Cheshire cat to star on commemorative 'Alice in Wonderland' stamp

'Alice in Wonderland' turns 150 this year, and these stamps are part of an anniversary series released by Britain's Royal Mail. The artwork is by the award-winning illustrator Grahame Baker-Smith.

Lewis Carroll's triumph of proto-surrealist fantasy is more widely read than ever. Professor Will Brooker of Kingston University London, author of Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture, told The Telegraph that generations of readers have interpreted its lunacies in ways that reflect the preoccupations of their eras and cultures. "In the 1930s it was Freudian psychoanalysis, in the 1960s it was psychedelia, and in the 1990s paedophilia," he says.

"In the 1960s, people assumed Carroll must have been on the same drugs they were on, because the story seemed to tally with their experiences of LSD and cannabis. They thought he was speaking their language."

In fact, he was an abstemious man with an entirely self-propelled imagination. And as for the speculation about paedophilia, Brooker believes there was no dark secret to the friendship between Carroll and the real-life Alice, who was the daughter of a friend.

Perhaps the recurring impulse to decode Carroll's tale is best answered by the Mad Hatter, in one of his most exasperating exchanges with Alice.

Mad Hatter: "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?"

"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.

"No, I give it up," Alice replied. "What's the answer?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter.