Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

I can’t believe I’ve never read these before! I loved them. I guess I thought they would be typical Victorian children literature but they were so wonderfully insane and verbally twisty turny. Like the whole episode between Alice, the Mock Turtle, and the Gryphon in the first book:

“…He taught us drawling, stretching, and fainting in coils.”
“What was that like?” asked Alice.
“Well I can’t show it to you myself,” the Mock Turtle said: “I’m too stiff. And the Gryphon never learnt it.”
“Hadn’t time,” said the Gryphon, “I went to the classical master though. He was an old crab, he was. “
“I never went to him,” the Mock Turtle said with a sigh. “He taught laughing and grief, they used to say.”

Or the beautiful homage to Anglo Saxon Poetry found in Through the Looking Glass:

Jaberwocky
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.