Irony in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)

Lewis Carroll was a master of parody.

G. W. Langford’s poem not only preached at parents, but threatened them with a reminder of the high mortality rate of young children: It went:

Speak gently to the little child?

Its love be sure to gain;

Teach it in accents soft and mild;

It may not long remain.

Lewis Carroll’s parody went:

Speak roughly to your little boy.

And beat him when he sneezes.

He only does it to annoy

Because he knows it teases.

Lewis Carroll also loved to play with words. Consider the following poem, in which the Content Words (Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives and Adverbs are nonsense words, and the Function Words (Articles, Conjunctions, Auxiliary Verbs, Prepositions, and Pronouns are real words. The resultant poem is therefore perfectly grammatical, but we have no idea what it means:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgabe

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch?

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Reading and Writing became Reeling and Writhing; Latin and Greek became Laughing and Grief; Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, and Division became Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derisionl Drawing, Sketching and Painting in Oils became Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils; take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves became Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves; and . Twinkle, twinkle, Little Star, How I wonder where you are became Twinkle, twinkle, Little Bat, how I wonder where you’re at.

With most of his parodies, Carroll was protesting the didacticism and the sentimentality imposed on Victorian children by their parents. Isaac Watts’ original poem is about bees and their industriousness, while Lewis Carroll’s Parody is about crocodiles:

How doth the little busy bee

Improve each shining hour

And gather honey all the day

From every opening flower!

How doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail

And pour the waters of the Nile

On every golden scale!