Proof of a Tenniel illustration. Credit The Morgan Library & Museum

For the first time in 30 years, the original manuscript of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland will travel from London’s British Library to the Morgan Library in New York, where the exhibition “Alice: 150 Years in Wonderland” opened last week and will run through October 11, 2015.

The handwritten, hand-illustrated “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground,” which Carroll gave as a Christmas present to Alice Liddell in 1864 is, according to the New York Times, “almost as close to an ur-text of the British soul as Magna Carta or Shakespeare’s First Folio.” A revised and expanded Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland appeared a year later, in 1865, with illustrations by Sir John Tenniel, and became the classic that we know today.

In addition to the original manuscript, the Morgan’s exhibition showcases memorabilia related to Carroll’s young muse, Alice: a hand-colored photograph, her writing case, and Carroll’s entry from the day he began the story of Alice, while boating down the Thames with her and her two sisters, Lorina and Edith, in 1862. It also marks the beginning of “what will become a lively late summer and fall of Aliceiana.”

From September 16 – November 21, New York’s Grolier Club will hold an exhibition of “Alice” in translation; the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts plans an exhibition called “Alice Live!” and the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia will host the British Library manuscript in a five-day “pop-up exhibition.”