Down the rabbit hole: 150 years of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Since its original publication in 1865, 150 years ago this year, has proven an enduring classic of children's literature. The ground-breaking fantasy has never been out of print since that day, has been translated into more than 170 languages, and influenced artists and pop-cultural luminaries as disparate as surrealist painter Salvador Dali, filmmaker Tim Burton, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and Beatle John Lennon.

Telling the tale of a bored but precocious young girl who falls through a rabbit hole into an hallucinatory world of grinning felines, manic milliners and self-important playing cards, Lewis Carroll's mind-bending, logic-twisting tale has charmed adults as well as with children for generations, inviting imaginations to run wild and readers to view our "curiouser and curiouser" world through the looking glass.

" was a watershed in the history of children's literature, not just because it was one of the first non-didactic, non-moralising books for young readers, but because it featured an inquiring, independently minded, self-possessed heroine who seems as 'modern' today as she did in 1865," says Brian Sibley, president of Britain's Lewis Carroll Society, a network of enthusiasts, experts, writers, researchers that was formed in 1969 to encourage research into the life and works of the author.

"Being an account of a dream," the 65-year-old writer and broadcaster continues, "the book is full of weird characters and bizarre events but, however unlikely and unexpected, they always seem - both to Alice and to us, as readers - to be perfectly believable. As a result, the Hatter and the March Hare, the Caterpillar and the Cheshire Cat are as 'real' as anyone we might encounter in our everyday life, and a lot more entertaining than most."

Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of University of Oxford mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and - according to the legend of what is referred to by Alice fanatics as "the Golden Afternoon" - on July 4, 1862, he and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth (represented by the Duck in , and who later officiated at the 1882 funeral of Charles Darwin) took a boating trip on Oxford's Isis river with the three young daughters of Henry Liddell, the vice-chancellor of Oxford University.