Satire of Religious Education in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland Texts

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll both parodies and satirizes various forms of Victorian religious education. As the son of an Archdeacon of the Church of England and a Fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford, Carroll was very familiar with both religion and education. By parodying various popular religious forms, figures, and texts and associating these with the nonsense of Wonderland, he effectively offers an alternative to the standard, rote forms that dominated nearly all aspects of Victorian education.