Lewis Carroll is a pen-name: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was the author's
real name and he was lecturer in Mathematics in Christ Church, Oxford.
Dodgson began the story on 4 July 1862, when he took a journey in a
rowing boat on the river Thames in Oxford together with the Reverend
Robinson Duckworth, with Alice Liddell (ten years of age) the daughter
of the Dean of Christ Church, and with her two sisters, Lorina (thirteen
years of age), and Edith (eight years of age). As is clear from the poem
at the beginning of the book, the three girls asked Dodgson for a story
and reluctantly at first he began to tell the first version of the story
to them. There are many half-hidden references are made to the five of
them throughout the text of the book itself, which was published finally
in 1865. This edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland presents the
text transcribed into the Unifon alphabet. Unifon was developed as an
auxiliary phonetic alphabet designed to facilitate access to literacy to
English-speaking children, by presenting to them a writing system that
worked by sound. Tests showed that children were able to learn to read
rather quickly using this system, and, having made that breakthrough,
were able to transition to tradi-tional English orthography relatively
easily. Unifon was developed in the 1950s by Dr John R. Malone, an
economist and newspaper equipment consultant who became interested in
phonetic writing while consulting with the Bendix Corporation, which was
interested in questions of aviation com-munication. That work was
abandoned when the International Air Transport Association selected
English as the language of inter-national airline communications in
1957. But Malone's interest in phonetic writing resurfaced when his
young son com-plained about difficulties learning to read. From about
1960 to the 1980s, Margaret S. Ratz used Unifon to teach first-graders
at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. A variety of teaching materials
exist using Unifon. From the 1974 to his death in 1993 John M. Culkin, a
specialist in media studies, also promoted Unifon. The transcription
used here is based on the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing
Dictionary, and accordingly reflects American pronunciation-naturally
enough, since Unifon was devised by an American.
