Most people remember Alice in Wonderland as a dreamy children's book about a girl, a rabbit, a cat that disappears, and a hatter who hosts a tea party. They forget that the man who wrote it spent the rest of his working life teaching mathematics, and that nearly every famous scene is a joke aimed at his colleagues in the Oxford Senior Common Room.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was thirty when he wrote Alice. He had been a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, for six years. He would stay in that post, in the same college, for another twenty-six. He published serious mathematical work under his real name. The Alice books appeared under a pen name because he was embarrassed for his students to know he wrote fiction.
The fiction was, in large part, the mathematics in disguise.
When Alice falls down the rabbit hole, she tries to check whether she is still herself by reciting the multiplication table. The result is one of the most-quoted nonsense passages in English children's literature:
Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is — oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate.
It looks like nonsense. It is not nonsense.
If you multiply in base 18, the answer to 4 times 5 is 20, which is written "12" (one eighteen plus two). In base 21, the answer to 4 times 6 is 24, written "13" (one twenty-one plus three). The pattern continues. In base 24, 4 times 7 is 28, written "14." Each step up advances the multiplication base by three. The product, written in that new base, always falls one short of twenty. Alice is correct. At that rate she will never get to twenty.
It is a base-numbering joke embedded in a sentence a seven-year-old can read aloud. It exists for the reader's father, or her tutor, who in 1865 might have been a man like Dodgson.
The Mad Hatter's tea party is stuck at six in the afternoon. The Hatter explains that he quarrelled with Time during a song recital and Time stopped speaking to him. It is now always tea-time. They cannot wash the cups because they have to keep moving round the table to use clean ones.
This was a joke about a controversy raging in mathematics in the 1860s. Bernhard Riemann had published his foundational paper on non-Euclidean geometry in 1854. The reading rooms of Oxford were full of arguments about whether parallel lines could meet, whether triangles' angles always summed to one hundred and eighty degrees, whether time and space were absolute or could be locally bent. Dodgson hated all of it. He spent his career defending Euclid against what he saw as fashionable nonsense, publishing a polemical book in 1879 called Euclid and his Modern Rivals, in which the ghost of Euclid himself argues against modern geometers and wins.
The Hatter's broken clock and stopped time are Dodgson's caricature of the new physics. Once you accept that time can be bent, he is saying, you end up sitting in the same chair forever, drinking the same tea, with no way to wash up. The joke is a Senior Common Room joke that has been read aloud at bedtime by every parent for one hundred and sixty years without anyone noticing.
The Cheshire Cat appears, smiles, and disappears. In its most famous scene, it disappears slowly, starting with the tail, ending with the smile. The smile remains in the air after the cat is gone. Alice says she has seen many cats without smiles, but never a smile without a cat.
This is the joke of a mathematician thinking about abstraction. In Dodgson's lifetime, mathematics was moving toward studying properties separated from the things that had them. A "group" was a set of operations with no obligation to apply to physical objects. A "function" was a relationship that did not need to describe anything in the world. Dodgson found this kind of pure abstraction unsettling. The Cheshire Cat's smile, hanging in the air with no cat to belong to, is exactly the kind of property he thought modern mathematics was inventing. It looks delightful and slightly wrong, which is how he meant it.
The Mock Turtle describes his school. The subjects were Reeling and Writhing, then the four branches of arithmetic: Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. The lessons grew shorter by an hour each day.
That's the reason they're called lessons, because they lessen from day to day.
The four-branches pun (Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division become Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, Derision) is the joke a Victorian eight-year-old would catch. The lessening-by-an-hour joke is the one the mathematician planted underneath: it describes a decreasing arithmetic sequence. If you started at ten hours and lost one a day, you would run out of lessons after ten days. The Gryphon and the Mock Turtle do not seem to mind. The Mock Turtle's school is a parody of the Victorian curriculum, but the underlying joke is a sequence of integers approaching zero, told to a girl who probably has not yet seen one.
By the time Dodgson died in 1898, Alice had been translated into seven languages and reprinted constantly. Surrealist painters were beginning to claim her. Freudian readings would arrive within twenty years. The book would later be adopted as a touchstone of the 1960s drug culture, the 1990s queer canon, and at least four different generations of cinema. None of this was anything Dodgson wanted.
He left several drafts of essays complaining that critics had missed the book entirely. He thought of Alice as a logic puzzle dressed in pinafore. The dream frame was not, for him, the licence for psychoanalysis or surrealism. It was a device that let him bend rules without breaking promises to the reader. He wanted the puzzles to be solvable. He wanted the math to come out.
The wider culture decided otherwise. He is now read as the patron saint of nonsense, by readers who have no idea that he was, in his real life, the most rigid kind of logician, arguing against the new geometry in nightly common-room debates and writing strict textbooks on syllogisms in his spare time.
The math jokes are buried. The surface is a stream of short scenes, repeated rhythms, and small vocabularies. Alice eats. Alice grows. Alice shrinks. Alice meets a new creature, who talks at her. Alice misunderstands. The scene resets. Almost every chapter follows the same arc with new vocabulary attached. For a learner moving from A2 to A2+, that scaffolding is gold.
The dialogue is, by Victorian-novel standards, very plain. Carroll wrote for a seven-year-old listener. The sentences are short. The words come from a small core vocabulary used in many configurations. The strangeness lives in the situations and not in the syntax. A B1 reader of French or Spanish can follow the original. An A2+ reader of an adapted version can follow it across all seven of Storica's target languages without ever stopping for a dictionary.
And once you have noticed one math joke, you start looking for the others. The croquet game with flamingo mallets and hedgehog balls is a parody of rule-based systems whose objects refuse to obey. The Duchess's habit of extracting morals from any sentence (everything has a moral, if only you can find it) is a parody of bad inductive reasoning. The trial with sentence-first-verdict-afterwards is a joke about a system that decides its conclusions before gathering its premises. The book becomes, for the second-time reader, a comedy about the rules of rules.
Storica's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland sits at A2+, available in all seven target languages. The adaptation keeps the rabbit, the cake, the cat, and the trial. It also keeps as many of the math jokes as a graded text can carry: the multiplication, the lessening lessons, the smile without the cat. None of these need footnotes. They land harder when you read them in a second language, because the surface meaning lands first, and the deeper one slips in a half-second later.
If you want the other side of the joke, the Metamorphosis sits on the shelf at A2+ as well. Kafka, like Dodgson, was a working professional (insurance, not mathematics) writing fiction in the evenings. He also took the strangeness of his work very seriously and was baffled when later readers turned it into a parable about totalitarianism. Two careful logicians, sixty years apart, dressing arguments as bedtime stories.
I'm one of the makers of Storica, a daily reading club for the language you're learning. We adapt classics, including Alice in Wonderland with every math joke we can salvage, into A0–B2 readings of about fifteen minutes a day, in seven languages.
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