From Rote Recitation to Spiritual Perception: Carroll’s Rival Order of Nonsense and the Critique of Victorian Moral Pedagogy

Abstract

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass recontextualize Victorian moral pedagogy by placing familiar didactic forms under the altered conditions of nonsense. Situating Carroll’s fiction within nineteenth-century educational and religious traditions—particularly the memorization-based moral instruction associated with Isaac Watts—this article contends that Carroll is less interested in rejecting morality than in testing how moral meaning operates once detached from its ordinary contexts of use. Through parody, linguistic play, disrupted dialogue, and logical inversion, the Alice books preserve recognizable pedagogical structures while exposing their dependence on convention, interpretation, and shared frameworks of meaning. Alice’s failed recitations and frustrated attempts to apply ordinary rules do not simply dismantle Victorian instruction; rather, they reveal the limits of rote learning when confronted with nonsensical situations. Carroll’s nonsense emerges not as an anti-pedagogical force but as a supplementary or “inverted” pedagogy that complicates inherited models of moral formation through play, improvisation, and interpretive uncertainty. Ultimately, Carroll reframes nonsense as a morally and intellectually serious mode that challenges Victorian assumptions about authority, education, language, and the relationship between instruction and understanding.