The Mad Hatter and the Hare went ‘mad together the day they murdered time’, according to Gilles Deleuze. The teleological momentum of common sense no longer anchors them in any chronological sequence, ‘they now change places endlessly, they are always late and early, in both directions, but never on time’ (79). The dream life of Alice herself mirrors this anachronistic disarray, always going in two directions at once, ‘the becoming-mad’ and the ‘unforeseeable’ (78). She loses hold of time, as well ‘as the identity of things and the world’ (77–8). Bereft of the means to decode and fix any truth from the surrounding nonsense, she is caught in a seemingly endless cycle of unanswered questions and questioning answers. Yet these riddling dialogues that seem at first to lead nowhere had, in fact, an implicit target – the unthinking learning by rote promoted by utilitarian mechanisms of modern education. Carroll was equally contemptuous of the heavy-handed truisms of Victorian didactic and moral literature. His concern was that forcing a child to memorise without comprehension conspired against understanding. The message would, in other words, get lost in the medium. As the mock turtle observes: ‘What is the use of repeating all that stuff? … if you don't explain it as you go on?’

This fear of the signal going unheard, or the message being lost or misunderstood, was an enduring one for Carroll. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Carroll's struggle to control the reception of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872).