With everything that has been written about Alice in Wonderland, where do we start? Perhaps with a little help from Lewis Carroll himself.

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. “Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?” he asked. “Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

From the beginning, Alice in Wonderland was a big success. Queen Victoria herself apparently wrote to Carroll’s alter ego Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and asked him to send her some of his other books. The story goes that, anxious to preserve the distinction between C. L. Dodgson and Lewis Carroll, he sent her some of Dodgson’s best, including:

• A Syllabus of Plane Algebraic Geometry (1860),
• An elementary treatise on determinants, with their application to simultaneous linear equations and algebraical geometry (1867)
• The fifth book of Euclid : treated algebraically, so far as it relates to commensurable magnitudes, with notes (1858, 1868) 

Dodgson was lucky he was able to continue with his life and career after that stunt. In a different reality, it could have been an "off with his head" thing if the queen was not happy (she probably wasn't).

As you probably know, Dodgson was a mathematician and a lecturer at Christ Church, the largest and one of the most famous of Oxford colleges. He authored works on political subjects and logic, but it was his work in mathematics and love of puzzles that provided the source and inspiration for Alice in Wonderland and his other fiction writings. Ironically, according to J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson, none of his mathematics books have proved to be of enduring importance except for Euclid and his modern rivals (1879, 2nd ed. 1885) which is of historical interest. He wrote it to defend using Euclid's Elements as a means of teaching geometry. The book is written in the form of a play, in which the ghost of Euclid returns to defend his book to modern geometers. So there we have a mixture of fiction and scholarship. Perhaps appropriately, The New York Public Library's Charles Lutwidge Dodgson collection of papers include a mixture of poems, stories, and mathematical studies.

There’s no telling how much those papers are worth. In 1928, an auction was held in London. Item no. 318 was the first edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, inscribed by the author to his friend, Mrs. Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, author of John Halifax, Gentleman. Bidding started at £100, but when Dr. Rosenbach bid £1,500, everybody else kept silent and the auction was over. It was, however, only the first Alice in Wonderland piece to be sold that day. As reported in Time (4/16/1928), bidding for the next item started at £5,000, and it quickly reached £10,000 as each bid increased by £1,000. The price peaked at £15,200. At that point the auctioneer said, "Goodness me," mopping his face with a handkerchief. He had just sold the original manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground.  The manuscript made its way to the British Library, though NYPL of course has many of its own holdings of Alice in Wonderland and related materials.

By that point, the business side of Alice in Wonderland was already booming. We don’t have reliable data about sales of printed copies, but we know Alice in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass have appeared in 174 languages and over 9,000 editions and reprints. A checklist of these printed copies was recently published in Alice in a World of Wonderlands. For those who were not making money on the many Wonderlands their popularity is probably maddening.

But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Alice’s success goes beyond the printed page. Disney produced the animated film in 1951; and in 2010, a 3-D Alice in Wonderland movie was released. According to Box Office Mojo, with the production budget of $200 million, it grossed domestically $334,191,110 and added $691,276,000 abroad, for a total of $1,025,467,110 in 126 days! During its opening weekend, it ranked No. 1 and while it was shown in 3,728 theaters it broke a record for March opening of a 3-D movie by grossing $116,101,023. In the process, according to CNN, it beat Avatar's opening weekend by almost $40 million.  

So where do we go from here?

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where,” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

That's right, it does not matter. Alice is a success where ever she goes.

Catch her at the free multimedia exhibition Alice Live!, which traces the history of Lewis Carroll’s stories in live performance from their first professional staging to the present day.