Down the Rabbit-Hole.

“Down the Rabbit-Hole” is the title of the opening chapter of Lewis Carroll’s children’s novel *Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland* (1865). The phrase frames the story’s inciting action: Alice, bored on a riverbank, notices a hurried White Rabbit and follows him, ultimately plunging into a rabbit-hole that leads to Wonderland. Carroll (Charles L. Dodgson) first told an early version of the tale orally in 1862 to the Liddell children during a boating outing, later expanding it into the published book. As a chapter heading, the words function as a narrative signpost announcing the transition from ordinary Victorian reality into a realm governed by dream-logic and linguistic play.

As a chapter title, “Down the Rabbit-Hole” encapsulates the novel’s central movement: a sudden descent from the familiar into the strange. The “down” suggests both physical falling and a metaphorical plunge into uncertainty, where customary rules of sense, language, and identity no longer hold. The rabbit-hole becomes a threshold image for curiosity’s risks and rewards—Alice’s decision to follow the Rabbit initiates a chain of bewildering encounters that test her assumptions about logic, manners, and selfhood. The phrase has also helped generate the later idiom “down the rabbit hole,” now used for entering an absorbing, disorienting, or obsessive line of inquiry.