“Consider your verdict” is the formal phrase a judge uses to send a jury to decide guilt after hearing evidence. Carroll twists it by placing the line at the very start, immediately after a sing-song rhyme is treated as an indictment. The King’s command exposes the court’s logic: authority dictates outcomes, not facts. The satire lands because the form looks right—throne, wigs, jury, herald—but every function is wrong. The nursery rhyme masquerades as legal charge; the King confuses ceremony with substance; the jurors dutifully obey forms that produce nothing but scribbles. The White Rabbit’s interruption highlights how glaringly premature the order is, as if procedure itself must step in to protect the bare minimum of fairness. For readers, the line signals that Wonderland’s trial will run on circular reasoning and fear of the Queen’s temper, not on testimony. It primes Alice’s later defiance in Chapter XII—her refusal of “sentence first—verdict afterwards”—by revealing the court’s core absurdity: decisions precede, and thus nullify, inquiry.