‘If I were a Beetle and had rolled over on my back…’: Lewis Carroll, Insects, and Posthuman Ethics

Lewis Carroll and his Alice novels have been a constant in children's literature. Yet, this conceptual framework has limited considerations of the intellectual scope of the Alice books, including how Carroll's creatures offer lessons in human-animal ethics which in themselves illuminate historical complexities of Victorian animal welfare debates. Despite some discussions of Carroll's involvement in anti-vivisectionism in later life, there has been little exploration of how a concern with animal cruelty and welfare underpins Carroll's fiction consistently, throughout his life. This article traces the core influences on Carroll's thoughts on animal welfare, firstly through his upbringing and continued interest in Christian Natural History and its notion of stewardship. Examining Alice's encounters with insects as lessons to engender care towards ill-loved parts of creation – animal and human – will show how Alice imitates narrative structure and set-pieces of this genre. Foregrounding the more ‘serious’ pedagogical dimension the author had indeed envisaged for the Alice books, but that is is often claimed to be absent from them, also highlights how Carroll rehearses the narrative elements deployed in his anti-vivisection writings. This in turn documents how much more closely linked these writings are to both his earlier and also later fiction, so often considered atypical of the author of Wonderland. Acknowledging the prominence of literary figures such as Carroll, and the literary elements of Victorian animal cruelty discourse will show their influence on the way in which later activists and sciencists articulated their concerns throughout history and the potential for effective communication strategies in these contexts in the present.