ABSTRACT
Any Victorian child from a comfortable background, such as Alice Liddell and most of the original child readers of the Alice books, would be bound to encounter animals in a variety of starkly different contexts. A mathematician and logician Lewis Carroll's kindliness towards animals needs to be understood in concert with his lifelong habit of joking about cruelty to animals, mostly by means of nonsensical anthropomorphism, especially in all of his writings for children and in many of his letters to child-friends. In his comic treatment of eating animals, Carroll concentrates most acutely on those animals the child would be most aware of eating. This implicit rationale explains the presence in the Alice books of the leg of mutton, the oysters, the whiting, the lobsters, the snail, and the eggs. Only comic exaggeration about predation can help the child, and Carroll, be comforted about its reality and reinforce its status as normative.
