Alice in Wonderland, tired on the bank

Lewis Carroll published 1865 302 characters easy

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversations?”

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About this text

Charles Dodgson, who wrote as Lewis Carroll, told the first version of this story during a boat trip on the Thames near Oxford on July 4, 1862. The book was published in 1865 with illustrations by John Tenniel, while Dodgson went on teaching mathematics at Christ Church and writing on logic under his own name. Project Gutenberg holds the full text.

Where this text comes fromThis is the first sentence of the book, and it does something almost no children’s story of the period risked: it opens with boredom. Nothing happens, nobody is introduced, and the only action is a child deciding that a book without pictures or conversations is not worth reading. That judgment is the engine of everything after it, because the White Rabbit arrives to a reader who has already agreed that the ordinary world is dull. The passage you copy is the whole of that opening, one sentence long.

What you might not noticeThe sentence contains a question inside quotation marks, Alice asking herself what the use of a book is, so the fragment carries direct speech before a single character has spoken aloud. Source

What it trainsFifty-seven words, one sentence, and no full stop anywhere: the passage ends on a question mark instead, which is the last keystroke you expect after three hundred characters of narration. The punctuation that matters is not the four commas but the quotation marks, which the edition sets as opening and closing pairs and you type with the straight double quote. Two pairs appear, four marks in all, and each of the four is the same reach: Shift plus the quote key. There is also a colon early on. Only two capital letters appear in 302 characters, so Shift works here for the punctuation rather than for the letters: four quotation marks, a colon and the question mark all need it.

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Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg