Lewis Carroll Writing Style

Lewis Carroll's writing style is nonsense that obeys rules. He was Charles Dodgson before he was anybody else, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, who published Euclid and His Modern Rivals under his own name and let the Alice books go out under the other one, and the two jobs are one job. A logician knows the edge of a formal system. Carroll wrote fiction that steps over that edge on purpose and keeps counting. Watch the pigeon in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland reason that serpents eat eggs, that little girls eat eggs, and that little girls are therefore a kind of serpent, then go back to guarding its nest, satisfied. The argument is a textbook fallacy, correctly executed.

The invention comes apart at three levels. Sound is the first: brillig, wabe, mome, borogoves, syllables shaped like English so your mouth agrees to them before your head objects. Words are the second, and this is where the real work happens, because Carroll packs two meanings into one and then stops the book so that Humpty Dumpty can take slithy apart for Alice as lithe and slimy. He puts brillig at four o'clock in the afternoon while he is at it. Syntax is the third, and he leaves it alone. 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe holds on to every article, tense, plural and preposition, which is why you can parse the grammar of a line whose vocabulary does not exist.

The books are built out of one encounter, run again at a higher price. Alice meets an authority. The authority states a rule. The rule turns out to be indefensible, and Alice comes away from the exchange with less standing than she took into it. The Caucus-race ends with prizes for all the runners and no result, which is funny. The trial of the Knave of Hearts ends with the Queen calling for sentence first and verdict afterwards, which is the same joke about procedure with an execution behind it. Through the Looking-Glass pulls the frame tighter still, because Alice is a pawn making legal moves across a chessboard toward the eighth square, so even the wandering runs on a rule.

What transfers to your own desk has little to do with talking rabbits. Say a rule out loud, apply it past the point anyone intended, and report the damage without raising your voice. Swift surveyed Lilliput to the inch and let the exactness carry the lunacy, and Douglas Adams later ran the same engine through interstellar paperwork. The prose stays courteous. The floor keeps moving.

Correct Logic, False Premise

Take a real inference pattern and feed it something untrue. The Cheshire Cat proves its own madness by observing that a dog growls when angry and wags its tail when pleased, whereas the Cat growls when pleased and wags when angry, so the Cat must be mad. The reasoning is clean. The claim about dogs is the part that fails, and Alice cannot reach it fast enough to object. Readers who could not name the error still feel it, and that is the return on the technique, because being argued into a corner by an authority who is wrong is what makes Wonderland claustrophobic rather than playful. The cost is discipline. One cheated step and the reader stops tracking, and a reader who has stopped tracking is watching surrealism with nothing to hold on to.

Two Words in One Slot

Build the invented word out of two real ones and let a character take it apart on the page. Humpty Dumpty glosses mimsy as flimsy and miserable, and the gloss is what makes the word land, because both halves turn out to be true of the borogoves at once. A borogove, on his account, is a thin shabby bird with its feathers sticking out. Two rules govern the build. The seam has to be sayable, so the blend comes out of your mouth as one word rather than two glued together, and both source meanings have to apply, or you have made a noise instead of a word. The failure mode is volume. Coin one a stanza and the reader learns your language. Coin six a page and there is nothing steady left to learn it against.

Rule Invented Mid-Scene

Let 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 made it up on the spot. He tells her it is the oldest rule in the book. She answers that in that case it ought to be Number One, and for once she wins, on the ordering of the rules rather than their content. Notice what makes the win possible. Carroll had set the court's procedure out carefully enough beforehand that a procedural objection has somewhere to land, and that groundwork is what imitators skip, because building a rulebook is unglamorous work and it pays only when somebody breaks it.

The Consequence That Arrives First

Put the effect before the cause and keep the accounting straight afterwards. The White Queen screams, then pricks her finger, and explains that she has already done the screaming so there is no point in doing it twice. She remembers things that happened the week after next. Her Messenger is in prison serving a sentence, the trial begins on Wednesday, and the crime is scheduled last of all. Her rule about jam allows it tomorrow and yesterday and refuses it today, which is a fact of grammar wearing the costume of meanness with the pudding. What this buys you is a scene the reader cannot predict forward and can still follow, because a different order has quietly replaced the ordinary one.

The Sincere Questioner

Give the viewpoint character honest 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 to give itself away in the answering. Sarcasm would end that. A protagonist who signals amusement has resolved the tension on the reader's behalf, and the scene shrinks to commentary. Carroll keeps Alice puzzled and polite across two books, and the strain of that politeness against people who will not answer straight is where the discomfort comes from, because a well-brought-up child has no move available against an adult who changes the terms mid-sentence and then finds fault with her manners.

The Idiom Taken at Its Word

Treat a dead metaphor as a live fact and follow it. The Mouse offers to dry the sodden animals with the driest thing it knows, which is a passage of school history, and the joke is that dry has two meanings and the Mouse is using both. The Hatter explains that he quarrelled with Time last March, after the Queen accused him of murdering it at a concert, and that Time has refused to move his clock since. Time, in the Hatter's account, is a person. The Mouse announces a long and a sad tale, and Alice looks at its tail and agrees that it is long. Each of these puns has a consequence attached, which is the difference between this device and a groan. Pick the idiom your scene already depends on, take it at its word, and let somebody be inconvenienced by the result.

Pattern With Variation

Carroll sets a shape and then alters one element at a time, which is how these books mean something without a plot to carry the meaning. 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 repetition as evidence rather than as a joke about credulity. Read one of his sequences across its repetitions and the sense lives in the difference between passes. A single instance would be an oddity. The third instance is an argument.

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, then sings 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. It does structural work by putting language 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.

Conflict Without an Antagonist

None of these characters is a villain in the ordinary sense, and the obstacle is the reasoning itself. Two things follow that are worth copying. Pressure builds in scenes where nothing violent is happening, because Alice is losing ground to an argument and there is nothing in the room to fight. Resolution also stalls productively, since each repair she attempts hands somebody a fresh term to redefine, so a scene can run for as long as the vocabulary holds out.

The Board Under the Story

Through the Looking-Glass is laid out as a chess problem, and Alice is a white pawn who crosses the board square by square until she reaches the eighth rank and is crowned. Carroll prints the problem and the list of moves at the front of the book, so a reader who cares to can check every square Alice crosses against a diagram the author drew before he wrote the chapters. That is the plainest statement of the whole method. A story that looks like a dream is running on legal moves. Give your own drifting narrative a rule of that order, printed or hidden, and the drift stops reading as aimlessness.

Stacking strange images and calling the result nonsense

Odd images do not compound. Put a talking teapot on a purple sky on a man made of clocks, and the reader's attention flattens, because with no stable rule in the scene there is nothing to separate 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. The Caucus-race is funny because races have a start and a finish and this one has neither, and the prize-giving afterwards follows a shape the reader already knows by heart. Alice ends up supplying the prizes herself. Take the shape away and you have a crowd running in a circle.

Letting the narrator wink at the reader

The wink is the commonest failure. A writer who feels absurdity coming gets nervous and has the narrator acknowledge it, which tells the reader that the author is safe and therefore that the reader is safe too. Carroll offers no such assurance. Irony delivered as a nudge cancels itself out. Irony delivered as a consequence stays where it landed, and the way to hold your nerve is to give the strange thing a result you can report in the same flat voice you would use for the weather.

Taking the props and leaving the procedure behind

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, and a reader who was promised menace gets a photograph of a table instead. Decide what your setting obliges people to do before you decide what the room contains. The obligation is the trap, and the crockery is whatever happened to be on the table.

Handing the child the winning line

Imitators let their Alice out-argue the adults, usually within a page, because a clever child is more comfortable to write than a baffled one. Carroll almost refuses her the win. She loses to the Caterpillar, to Humpty Dumpty, to the Duchess and to the Queen, and the round she does take, she takes on a technicality about how rules are numbered. That imbalance is where the discomfort in these books lives. A protagonist who keeps winning turns the nonsense into a joke the reader sits comfortably outside of, and the whole point of Wonderland is that Alice is inside it and cannot get the terms fixed.