I was up way too late reorganizing my board game shelf - you know, the kind of reorganization that starts productive and ends with you sitting on the floor reading the rulebook for Gloomhaven for the fourth time - when I decided to throw this on. At 81 minutes, I figured it'd be done before I finished alphabetizing my Carcassonne expansions. And honestly? That brevity is kind of the whole point.
The Proto-Wonderland Draft Nobody Talks About
So here's the thing most people don't realize: this isn't Alice in Wonderland. This is Alice's Adventures Underground, the handwritten manuscript Carroll gave to the real Alice Liddell in 1864, before Tenniel's illustrations, before the publisher's polish, before the Mad Hatter's tea party even existed. It's the rough draft. The first campaign notes before you flesh out the module, if you will.
And that distinction matters. The Underground version is shorter, rawer, and honestly a little weirder in ways the published book smoothed over. Some of the familiar beats are here - the rabbit hole, the shrinking and growing, the Cheshire Cat, the trial - but they hit different when you know Carroll was basically improvising this on a rowboat for three kids on a July afternoon in 1862. The Mock Turtle sequence feels more like a private joke between friends than a polished set piece. The ending is more abrupt, almost like Carroll got tired and wrapped it up. Which, given the origin story, he probably literally did.
What's wild is reading (well, listening to) what's missing. No Mad Hatter. No Dormouse. No "we're all mad here" in the same form you know it. It's like finding the DM's original session notes before they wrote the full adventure - half the NPCs haven't been invented yet, and the map is just a sketch on a napkin. That same feeling of stumbling into a world still figuring out its own rules is actually what drew me to Grimms' Fairy Tales - those stories have the same rough-hewn, pre-editorial energy, like you're catching the folklore before anyone decided to clean it up.
Phil Chenevert and the LibriVox Question
Let me be honest: I don't have a ton to say about Phil Chenevert's narration specifically, because this is a LibriVox recording and the research didn't turn up detailed performance notes. What I can tell you is that LibriVox recordings are volunteer-produced, public domain readings, and they tend to range from "surprisingly charming" to "your uncle reading at Thanksgiving." The audio quality reflects that - this isn't an Audible studio production with sound design and post-processing. It's one person, a microphone, and Carroll's words.
For an 81-minute listen, that's... fine? You're not getting Steven Pacey-level character differentiation here. (Steven Pacey walked so other narrators could run, but that's an unfair comparison for a free public domain recording.) What you ARE getting is access to a genuinely interesting literary artifact without paying a dime, and sometimes that's the trade-off.
I will say - and this is me being real - at 81 minutes, I'd almost rather read the Project Gutenberg text version, where you can actually see Carroll's original hand-drawn illustrations. Those drawings are half the charm of this manuscript. They're awkward and earnest and completely unlike Tenniel's iconic versions, and losing them in audio form means you're missing a big piece of what makes Underground different from Wonderland.
Who Should Bother (And Who Should Just Reread Wonderland)
If you're a Carroll completist, a literary history nerd, or someone who geeks out over early drafts and creative process stuff - yes. Absolutely listen to this. It's fascinating to hear the skeleton of one of the most famous children's books ever written and mentally catalog what Carroll added, cut, and reworked. My D&D group would love this, actually - there's something very "comparing the playtest document to the final rulebook" about it.
If you just want the Alice experience? Go grab a proper Wonderland audiobook with a narrator who can really swing for the fences on the absurdism. This is the academic curiosity version, not the definitive one.
And if you're a parent looking for a bedtime listen - actually, the short runtime works perfectly for that. Just know the production quality is modest.
My Thesis Can Wait Another 81 Minutes
I read this instead of writing my thesis, and I'd do it again, but I want to be clear about what this is: a historically interesting rough draft, competently read, available for free. It's not going to blow your mind. It IS going to make you appreciate what Carroll did when he expanded this into the full Wonderland - the man basically took decent session notes and turned them into a legendary campaign. The progression from Underground to Wonderland is genuinely satisfying if you care about that kind of craft evolution. Just don't expect the audiobook format to capture everything that makes this manuscript special.
