What’s the moral of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?

“How fond she is of finding morals in things!”

What’s the moral of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?

At the croquet party, the Duchess says to Alice: “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.” And people sure have looked for the moral of Alice. Every theory you can think of has been discovered lurking in its symbolism. Rather than hinting at hidden meanings, though, the Duchess’s quote draws attention to the lack of an explicit moral in Carroll’s story. Alice is supposedly the first Victorian children’s story that isn’t instruction in Christianity or good behaviour. The moral is that there is no moral.

On the next page, the Duchess says, “Take care of the sense, and the sounds take care of themselves.” (A little pun on “take care of the pence and the pounds take care of themselves.”) Martin Gardner, the editor of The Annotated Alice, calls this advice “Unsound, of course.” (Haw haw.) He must have momentarily forgotten that in Wonderland, many things are inversions of the norm.

To understand Alice, we reverse what the Duchess says. The essence of nonsense is that if you take care of the sounds the sense takes care of itself—“I mean what I say,” says the Mock Turtle. This is what all those meaning hunters, who have “discovered” half the world’s ideas in Alice, don’t get.

The “meaning” of Alice is that it is a children’s romance, full of the fantasies and puns and inventions and inversions that children concoct and enjoy. It’s a game. Carroll was essentially a highly intelligent child. To look for adult ideas behind it all is to miss the point entirely. It is only nonsense if you are such an adult you can no longer think like a child.

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Gardner’s book is a must-read for anyone interested in Carroll, Alice, or the Victorians.

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Housekeeping

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On 7th September I’m running a salon about Fire and Ice by Robert Frost.

Alice and the Duchess at the croquet game. John Tenniel, 1865 illustration.