The story begins not in Wonderland but in a dusty bookshop, where a tiny Alice slips out of a red linen copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, leaving a vacancy in Tenniel’s illustration. She eats cake to grow to schoolgirl size, then approaches the rheumatic old bookseller to borrow the very volume she escaped from. This opening immediately establishes a playful self-awareness: Alice is both character and reader, free to move between fiction and the real world.

Escaping the Page, Entering the Toy Shop

Alice’s escape is literal and symbolic. She climbs down from a shelf, eats cake to grow, and plucks her own book from the counter. The old bookseller, whose wits have been woolgathering for years, barely notices. This sets the tone for a story that treats books as physical objects and characters as autonomous beings. Once outside the volume, Alice navigates a toy shop filled with a Plausible Donkey, a Singing Bird, and a stuck-up Queen of the Dolls. The shop becomes a liminal space where literary and commercial worlds collide, and where Alice’s adventures are reframed as a Christmas errand.

Debating Daisy Ashford and H.G. Wells

Alice’s companion is a wooden man who challenges her literary tastes. When Alice praises Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters, the wooden man scoffs, suggesting Sir James Barrie wrote it and that Ashford’s age is a gimmick. Alice retorts by citing Barrie’s preface. The argument escalates to H.G. Wells, whom the wooden man mocks with a rhyme: “Mr. Britling saw it through, / That was more than I could do!” Alice scolds him for being “Leviticus” (a pun on “levity” and the biblical book). This exchange showcases Starrett’s satirical edge, using Carrollian wordplay to critique early 20th-century literary figures.

The Kitten Quest and Santa’s Strike

The wooden man reminds Alice that a kitten was on her Christmas list. She refuses to return to the menagerie, where the donkeys were impolite. They rush to Santa Claus’s cottony dwelling, only to find a sign: “Gone to the Races. Back Next Year.” The joke—Santa on strike for a shorter day, with seven hundred of him—undercuts the holiday magic. Alice’s exasperated “Oh!” leaves her resigned to a kitten that might eat the bird and scratch the doll. The story ends on a note of comic disappointment, blending whimsy with a gentle mockery of consumerist Christmas expectations.

Starrett’s fantasy is best read as a literary jeu d’esprit rather than a children’s story. The humor depends on familiarity with Carroll, Tenniel, and the authors name-dropped in the toy shop debates. Readers who enjoy spotting period references and puns will find the most pleasure here. The brevity of the tale—under 9,000 words—makes it a quick, amusing diversion, especially for those curious about how early 20th-century writers played with the Alice legacy.