This chapter considers how the nonsense of Lear, Carroll and Rossetti charts a course through the unknown territories of late-Victorian modernity. It explores the flourishing of nonsense in the 1870s in the context of accounts of the decade as a time when Victorian culture was forced to reckon with the changes and developments that the century had been driving towards. Focusing on puzzling geographies of Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark and Through the Looking-Glass, the playful exploration of new ways of knowing in Lear’s poetry and the interrogation of likeness and difference in Christina Rossetti’s works for children, it proposes nonsense as a genre well-placed to express the period’s political and epistemological uncertainties.

Abstract: This chapter examines 1870s children’s literature materially. It does this by emphasising, first, the children’s book as a material object and, second, the process of producing children’s literature within the material conditions of Victorian publishing. A discussion of the distinctive material attractions of the movable picturebook for children, such as three-dimensional pop-up pictures and manipulable mechanical figures, sets up the chapter’s focus on the value added by considering the material configuration of word and image in other books from the period. This facilitates a reassessment of well-known texts including Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Kate Greenaway’s Under the Window (1879), and Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song (1874). Features such as the distribution of illustrations across pages, the variation of editions’ content, and illustrations changing from manuscript to print restore children’s classics as materially specific objects rather than timeless texts conveyed immaterially from the 1870s to the present

In the last chapter I looked at several more or less reasonable – as well as several more or less outlandish – attempts to make representative democracy work. From the “suppositional” designs of ballot boxes to the intricacies of Hare’s machinery to the representational aspirations of the realist novel, the things I considered were variously committed to the idea that, given the right system, one could accurately represent the will of a single individual and then somehow aggregate the accurate representations of many individuals into yet another, accurate second-order representation of the will-of-all. As the figures I looked at understood, this isn’t easy – first, because any effort to represent the will of an individual relies on a complicated and maybe impossible set of assumptions about what an individual is and, second, because, even if one could settle on a way to represent an individual, arriving at a meaningful second-order representation of the aggregation of other representations is itself wickedly difficult. Before one could settle on an electoral design for parliamentary and other elections, one had to decide whether political representation was supposed to represent what individuals thought, what different types of individuals thought, what the state thought, what a party thought, what a strategic coalition of parties thought, what different places thought, what simple majorities thought, or what the people as le Peuple thought. These were and still are hard problems. Despite that, the figures I looked at believed in parliamentary democracy; they believed in its power, its potential, and its seemingly limitless capacity for expansion and reform.

Chapter 1 explores one of the most enduring popular works for children, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Charles Dodgson wrote it at a time when the very conception of childhood as a distinctive and cherished stage of human development was being explored and, through the popularity of Dodgson’s penmanship, being promulgated. Dodgson’s interest in children is also apparent from his (now controversial) photographs of children and from his obsessively detailed exchanges with his publisher, Frederick Macmillan, over the presentation of Alice and other works for children. Dodgson sought to curate the way young readers entered into and experienced the fantasy realm. He appeared to draw the line at ventures he judged could dilute the fantasy, such as mass-manufactured goods produced outside of Victorian artistic creative industries. Dodgson wrote at a time when authors could and did control the terms of engagement with their fantasy through the exercise of copyright. Management, agency and legal relations would supersede this authorial power and authority in the following century.

Chapter 2 explores a range of fictional and non-fictional writing on dinosaurs. The first half shows how different writers, including Henry Neville Hutchinson, Grant Allen, and geoscientist Henry Woodward, invoked the comic monsters of Lewis Carroll to develop a new, ‘grotesque’ register for describing dinosaurs. This language naturalised an emergent understanding of dinosaurs, especially American dinosaurs like Triceratops, as having gone extinct owing to the evolution of uselessly monstrous characteristics. These ideas were appealingly absurd to general audiences, who could contrast the progressive traits and intelligence of mammals like themselves with the doomed grotesqueness of the dinosaurs. The chapter’s second half examines this new way of talking about dinosaurs, providing close readings of humourist Eugene Field’s poem ‘Extinct Monsters’ (1893), Edward Cuming’s Wonders in Monsterland (1901), and Emily Bray’s Old Time and the Boy (1921). In addition to depicting dinosaurs through Carrollian nonsense conventions, all three of these texts were direct responses to the works of Hutchinson, demonstrating his long-term importance for the popularisation of dinosaurs.

This chapter examines the political uses of animals in children’s literature, and connects them to understandings of alterity in mid-Victorian demands for democracy and debates over national education. I examine John Locke’s discussion of animals in children’s literature and education in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, to show how the inclusion of animals in children’s education positions them as educational and financial capital. I then analyze mid-Victorian debates about education in relationship to demands for democracy and show how theorists such as John Stuart Mill similarly brought alterity into the political sphere only to reject it. Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, however, revises the role of animals in children’s literature and of alternative subjectivity in the political sphere. Instead of instructing children to conform to liberal ideology, Carroll’s unconventional animals educate Alice in undoing liberal subjectivity and appreciating the political potential of alternative subjectivities. The novel thus teaches readers that alterity is excluded from the political sphere precisely due to its ability to disrupt liberal ideology.

This chapter analyzes Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Oliver Twist, and Barnaby Rudge to show how the Dickensian novel includes animals in its political critiques, questions the belief that humans have access to animal subjectivity, and cultivates an alternate form of animal character. Although Dickens rarely removes himself from ideologies of pastoral power, his animals often function outside it. Dickens’s animal characters critique dominant notions of liberal character and the character of government, offering a way out from animalizing discourses of both animal and working-class character. This chapter engages with discourse surrounding the New Poor Law and Chartism, and shows how Dickens’s animal characters can be considered minor characters who reflect demands for democracy throughout the period. These three novels highlight the radical nature of Dickens’s animal politics, as they challenge larger constructions of liberal character and posit alternate animal subjectivities within a more democratic political community.