Reading Alice in Wonderland in English: Where the Wordplay Trips You Up

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published by Lewis Carroll in 1865. It has 12 chapters and runs to about 27,000 words in the Project Gutenberg text. That is roughly two thirds the length of A Study in Scarlet, the Holmes novel covered in the previous post on Sherlock Holmes.

It is a children’s book and a famous story, so many learners pick it as their first book in English. Alice is a book with easy words that is hard to read. Most of its sentences are built from everyday vocabulary. What makes it hard is that much of the humour is wordplay that depends on the sound and spelling of English. This post looks at the places where the wordplay is easy to miss, and how to deal with it.

Is it easy for learners?

On vocabulary alone, Alice is not very difficult. There are no long abstract passages like Watson’s narration in the Holmes stories. There is a lot of dialogue, and a chapter is roughly 2,000 to 2,500 words.

The difficulty is that nonsensical things keep happening. It is a dream, so scenes do not connect and the characters talk past each other. When you are confused, it is hard to tell whether the cause is your English or whether the book is written not to make sense.

The other difficulty is the wordplay. Even if you look up every word in a line, you may not see why it is funny. That is normal.

Wordplay that is easy to miss

Chapter 3: tale and tail, not and knot

The Mouse says that his is “a long and a sad tale”. Alice looks down at the Mouse’s tail and answers, “It is a long tail, certainly”. Tale (a story) and tail sound the same.

A little later the Mouse snaps “I had not”, and Alice hears “A knot” and offers to help undo it. Not and knot also sound the same.

In printed editions, the Mouse’s tale is set on the page in the shape of a tail, winding and getting thinner. In the Project Gutenberg text it is an ordinary paragraph. When Alice says the Mouse “had got to the fifth bend”, that shape is what she means.

Chapter 9: the Mock Turtle’s school

In this chapter the Mock Turtle lists the subjects he learned at school in the sea:

• Reeling and Writhing is Reading and Writing.
• Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision are Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, and Division.
• Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils are Drawing, Sketching, and Painting in Oils.
• Laughing and Grief are Latin and Greek.

Each one replaces a real school subject with a word that sounds similar. If you don’t know the real subjects, it just looks like a list of strange words.

In the same chapter, the master was called Tortoise “because he taught us”, a pun on tortoise and taught us. Lessons are called lessons, the Gryphon explains, because they lessen from day to day. Ten hours the first day, nine the next, and Alice seriously asks whether the eleventh day was a holiday.

Parody poems

Alice tries to recite poems she has learned, and they come out as different poems. “How doth the little crocodile” in Chapter 2 is a parody of “How doth the little busy bee”, a poem children of the time often learned by heart. Alice herself mentions it in Chapter 5. “You are old, Father William” in Chapter 5 and “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat” in Chapter 7 work the same way. The second comes from “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”.

British children who knew the originals would have heard a familiar poem go off in the wrong direction. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” is known in many countries, so that one is easier to catch.

Chapter 7: a riddle with no answer

At the tea party the Hatter asks, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” Alice tries to work it out, but the Hatter has no idea himself. No answer is ever given in the book, so of course a dictionary will not help.

How to handle lines a dictionary can’t explain

There is no need to stop long on lines of wordplay. If a dictionary gives you two meanings, consider that both may apply. Wordplay usually uses two meanings at once.

If that does not help, try reading the line aloud. As with tale and tail, or not and knot, a lot of the wordplay is easier to hear than to see.

If you move on without understanding, you lose very little of the story. You can read the whole book once, then check the lines that interest you in an annotated edition or a commentary. You do not need to understand every pun before reading on. How to decide which words to look up is in Which Words Should You Look Up When Reading in English?.

The sequel: Through the Looking-Glass

The sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, came out in 1871. It also has 12 chapters and is a little longer, about 30,000 words. Its plot is built on a game of chess, and printed editions begin with a chessboard diagram.

There is even more wordplay. The poem “Jabberwocky” in Chapter 1 begins “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves”, with words that are not in any dictionary. In Chapter 6, Humpty Dumpty explains the words one by one. Slithy, he says, means “lithe and slimy”, two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, a travelling bag that opens into two halves. It is a rare place where the author explains how his wordplay works.

Illustrations and editions

The illustrations in the first edition were drawn by John Tenniel. For many people, his pictures are still what Alice looks like.

Project Gutenberg has several editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Ebook 11 is the text only. There is also an edition illustrated by Arthur Rackham (28885), and Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (19002), the handwritten version Carroll made before the book was published, with 37 illustrations by the author. After you finish, looking through the different illustrated editions on the web is a pleasure of its own.

Reading Alice in ABC George

I make ABC George, a free reading app for iPhone and iPad that holds the Project Gutenberg catalogue of English books. On the Discover screen, search for “Alice” or “Carroll” without a connection.

George downloads the text and the cover, so the illustrations and the shape of the Mouse’s tail do not appear. While reading, long-press a word and tap Look up to see a plain-English definition and the WordNet senses. When a line of wordplay puzzles you, select it and tap Speak to hear it read aloud. Puns based on sound, like tale and tail, are easier to catch by ear. To check the meaning of a whole line, you can also use Translate.

There are no ads and no account, and books read offline once downloaded. Other books to read are in 30 Free Classic Books for English Learners (Project Gutenberg).