33 inch (838mm) celestial globe using the characters from John Tenniel as using the cartography from Charles Copley's celestial globe dated 1852

This oversized prepublication proof (issued ‘1/1’) served as the model for a 12″ production globe the same year. Its diameter is 838 mm (33 in), and its full height on stand is 1,980 mm (78 in). The surface is covered by twelve colour-printed gores (the tapered map segments traditionally pasted onto a sphere), laid from pole to pole. The equatorial, colures, and ecliptic lines are precisely graduated (degrees, hours, minutes, days of month, Zodiac signs), while stars are plotted across nine orders of magnitude, with nebulae rendered in subtle detail. 

In place of the usual mythological figures, the constellations are represented by John Tenniel’s (1820–1914) illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s (1832–1898) characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. The globe carries a white-painted pawn finial at the North Pole, rests on a painted teacup, and is mounted via a carved queen-chess-piece stand inscribed at the base ‘Greaves & Thomas, London.’

Accompanying this globe is James Bissell-Thomas’s booklet The Making of Alice’s Celestial Globe (Richmond: Greaves & Thomas, 2001), second edition, limited to 150 copies.
The cartographic foundation is derived from Charles Copley’s (act. 1843–69) 1852 celestial gores, into which the usual constellations were replaced with Tenniel’s illustrations. Some of the identifications are playful yet apt: Aquarius becomes the Mad Hatter with his endlessly flowing teapot; Gemini the inseparable Tweedledum and Tweedledee; Virgo Alice herself. Others are strikingly inventive, such as Humpty Dumpty transformed into Ophiuchus (the Serpent-Holder) on the logic that ‘an egg often holds a serpent.’ In the cartouche near the North Pole, the sleeping Red King presides over the whole, watched by the Gryphon and the Queen of Hearts, underscoring Carroll’s theme that ‘all life is but a dream.’

A celestial globe presents a reversed, ‘outside-in’ view of the heavens. The conceit is here aligned with Carroll’s world of reversal and nonsense, in which looking-glasses are both mirrors and telescopes. The result is a work of fictional cartography that projects Wonderland into the stars, extending Carroll’s dream logic into a unique cosmography.

Ex Carta

Produced by Greaves & Thomas, this celestial globe adapts nineteenth-century astronomical cartography to the imaginative universe of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Tenniel’s characters replace the constellations, transforming the night sky into a playful cartography of Wonderland.

Greaves & Thomas revived the traditional craft of globe-making in Britain in 1991 under James Bissell-Thomas, who combined skills in art, printing, publishing, and antiquarian books. Their output includes both historical facsimiles and imaginative themed globes; the Alice series belongs to the latter category, blending Victorian celestial cartography with Carrollian fantasy.