CHAPTER XII. Alice’s Evidence
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Quick Facts
- Word Count
- 2,101
Summary
Alice, now rapidly enlarging, springs up when the White Rabbit calls her and accidentally overturns the jury-box, then dutifully collects the jurors, even righting Bill the Lizard she had replaced head-down. The King attempts to steer the trial by declaring “Rule Forty-two”—that anyone over a mile high must leave—only for Alice to expose its ad hoc invention with the crisp rejoinder, “Then it ought to be Number One.” The White Rabbit produces an undirected set of verses, not in the Knave’s hand; the King forces interpretations anyway, mapping lines to the jurors and the tarts, while the Queen hurls an inkstand at Bill and demands “sentence first—verdict afterwards.” Growing to full size, Alice refuses to be silenced, dismisses the court’s logic as “stuff and nonsense,” and, naming the assembly “nothing but a pack of cards,” dissolves the spectacle as the deck flies at her. She wakes on the riverbank with her head in her sister’s lap and recounts the dream. In a reverie, her sister imaginatively re-hears Wonderland’s noises in the English countryside and projects Alice as a future storyteller who will keep a “simple and loving heart,” preserving these creatures for other children. The chapter resolves the legal satire by translating private dream into shared memory, closing the book’s movement from bewilderment to critical judgment.
Analysis
From procedural parody to waking insight: Alice’s judgment takes command
The chapter condenses the book’s critique of rule without reason into courtroom action and its dissolution. Alice’s sudden growth coincides with her refusal to defer: after tipping the jury “like a globe of goldfish,” she corrects the error with literal care yet quickly pivots to principled resistance. Her precision punctures invented procedure—when the King proclaims “Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court,” she answers, “Then it ought to be Number One,” exposing the retrofitted nature of authority that writes rules to fit the accused. The legal system’s hermeneutics collapse under the undirected verses: the White Rabbit admits the lines are not in the Knave’s hand, yet the King reads them as proof, assigning “We know it to be true” to the jury and linking “I gave her one, they gave him two” to tarts. The Queen’s inkstand hurled at Bill and the King’s offended “It’s a pun!” over “fits/fit” reveal law reduced to aggression and wordplay.
Alice’s body here externalizes moral enlargement: “I shan’t go,” “I won’t,” and finally the performative naming—“You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”—convert critique into ontological reset. The symbol of playing cards—ranked, flat, animated by ceremony—collapses once Alice withholds recognition; the cards lose depth because they never had it. Waking on her sister’s lap translates that critical act into memory. The sister’s pastoral transpositions—the teacups to sheep-bells, the Queen’s shriek to a shepherd boy’s call—recontextualize Wonderland’s noise within ordinary sound, asserting that nonsense can be recollected without obedience to its rules. Her closing vision of Alice as a future narrator completes the arc from reciter of others’ lessons to maker and keeper of stories. Thus the chapter fuses themes of arbitrary justice, language’s conventionality, bodily change as agency, and the dream’s frame: inquiry matures into judgment, and judgment becomes a tale shared beyond the dreamer.
Alice’s growing body accompanies her decisive speech acts. She rejects the ad hoc “Rule Forty-two,” resists “Hold your tongue!,” and names the court’s ontology (“a pack of cards”), showing that calibrated self-possession—not compliance—dissolves capricious systems.
The undirected verses, not in the Knave’s hand, become “evidence” through the King’s forced glosses (“that’s the jury, of course”). The scene satirizes institutions that conjure guilt by interpretation rather than fact, culminating in “sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
Waking on her sister’s lap, Alice retells the dream. The sister’s reverie re-hears Wonderland in English sounds and imagines Alice as a future storyteller, converting ephemeral absurdity into transmissible memory and affection.
Procedural absurdities named and neutralized
- Jury-box overturned and reassembled like rescued goldfish
- King’s freshly minted “Rule Forty-two” exposed by Alice’s numbering logic
- Jurors split between writing “important” and “unimportant” as the King dithers
- A letter without address or signature becomes “verses” and then “evidence”
- The Knave’s inability to swim inferred from his cardboard body
- Queen’s inkstand assault followed by the King’s aggrieved pun on “fits/fit”
- “Sentence first—verdict afterwards,” rebutted as “Stuff and nonsense!” by Alice