Alice in Wonderland: down the rabbit hole

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church in Oxford. He first told the story on a boat trip up the Thames on July 4, 1862, to Alice Liddell and her two sisters. Carroll wrote the tale out by hand as a present before any publisher saw it. The book appeared in 1865, though the whole first printing was withdrawn because John Tenniel disliked how his pictures had come out.

Where this text comes fromThe decisive action of the book happens in a subordinate clause. Alice goes down the hole, and the sentence spends more words on what she failed to consider than on the jump itself, which is exactly how the narration treats every catastrophe that follows. Nothing is dramatized. The tone stays mild and slightly amused while a child falls into a hole of unknown depth, and that gap between event and manner is where the comedy of the whole book sits.

What you might not noticeThe narration notes that she never once considered how she was to get out again, planting the problem of the return journey in the same sentence that begins the adventure. Source

What it trainsTwo sentences, twenty-one words and then thirty-nine, three commas, one hyphen and two full stops in 329 characters. There is no other punctuation at all: no quotation marks, no semicolons, no dashes. Four capitals, two of them inside sentences. This is one of the plainest passages available here, which makes it a reasonable choice for a first attempt or for measuring a rate you want to compare later, since nothing in it will distort the number.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg