“The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,”
Why does Carroll present the charge as a nursery rhyme, and what does “The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,” reveal about Wonderland’s idea of justice and evidence?
Quick Facts
- Speaker
- White Rabbit
- Chapter
- CHAPTER XI. Who Stole the Tarts?
Analysis
At the opening of the trial in Chapter XI, the King and Queen of Hearts preside while the Knave stands in chains. In the center sits a dish of the Queen’s tarts, tantalizing Alice. The White Rabbit, acting as herald, blows his trumpet and unrolls a parchment. Instead of a legal indictment, he reads a quatrain adapted from the familiar nursery rhyme “The Queen of Hearts.” Immediately after the rhyme—“The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts”—the King tells the jury to “consider your verdict,” signaling a sham process where judgment precedes evidence. The jurors scribble nonsense on slates, and the proceedings drift into farce as witnesses like the Hatter and the Cook offer irrelevant or impossible testimony. The rhymed accusation remains the closest thing to “evidence” the court ever uses.
Meaning and Function of the Rhymed Accusation
Satire of Procedure: Rhyme as Evidence, Verdict as Ritual
Carroll’s choice to let the White Rabbit read a jingle instead of an indictment satirizes legalism by exaggerating what real courts risk: mistaking form for substance. The meter and rhyme confer a false aura of order, while the King’s haste—verdict before testimony—reveals adjudication as ritual. Details in the chapter sharpen the critique: the jurors write their own names to avoid forgetting them, the Hatter’s timeline collapses into wordplay (“twinkling of the tea”), and two guinea-pigs cheering are literally “suppressed”—a newspaper cliché turned concrete. In this context, the accusatory line is not merely playful; it is the structural hinge that lets nonsense rule. Because the charge’s “proof” is its rhyme, any counterevidence becomes irrelevant. The line thus prefigures Alice’s eventual revolt—her insistence on sense over ceremony—when she rejects “sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
By invoking the pre-existing “Queen of Hearts” rhyme, the court borrows cultural authority from a familiar verse. That borrowed legitimacy lets the King and Queen treat the charge as settled. The comfort of recognition replaces investigation, showing how institutions can launder bias through tradition.
The tarts’ presence in the courtroom should aid proof, but they become props. Their visibility distracts Alice with hunger and anchors the rhyme theatrically, not evidentially. The showiness underscores a trial where spectacle and word-patterns eclipse cause, motive, and fact.
Themes and Characters in Play
The line binds the White Rabbit to ritual roles—trumpet, scroll, formula—placing him on the side of procedure over meaning. It spotlights the King and Queen’s arbitrary rule: they accept a rhymed claim and hurry the jury toward a verdict. For Alice, the moment clarifies what she will soon say explicitly: Wonderland’s rules are games that demand compliance rather than thought. The scene crystallizes several themes: arbitrary-authority-and-justice (a verdict built on verse), logic-language-and-nonsense (meter masquerading as logic), and rules-games-and-social-performance (courtroom as theater). It also nods to parody-and-intertextuality by repurposing a nursery rhyme as legal document, sharpening the book’s critique of adult institutions through childlike forms.