London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome,
Why does Alice say “London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome,” and what does this mistake reveal about her identity crisis and Victorian rote learning?
Quick Facts
- Speaker
- Alice
- Chapter
- CHAPTER II. The Pool of Tears
Analysis
In Chapter II (“The Pool of Tears”), Alice has just undergone extreme size changes, scolded herself for crying, and flooded the hall with tears. After the White Rabbit reappears and flees again, she picks up his fan and gloves and, while fanning herself in the hot hall, wonders if she has “been changed in the night.” To test whether she is still herself, she tries to recall schoolroom facts and recitations. The effort misfires: multiplication and geography come out wrong, and her attempt at “How doth the little—” turns into the crocodile parody. The quoted line occurs during this self-examination, just before she notices she’s shrinking because of the fan and rushes back to the little door—only to find it shut and soon slip into the pool of her own tears.
What the wrong capitals mean
Logic under strain: from recitation to inquiry
The line applies a faulty transitive logic to political geography: if X is a capital, then it must belong to Y, and Y must belong to Z. Carroll weaponizes the form of a school fact to reveal the absurdity that results when rules are applied mechanically without context. Alice’s test—“I’ll try if I know all the things I used to know”—equates identity with recall. When recall fails, she concludes she might be “Mabel,” a dimmer classmate. This conflation of selfhood with lesson-performance critiques a system that measures character by recitation. The moment foreshadows two arcs: the book’s sustained parody of instruction (from the crocodile verse to the Mock Turtle’s “Reeling and Writhing”) and Alice’s growth toward empirical, situational reasoning (she will later calibrate size with the mushroom and reject “sentence first—verdict afterwards”). Misplaced capitals, then, chart the breakdown of borrowed certainties and the birth of skeptical inquiry.
Alice treats correct answers as proof of being herself. When geography and multiplication collapse, her self-label wobbles (“I must have been changed for Mabel”). The quote makes visible how fragile a self is when it rests on rote recall.
The line preserves the sing-song form of a lesson while voiding its content. Carroll lampoons Victorian pedagogy: knowledge as lists and capitals becomes comic nonsense once context and understanding are stripped away.
Themes and character links
The quote knots identity-and-growing-up with logic-language-and-nonsense: Alice’s factual slip mirrors bodily slippage and prompts self-scrutiny. It also ties to education-and-mock-pedagogy and parody-and-intertextuality, prefiguring the crocodile verse and later curricular parodies. In character terms, it sharpens Alice’s contrast with figures like the White Rabbit and, later, the Queen and Hatter, who cling to empty forms (punctuality, procedure, etiquette). Alice’s eventual shift—from recitation to testing and judgment—begins here, as she recognizes that certainty borrowed from schoolbooks won’t guide her through Wonderland’s elastic rules.