On 4 July Americans will celebrate Independence Day. Now, did you know that 4 July is also Alice Day?
To mark the occasion, let’s dive into the 15-year-old rabbit hole of how Alice became a part of iA. Alice in Wonderland is celebrated around the world on 4 July—especially in Oxford, her birthplace. 1
Legend has it that on 4 July 1862, Charles Dodgson created an adventurous girl called Alice to entertain the young Alice Liddell and her sisters during a picnic. A few years later, under the pen name Lewis Carroll, he published the original story as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, commonly known as Alice in Wonderland. We’ve been using Lewis Carroll’s original story to showcase our writing app’s features since it first launched in 2010.
Why Alice?
Alice in Wonderland is a trippy story and a wonderful showcase of imagination and literary craft. Lewis Carroll loves and plays with typography using visual poetry.2
We have met Alice in The Matrix, in Salvador Dalí’s and Yayoi Kusama’s works. We heard of her through the music of Serge Gainsbourg, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and many others. References to Alice are easy to spot and somehow they always bring joy.3 At times, our Alice quotes have been quite subtle and other times pretty obvious:
This universally recognized story allowed us to create an immediate connection with any user. Alice is well-known almost everywhere in the world and is one of the most recognizable Western fiction characters in Japan.4
Alice, Spelled with i and A
The prominence of the capital A and the lowercase i works nicely typographically and musically. By showcasing Alice, the White Rabbit, and the Queen of Hearts in our screenshots, we offered a little trip back to our childhoods that contrasted against the technical feel that Markdown apps can have.
Lastly, Alice’s story is connected to iA Writer’s core feature, Focus Mode. Just as Alice falls down, down, down the deep well into the rabbit hole, Focus Mode lets you cut out all distractions and dive deep into the rabbit hole of writing.
“Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. […] Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end!”
Referencing Alice in Wonderland became such a habit that we naturally included her in other smaller projects. About eight years ago, we developed a minimalist WordPress theme called iA4 (now deprecated) and, of course, Alice was there to illustrate it.
Alice in Wonderland has been a fun companion since the launch of iA Writer in 2011. More than ten years later, even though we’ve occasionally referenced other works, she remains our favorite and is an integral part of iA Writer’s world. Happy Alice Day—here’s to many more years together!
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The city of Oxford celebrates all things Alice each year on the first Saturday of July. Check the festivities schedule for 2024 for more details. ↩
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Visual poetry emphasizes the visual arrangement of words to enhance the meaning of the text. Alice in Wonderland famously uses caligrams. Caligrams are poems or text arranged to form a visual image that represents the subject of the poem. ↩
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See the artists inspired by Alice’s adventures down the rabbit hole or Artworks inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. ↩
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In fact, Japan seems a little obsessed with Alice… From theme restaurants to the ever-popular Halloween costume, she is a pop icon here. The story has seen many adaptations too: “The books have been translated into Japanese more than 500 times, resulting in more editions of these works in Japanese than any other language except English.” –Amanda Kennell, Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaption, Mediation. ↩
