Malice in Wonderland

Is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) a philosophical analysis of language, a political allegory of liberal overreach, or a Menippean satire that, by following curiosity over the edge of logic, exposes legal order as a word game, proving nothing but its own emptiness?

You know from the question that the answer is “All of the above.” Alice in Wonderland isn’t nonsense in the way of Edward Lear’s nursery gibberish or John Lennon’s “I am the Walrus.” It shows how the exploitation of language creates legal and political power, the self-perpetuating commodities that everyone covets though no one, Tolstoy noted in the same decade, can define its sources.