You Are Prudish, Father William: Rhyme and Respectability in Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

The Victorian Era was marked by a heightened sense of moral responsibility. People living during this time felt it necessary to live up to the highest expectations of respectability. They had many conventions and rules to follow in order to meet these expectations. Learning how to be respectable began at a very young age and was emphasized in school through learning and reciting rhymes and poems. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Alice attempts to recite her lessons a number of times but cannot seem to get the words right. Alice’s lessons and rhymes are included in the novel to contradict and poke fun at the Victorian value of respectability through the nonsense verse that replaces the original respectable text when she attempts to repeat them in Wonderland.

At the beginning of Alice’s adventure, she decides that she must try to remember some of her lessons in order to determine that she is still herself. She attempts to recite a poem written by Isaac Watts entitled “Against Idleness and Mischief.” The opening lines of Watt’s poem read “How doth the little busy bee/Improve each shining hour/And gather Honey all the Day/From ev’ry op’ning Flow’r!” (Watts 332). It upholds Victorian respectability because it insists that one must remain busy in order to be good. When Alice begins, the words get confused and she recites:

“How doth the little crocodile/Improve his shining tail/And pour the waters of the Nile/On every golden scale!/How cheerfully he seems to grin/How neatly spreads his claws/And welcomes little fishes in/With gently smiling jaws.” (Carroll 19)

Idleness and mischief are two behaviors that directly contradict Victorian respectability. Alice’s unconscious rewording “attacks the anticomic stuffiness and prudence of Watt’s [poem] and promotes by implication the important values of comic anarchy” (Kincaid 96). Alice’s reading is also uncommonly dark for what would be considered respectable during the Victorian era. The final two lines leave the reader with a dark, yet slightly comical feeling. Carroll wants the reader to recognize the contrast, but does not want it to be completely serious at the same time.

During her adventure in Wonderland, Alice comes across many interesting characters. One of the most memorable is the Caterpillar. While she is having a conversation with this character, he asks her to recite another one of her lessons, which he calls “You are old, Father William” (Carroll 42). What Alice recites is a parody of a poem written by Robert Southey. Southey’s Father William is the picture of Victorian respectability. He tells the young man that "I remembered that youth would flyfast/And abused not my health, and my vigor at first/That I never might need them at last" (Southey 401). The poem emphasizes the respectability of taking care of your health—to the point where you do almost nothing in order to preserve your health and energy for later in life. “Alice’s Father William seems the antithesis of Southey’s pious, temperate old man who has come gently to the end of his days” (Rackin 318). Father William is supposed to represent the type of person you will be if you follow Victorian values. In Alice’s rendition, however, Father William is a silly and ridiculous.

In Through the Looking Glass, Alice journeys back to the magically land of the Looking Glass and encounters many interesting characters as she did in Wonderland. Two rather odd characters, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, relate to her a poem entitled The Walrus and the Carpenter. Carroll uses this poem differently here than how poems were used in the previous novel. The twins’ recitation “prompts Alice into revealing just how much she has grown up. She ignores the victims of the poem, the oysters, and immediately searches for one of the power figures with whom to identify” (Kincaid, 95). Rather than contradicting Victorian respectability directly through the words of the poem, Carroll uses Alice’s reaction to make his point about it. The twins are disappointed with her attachment to the Walrus character. Alice seems to believe that she must choose a character to identify with. Tweedledee and Tweedledum don’t understand why she does not feel sorry for the oysters. In the end, she decides that both the Carpenter and the Walrus were equally unlikable. The poem emphasized “false sympathy and cruelty” (Kincaid, 95), and Alice finally realizes this. Carroll uses Alice’s realization to make a statement about Victorian society: it can be extremely fake and cruel.

Alice came to discover a lot about herself and the society she lived in through her adventures. Lewis Carroll used these discovers to convey his own points about Victorian society. He uses Alice’s adventures, specifically the poems she attempts to recite, to contradict and mock Victorian respectability and prudishness.

Works Cited

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Ed. Hugh Haughton. London: Penguin Books. 1998.

Kincaid, James R. “Alice’s Invasion of Wonderland.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 88.1 (1973): 92-99.

Rackin, Donald. “Alice’s Journey to the End of Night.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 81.5 (1966): 313-326.

Watts, Isaac. “Against Idleness and Mischeif.” A Collection of English Poems 1660-1800. Ed. Robert S. Crane. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1932. 332.

Southey, Robert. “The Old Man’s Comforts And How He Gained Them.” English Poetry and Prose of the Romantic Movement. Ed. George Benjamin Woods. Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co. 1916. 401.