“They’re putting down their names,” the Gryphon whispered.
Why does the Gryphon whisper that the jurors are “putting down their names,” and what does this reveal about the Wonderland trial?
Quick Facts
- Speaker
- Gryphon
- Chapter
- CHAPTER XI. Who Stole the Tarts?
Analysis
Alice has entered the Queen and King of Hearts’ court, where the Knave stands accused of stealing tarts. Before any evidence is heard, Alice surveys the room and identifies the judge’s wig (balanced absurdly under the King’s crown) and the jury-box filled with birds and beasts armed with slates. She notices all twelve jurors writing “very busily” despite the trial not having begun. Puzzled, she whispers to the Gryphon, who explains that they are writing down their own names “for fear they should forget them before the end of the trial.” Immediately after, Alice’s loud remark—“Stupid things!”—is dutifully copied onto the slates as well, even misspelled by one juror who asks his neighbor for help. The scene turns legal procedure into fussy, error-prone busywork.
Meaning of the whisper
Satire of courts and classrooms
Carroll fuses legal parody with classroom farce. The court supplies wigs, titles, and a nursery-rhyme indictment; the classroom supplies slates, copying, and spelling correction. The Gryphon’s line frames the jury’s writing as a memory crutch—an infantilizing detail that mirrors children being told to put their names on their work. What follows confirms the critique: jurors copy multiple contradictory dates from the Hatter and even reduce them “to shillings and pence,” a comical misapplication of arithmetic. When Alice blurts “Stupid things!,” they copy that too, treating whatever is heard as worth recording. The whisper thus exposes a system that confuses documentation with truth, procedure with judgment. In a chapter where the King leaps to “Consider your verdict” after a nursery rhyme, the jurors’ need to write their own names crystallizes a larger point: Wonderland’s justice, like bad pedagogy, prioritizes forms, memoranda, and noise over understanding.
By revealing the jurors’ fear of forgetting their own names, the Gryphon collapses the court’s authority into farce. If memory and competence fail at the most basic level, any verdict will reflect ritual, not reason.
The jurors’ slates gather names, insults, and numbers indiscriminately. This anticipates the chapter’s nonsense “proof” and shows how Wonderland confuses the act of writing with the production of truth.
Themes and characters in play
- Alice’s skepticism sharpens: she spots procedural absurdities and later challenges “sentence first—verdict afterwards.” - The Gryphon acts as a sardonic guide, translating spectacle into critique. - Bill the Lizard, a juror with a squeaky pencil, embodies incompetent bureaucracy. - The King and White Rabbit cling to ceremony (wig, trumpet, scroll) while substance evaporates, linking to arbitrary-authority-and-justice, education-and-mock-pedagogy, and rules-games-and-social-performance.