A Critique of the Victorian Justice System.
Many people look at Lewis Carrol as a political satirist. Through his novels Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass he constantly criticizes the Victorian justice system. In this essay I will examine Carrol's attacks upon the ignorance of the court agents, the injustice of the system itself and the gravity of the punishments.
Carrol has consciously picked very incompetent characters to portray .
the roles of court agents. The jury is made up of "creatures" (pg 144) thus referred to by Alice, as she attempts to describe the random bunch who can not even remember their own names, let alone comprehend normal court proceedings. The witness's testimonies are conflicting, but, the jury disregards this issue and simply records all three contradicting number's, adding them, reducing them, and then, converting this all to shillings and pence. Here, Carrol implies, that many of the jury's verdicts in Victorian times, were illogical. .
During the trial, the jury is speaking out and questioning the witnesses. This would never happen in a courtroom today. The questioning is up to the lawyers, while the jury's job is to listen carefully. It is up to them to produce a justifiable decision.
The jurors are not the only ones involved in the trial who deserve to be discredited. The King, who acts as judge is practically useless. In today's courts, the judge is in charge of the proceedings and keeps order in the court. In Alice In Wonderland, the King isn't even familiar with proper procedure of a trial. He needs to be repeatedly reminded by the White Rabbit, that the jury's verdict is not in, until the very end. Rather than the calming presence a judge should be, he is one of the major causes of the chaos within the court, threatening witnesses with execution and such. The King's uncertainty is evident when he instructs the jury to write down that it is "important" (pg155) that Alice knows "nothing" (pg 155), when in fact, this is irrelevant.