Which well-known poems did Lewis Carroll parody in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll parodied well-known didactic poems to subvert the moralizing tone common in children's literature of his time. The specific poems parodied in the book include:1

  • "How doth the little crocodile": A parody of Isaac Watts’s moral poem "Against Idleness and Mischief" (which begins "How doth the little busy bee").
  • "You are old, Father William": A parody of Robert Southey’s didactic poem "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them."

By turning these familiar verses into nonsense, Carroll appealed to children's sense of the ridiculous and challenged the prevailing literary conventions of the 19th century.1