Alice was published to critical praise.[100] One magazine declared it "exquisitely wild, fantastic, [and] impossible".[101] In the late 19th century, Walter Besant wrote that Alice in Wonderland "was a book of that extremely rare kind which will belong to all the generations to come until the language becomes obsolete".[102]
No story in English literature has intrigued me more than Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. It fascinated me the first time I read it as a schoolboy.
— Walt Disney in The American Weekly, 1946.[103]
F. J. Harvey Darton argued in a 1932 book that Alice ended an era of didacticism in children's literature, inaugurating a new era in which writing for children aimed to "delight or entertain".[3] In 2014, Robert McCrum named Alice "one of the best loved in the English canon" and called it "perhaps the greatest, possibly most influential, and certainly the most world-famous Victorian English fiction".[2] A 2020 review in Time states: "The book changed young people's literature. It helped to replace stiff Victorian didacticism with a looser, sillier, nonsense style that reverberated through the works of language-loving 20th-century authors as different as James Joyce, Douglas Adams and Dr. Seuss."[1] The protagonist of the story, Alice, has been recognised as a cultural icon.[104] In 2006, Alice in Wonderland was named among the icons of England in a public vote.[105]
