Alice in Wonderland: the little door

The little door and the garden behind it drive the middle of the book, because Alice has to change size to get through. Carroll gives the door an exact height of fifteen inches, which suits a mathematician. The first edition of 1865 carried forty-two illustrations by John Tenniel, a cartoonist for Punch. Alice Liddell, the girl who asked for the story, kept the handwritten manuscript for more than fifty years.

Where this text comes fromA door fifteen inches high is a very specific measurement, and the specificity is the joke: the obstacle is not vague or magical, it is simply the wrong size, and the rest of the book becomes a series of attempts to solve an engineering problem. That precision runs through the story because its author taught mathematics for a living. The curtain and the door behind it are introduced in a single clause and then govern the next several chapters.

What you might not noticeThe passage contains one capital letter, at the start, and ends on an exclamation mark, so the whole of it runs from a single capital to a single burst of surprise without another capital in between. Source

What it trainsAt 230 characters this is among the shortest fragments available here, and it is a single sentence of forty-four words carrying four commas, one colon and one exclamation mark. Only one capital letter appears, at the very start. The colon and the exclamation both need Shift and both arrive late, after the hands have settled into plain lower case, which is why people who type this passage quickly tend to miss the second one entirely.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg