Not long after her trip down the rabbit hole, the reluctant heroine of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is left shaken by the nonsensical strangeness of her surroundings. She tries reciting her school lessons to settle her nerves, but practicing does not provide her with any comfort. Her arithmetic doesn’t add up, geography is lost on her, and when she tries to recite Isaac Watt’s ode to the humble bee “Against Idleness and Mischief”, it comes out as a backwards tribute to a very different sort of creature:

[Alice] crossed her hands on her lap, as if she were saying lessons, and began to repeat [the