Lewis Carroll’s Taxonomy of Reading

Abstract:Lewis Carroll’s Alice books advocate a playful mode of reading driven by curiosity rather than dutifulness. Yet Carroll considered dutiful reading the business of life, and life as a worryingly finite period within which to read as much as possible. These anxieties are particularly pronounced in his understudied fin-de-siècle writings, which speak directly to the threat of information overload. Carroll’s preoccupations with the material and conceptual density of books and the time available to read them manifest themselves in the unique form and scope of Sylvie and Bruno, which this essay reads as a Borgesian “total book.”