Part of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, book 1
First published 1865
Crystal tumbles down the rabbit hole into a peculiar world where everyone speaks in Cockney rhyming slang. She encounters the White Rabbit checking his kettle and hob, attends a mad tea party where the Hatter speaks in plates of meat, and faces the Queen of Hearts who threatens to separate her loaf of bread from her shoulders. Crystal must navigate this linguistic wonderland where "stairs" means hair and "trouble and strife" means wife. Each familiar character from Carroll's original story appears transformed through London's working class dialect. The Cheshire Cat grins as he speaks in apples and pears, while the Mad Hatter's riddles become even more confusing when filtered through rhyming slang. Crystal struggles to understand this new language while trying to find her way home. The story preserves all the whimsical logic and absurd encounters of the original while adding layers of wordplay through the distinctive speech patterns of East London.
Genres: adaptations, classic-literature, fantasy, british-literature, comedy, childrens-classics
Vibes: absurdist, clever, imaginative, playful, whimsical
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, linguistic-transformation, portal-fantasy
Setting: Wonderland, East London, rabbit hole
Period: 19th-century
320 pages · Hardcover · Pan Macmillan