'The Queen Had Only One Way of Settling All Difficulties ... "Off with His Head!"': Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the Anti-Gallows Movement

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.