Lewis Carroll Writing Style

A pigeon in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland proves that Alice is a serpent. Serpents eat eggs. Little girls eat eggs. Therefore little girls are a kind of serpent, and the pigeon goes back to guarding its nest, satisfied. That argument has a name in the logic textbooks Charles Dodgson worked from at Christ Church, Oxford, where he lectured in mathematics and published Euclid and His Modern Rivals under his own name while the Alice books went out under his other one. The joke is a fallacy, correctly executed.

Look at what his characters fight over. Not territory, not love. Words. Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that a word means what he chooses it to mean, and when she objects that words cannot be made to do that, he answers with the only question that settles anything in Through the Looking-Glass: which is to be master. The Hatter's watch reports the day of the month and withholds the hour. The King of Hearts invents Rule Forty-Two in the middle of a trial, and Alice beats him with a rule about rules, pointing out that the oldest rule in the book ought to be numbered first.

Holding that together is bookkeeping, and Carroll does his in public. Once the Mad Tea-Party has raised the question of whether meaning what you say is the same as saying what you mean, the Hatter answers it with seeing and eating, the March Hare follows with getting and liking, and the Dormouse closes with breathing and sleeping. Three passes, one joke, rising. Most imitators stop after the first pass, because the first pass looks like the joke. Carroll knew the pattern was the joke.

What survives for a working writer has little to do with talking rabbits. It is a method for making an impossible premise behave itself: state the rule in plain words, apply it without flinching, and let the consequences arrive on schedule. Douglas Adams ran the same engine through interstellar paperwork, and Swift ran it through the deadpan surveying of Lilliput, where every measurement is exact and the whole enterprise is mad. The prose stays courteous. The floor keeps moving.

Valid Form, Rotten Premise

Take a real inference pattern and feed it something false. The Pigeon reasons that serpents eat eggs and little girls eat eggs, so little girls are serpents, and that error has a name. The Cheshire Cat's proof of its own madness has the same shape with a lie about dogs at the bottom of it. Readers who could not name the error still feel it, which is the whole return on the technique, because being argued into a corner by an authority who is wrong is what makes Wonderland claustrophobic rather than whimsical. What this asks of you is discipline. One cheated step and the reader stops tracking, and a reader who has stopped tracking is watching surrealism with no traction in it.

The Contested Definition

Hand two characters the same word, let them mean different things by it, then make the scene turn on which meaning gets enforced. Humpty Dumpty declares that glory means a nice knock-down argument, and Alice objects that glory does not mean that. He answers by moving the dispute from semantics to authority, since the real question is which of them is to be master, and once he has said so the argument is over and Alice has lost. Nearly every confrontation across the two books reduces to that exchange. The technique costs you a setup. You have to know which meaning is the ordinary one and write it plainly first, because a redefinition only registers as violence when the reader was holding the original.

Rule Invented Mid-Scene

Have an authority produce a rule that did not exist a moment earlier and apply it backwards. The King of Hearts reads out Rule Forty-Two, all persons more than a mile high to leave the court, and Alice refuses on the grounds that he invented it just now. He claims it is the oldest rule in the book. She replies that in that case it ought to be Number One, and for once she wins, on a point about the ordering of rules rather than their content. Notice what makes the win land at all. Carroll had established the court's procedure carefully enough beforehand that a procedural objection carries weight in it.

The Portmanteau

Pack two meanings into one word and let a character gloss it aloud. Slithy holds lithe and slimy, and Humpty Dumpty's explanation of that is where English got the term portmanteau word. The coinage is more than a party trick because it becomes an object characters can argue about, so an invented word enters the scene with a disputed definition attached and a use in the plot. The failure mode arrives fast. Invent six of them a page and nothing stable is left for the reader to measure the invention against, which is why Jabberwocky keeps its articles and its tenses plain and puts the whole strangeness in the stems.

Verse That Carries the Rules

Carroll's verse is load-bearing. You Are Old, Father William parodies a solemn Southey poem about the dignity of age, and in the parody it tells you precisely how Wonderland treats instruction from elders. The Walrus and the Carpenter delivers an ethic of appetite while pretending to be a nursery rhyme, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee recite it as though it settled a dispute. Getting verse right is unforgiving work. A limp line is audible in a way a limp prose sentence is not, and the metre has to feel inevitable or the smuggled content shows through the seams and the reader hears the author instead of the poem.

The Question That Will Not Stop

Give the viewpoint character sincere questions and refuse to let her turn sarcastic. Alice asks who these people are, why a rule counts, what a word means, and she asks in earnest, which obliges the world to answer and expose itself in the answering. Sarcasm would end all of that. A protagonist who signals amusement has already resolved the tension on the reader's behalf, and the scene shrinks into commentary. Carroll keeps Alice puzzled and polite across two books, and the strain of that politeness against a court that sentences before it deliberates is where the unease comes from.

Formally Valid Nonsense

The engine of both Alice books is an argument whose form is correct and whose content is not. Carroll wrote on logic under his own name, and the fallacies in Wonderland are recognisable named ones rather than free-floating gibberish. This generates conflict with no antagonist present, since the obstacle is the reasoning itself and Alice keeps losing to it. It also stalls resolution productively. Each repair she attempts supplies a fresh term for somebody else to redefine, so a scene can run as long as the vocabulary holds out.

The Use-Mention Trap

The White Knight distinguishes his song, the song's name, what the song is called, and what the name is called, and then performs something that matches none of the four labels he has arranged so carefully. That is the difference between using a word and mentioning one, played as comedy, and it does structural work by putting language itself on the table without anyone in the scene delivering a lecture about it. Alice's response is the reader's. She tries to hold four labels in her head at once, and fails, and the failure is the point.

Reversed Causality

Effects precede causes on the far side of the looking-glass. The White Queen screams before she pricks her finger, remembers next week, and mentions a Messenger already serving his sentence, with the trial due later and the crime scheduled last of all. Jam is promised tomorrow and reported yesterday and withheld today, which is a rule of grammar disguised as meanness with the pudding. The pacing effect is specific. Carroll removes the reader's ability to predict forward from cause to consequence, then supplies a different predictability in its place, so the scenes stay trackable while feeling ungoverned. The Queen of Hearts runs the courtroom version of the same inversion when she asks for sentence first and verdict afterwards.

Pattern With Variation

Carroll sets a shape and then alters it one element at a time, which is how the books mean something without a plot to carry the meaning. Three speakers at the tea party invert three different pairs of verbs. The Bellman in The Hunting of the Snark announces that whatever he tells the crew three times is true, and the poem then obeys him, treating the rule as evidence rather than as a joke about credulity. Read any of these sequences across their repetitions and the difference between passes is where the sense lives. One instance would be an oddity. The third instance is an argument.

Stacking odd images and calling the result nonsense

Odd images do not compound. Stack a talking teapot on a purple sky on a man made of clocks, and the reader's attention flattens out, because with no stable rule in the scene there is nothing to tell a significant deviation from a decorative one. Wonderland does something much narrower. It fixes a norm, breaks it at a named point, and pays out the consequence, which is why the Caucus-race is funny: races have starts and finishes, this one has neither, and the prize-giving afterwards parodies an institution the reader already knows by heart. Remove the institution and you have a crowd running in a circle.

Writing puns that leave the scene exactly where they found it

Carroll's puns change the state of play. Lessen and lesson settles the Mock Turtle's curriculum. Tortoise and taught us settles who his teacher was. An imitator's pun tends to sit beside the action and comment on it, which reads as the author asking to be admired, and the tension in the scene drains out through that gap. A workable test is whether the wordplay would survive being cut, because if the scene proceeds identically without it, it was ornament. Cutting one of Carroll's would leave a hole where a plot point used to be, because the joke is the mechanism by which a character learns something or loses standing.

Letting the narrator wink at the reader

The wink is the commonest failure. Writers who feel absurdity approaching get nervous and have the narrator acknowledge it, which tells the reader the author is safe and therefore that the reader is safe too. Carroll's narrator offers no such assurance. The Queen orders executions, the Duchess flings a baby about while singing to it, and the prose reports both in the same even register it used for the riverbank, and that flatness is what leaves readers uneasy rather than merely entertained. Irony delivered as a nudge cancels itself out. Irony delivered as a consequence lands and stays landed.

Borrowing the tea party without the procedure

Props are cheap and procedure is not. A tea party in Carroll is a seating plan, an order of turns, a rule about moving down the table when a place gets dirty, and a running argument about whether the guest was invited at all. The imitation keeps the teacups and drops the seating plan, so the scene has a look and no engine. Ask what the etiquette of your setting obliges people to do, then find the obligation that can be turned against the person it protects, because the obligation is the trap and the crockery is only what happens to be on the table.