‘The Queen Had Only One Way of Settling All Difficulties. . . “Off with His Head!”’

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Anti-Gallows Movement

Authors

  • Michelle Ann Abate Hollins University, United States

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21153/pecl2011vol21no1art1139

Keywords:

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, executions, the anti-gallows movement

Abstract

This article, on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), reveals the new interpretive possibilities that emerge about this classic fantasy when the character of the Queen of Hearts—along with her murderous mandate ‘Off With their Heads!’—is moved from the background to the forefront of consideration. In a detail that has been overlooked in previous scholarship, state-sanctioned executions were a vivid social reality and the subject of heated public controversy in England during the period when Carroll conceived and composed Alice. Throughout the nineteenth century but especially during the 1860s, the humanity, efficacy and even wisdom of the practice were discussed in popular newspapers, among British citizens, and by elected officials. In this chapter, I make a case that, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll weighed in on this debate. The Queen of Heart’s repeated, impulsive and usually absurd calls for various individuals to be executed satirize this longstanding civic practice and add a new, and previously neglected, area of cultural commentary within the novel: the anti-gallows movement.

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Author Biography

  • Michelle Ann Abate, Hollins University, United States

    Michelle Ann Abate is an associate professor of English at Hollins University. She is also co-editor of Children's Literature and has written a number of young adult novels including What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay, which has been selected by The Boston Globe as one of 2011's best books. Her latest books include Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism (Rutgers University Press, 2010).

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Published

2011-01-01

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How to Cite

“‘The Queen Had Only One Way of Settling All Difficulties. . . ‘Off with His Head!’’: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Anti-Gallows Movement” (2011) Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, 21(1), pp. 33–56. doi:10.21153/pecl2011vol21no1art1139.

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