Curiouser and curiouser!

The cry opens chapter 2 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “The Pool of Tears”. Alice has just eaten a little cake, and now she is growing, “opening out like the largest telescope that ever was”. She is so surprised, the narrator explains, that for the moment she quite forgets how to speak good English: hence the impossible comparative. Looking down at her feet, now almost out of sight, she bids them good-bye, wonders who will put on their shoes and stockings, and resolves to send them a new pair of boots every Christmas. Soon, far too big for the little door to the garden, she bursts into tears and weeps a pool around her.

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Oxford. He first told the story to Alice Liddell and her sisters during a boat trip in 1862, and published it in 1865, with illustrations by John Tenniel. Alice’s slip of grammar has become a proverbial way to greet things that grow ever stranger.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 2 (Alice), 1865

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