What is most striking about the Alice books in this context is that they are not fairy tales. The wood is not the dark wood where the enchanter and the witch lurk. The creatures are not magical helpers or disguised princes. They are garrulous and argumentative philosophers and grammarians, and the world they inhabit is the world of nonsense, which exists only in contradistinction to the world of sense, common or uncommon, which Alice has in abundance.
