A timeless children's book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is 150 years old in 2015 and the story of this beguiling tale begins with its creator, Charles Ludwidge Dodgson. Charles was a natural storyteller who regularly invented new stories to entertain his friends. He knew that for the best stories to work, the child must be at the centre of the narrative so that their imagination could be led to marvellous and wonderful places. Inspired by real events and a real child, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was dreamt up on a summer's day in Oxford. The river outing with the Liddell family on 4 July 1862, from Folly Bridge to Godstow, is now famous for the Alice story to which it led. Charles L. Dodgson travelled downriver with the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford (the college at which Charles was a lecturer in Mathematics), and his family. Along the way he told the family a story about a bored little girl called Alice who goes looking for an adventure. The family loved it and at the end of that day, the daughter, Alice Liddell, asked for the story to be written down. Charles Dodgson agreed and began writing the manuscript the next day. It eventually took him two and a half years to complete. an excerpt from Philip Pullman's foreword to The Complete Alice by Lewis Carroll.