Alice without quaternions: another look at the mad tea-party

Abstract

Ever since the publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s adventures in Wonderland (1866), interpretations of its apparent nonsense have been given. In 2009, Melanie Bayley added new interpretations, for instance, that the chapter about the mad tea-party mocked the quaternions of Sir William Rowan Hamilton. In 2017, Francine Abeles argued against Bayley’s quaternion interpretation of the tea-party, and these arguments will be supported and extended by showing that Bayley’s interpretation is based on erroneous assumptions about quaternions. It can be concluded that it is indeed very unlikely that Dodgson had the quaternions in mind when writing the tea-party chapter.