
“Kids! Never become complacent. The world we think we know reflects the way we are conditioned to see it. Maybe it’s not like that at all”. This is the penultimate paragraph of Vivienne Westwood’s introduction to the Vintage Classics 150th edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Aside from her Alice-inspired Autumn/Winter 2011/2012 runway collection, her credentials differ from those who have written an introduction to the work in the past. Previously the book has been introduced by Michael Irwin, a professor of English literature at the University of Kent, and Hugh Haughton, a professor of English literature at York University, who tells me that he thinks Alice in Wonderland is, “the greatest text of dream realism ever written”.