SOURCE: Silverstone, Ben. “Children, Monsters, and Words in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.” Cambridge Quarterly 30, no. 4 (2001): 319-56.

In the following essay, Silverstone discusses the similarities between the unconventional language employed by Carroll in his fiction and the “speculative morphologies” practiced by children as they master the rules of language.

In the preface to the fourth edition of his Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Walter Skeat acknowledges a debt to an earlier lexicographer: ‘I have also made some use of the curious book on Folk-Etymology by the Rev. A. S. Palmer, which is full of erudition and contains a large number of most useful and exact references.’¹ It was Skeat's work, not Palmer's, that proved to be the more valuable resource for the editors of the nascent OED, but this minor dictionary is significant in its own way. As Palmer himself points out, it is...