one of the first scenes of Wonderland, Alice comes ashore with a group of different birds.) Carroll may have been inspired to have his title character change size to suit her needs and difficulties by the emerging science of the time. Alice also seems to improve and become more comfortable with changing her size as time goes on, and on that point a parallel can be drawn between evolution and Alice, in that as evolution progresses, she becomes more refined. Lewis Carroll......middle of paper......bsp; Alice in Wonderland, the work of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, has been the enduring story of a girl's journey into a world of fantasy and imagination because of the multi-layered meaning that exists within it. The story was written for the enjoyment of all children, but as Carroll himself once wrote, "we (adults) are but older children, dear." (499). Inspired by a dear child friend named Alice Liddell, Alice in Alice in Wonderland has been the mediator between childhood and adulthood, remaining innocent and becoming expert for over a hundred years. One of the most obvious and famous aspects of the story is the numerous changes in size that Alice undergoes, a phenomenon of evolution that was brought to the fore in Victorian scientific and everyday life by the revolutionary thinker and naturalist Darwin. Charles Darwin wrote and published his landmark book On the Origin of Species at the same time as Carroll's arguably equally famous book was written and published, a coincidence that cannot be overlooked when we observe the clear connections between Darwin's theories and themes by Dodgson.