A bored child follows a waistcoated rabbit down a hole and lands in a country where size, time and courtesy have all come loose. Carroll invented it aloud on a rowing trip up the Isis in July 1862 to keep three sisters entertained, and wrote it out because the middle one asked him to. Under the nonsense runs a stubborn logic: Alice keeps insisting on sense in a place that has none, and it is that insistence, not the wonders, that carries her through.
