“Four times five is twelve” literalizes the dislocation Alice feels when she asks, “Who in the world am I?” Wonderland’s physics have scrambled her body; now her schoolroom certainties dissolve. The error is not random: it dramatizes the collapse of rote knowledge under pressure. Alice reaches for the Multiplication Table to verify her identity, as if correctness could prove the continuity of self. But the result—twelve instead of twenty—makes that test fail, pushing her to conclude she might be “Mabel,” the child who “knows such a very little.” The joke also parodies Victorian pedagogy. Memorized facts (tables, capitals, moral verses) are supposed to anchor the child, yet here they deform into nonsense: “London is the capital of Paris,” and the hymn “How doth the little busy bee” becomes a crocodile’s predatory grin. Critics have noted you could force a logic by shifting number bases, but Carroll’s scene resists rescue: Alice herself dismisses the table—“doesn’t signify”—and moves on. The point is not alternative arithmetic; it’s the exposure of authority-by-recitation and the prompting of inquiry over obedience.