An inspiration for Alice
COOKE, Mordecai Cubitt. A Plain and Easy Account of British Fungi; with especial reference to the esculent and poisonous species, details of the principles of scientific classification, and a tabular arrangement of orders and genera. London: Robert Hardwicke. 1866.
8vo. Original olive green cloth, front with gilt lettering and design of a mushroom, gilt lettering to spine; pp. viii, 166, 32 {publisher's catalogue], with 24 coloured lithographic plates; a very good copy. Provenance: front pastedown with bookplate of Wolfgang Metzner (1909-92), publisher, and another signature to ffep.
Second edition. This was a popular guide to mushrooms that ran into several editions by the end of the nineteenth century. Cooke (1825-1914) was one of Britain's foremost mycologists, ending his career at Kew. This book purportedly inspired the passage in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in which Alice grows and shrinks while eating a mushroom with its account of the distortion of perception caused by eating the fly agaric mushroom.
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