Who's Who in Alice in Wonderland: a Character Guide, With the Chapter Each One Appears In
About twenty named characters, each one a single joke held without blinking. Also: the two queens people keep confusing, and the courtroom rule the King invents on the spot.
Wonderland has about twenty named characters in twenty-six thousand words, which is a crowd for a book that short. Almost every one of them is a single joke played completely straight, appears in one or two chapters, and never comes back. This is the list, with the chapter each one turns up in.
- Nobody has an arc. Each character is one fixed idea, and the comedy is that they never budge.
- The Red Queen is not in this book. She is a chess piece from the sequel, and she is not the Queen of Hearts.
- He is never called the Mad Hatter.Carroll writes “the Hatter”, every single time.
- Rule Forty-two is invented on the spot. By the King, in the last chapter, to get rid of a witness.
If you would rather meet them than read about them, the playable Alice's Adventures in Wonderland runs the whole cast in chapter order, from the rabbit in the waistcoat to the King reading out his own invented rule.
📄 The short answer: one joke each, held without blinking
The design of Wonderland is unusually consistent. Each creature gets a single fixed trait and behaves as though it were the only sane rule in the world. The White Rabbit is late and will always be late. The Hatter is stuck at one hour of the day. The Duchess finds a moral in everything. The Caterpillar is three inches tall and unimpressed by everyone. Alice arrives at each of them expecting the trait to be negotiable, and it never is.
That is also why the book survives being cut apart by adaptations. You can drop the Mock Turtle entirely, as Disney did in 1951, and lose nothing structural, because there is no structure. It is a sequence of encounters with fixed positions, and the only character who develops is the girl arguing with them.
| Character | Where they appear, and what they are for |
|---|---|
| Alice Chapters 1-12 | Relentlessly polite, and the only person in the book who expects reasons. Wonderland never gives her age; the sequel has her say she is seven and a half exactly. Her running problem is that she keeps changing size and cannot remember her lessons, so she is never quite sure she is still herself. |
| The White Rabbit Chapters 1, 2, 4, 8, 11-12 | Waistcoat, pocket watch, permanent panic. He starts the story by being late and ends it as the court herald reading out the charges. He is the only character who appears at both ends. |
| The Mouse Chapters 2-3 | Swims in the pool of tears with Alice and tells the long tale that Carroll prints in the shape of a tail. Extremely easy to offend on the subject of cats. |
| The Dodo, the Lory, the Eaglet, the Duck Chapters 2-3 | The soaked committee who run the Caucus-race, which has no rules, no start and no finish, and ends with everybody winning and Alice paying for the prizes. |
| Bill the Lizard Chapters 4, 11-12 | Sent down a chimney by the others because nobody else will go, and kicked back out of it by a giant Alice. He turns up again on the jury, unable to spell “stupid”, and Alice steals his squeaking pencil so he has to write with one finger. |
| The Caterpillar Chapters 4-5 | Three inches tall, on a mushroom, smoking a hookah, and openly contemptuous. Opens with “Who are you?” and refuses every answer Alice offers. |
| The Duchess and the Cook Chapter 6; Duchess again in 9, Cook in 11 | A pepper-filled kitchen, a cook throwing fire-irons, a baby that turns into a pig. The Duchess returns at the croquet ground determined to find a moral in every remark Alice makes, and the cook turns up at the trial as a witness, still holding the pepper-box, and answers one question before vanishing. |
| The Cheshire Cat Chapters 6, 8 | Named in chapter six by the Duchess and gone by chapter eight, leaving the grin. He gets more quotable lines per page than anyone; the essay on his advice takes them one at a time. |
| The Hatter, the March Hare, the Dormouse Chapters 7 and 11 | Three at one corner of a large table, shouting that there is no room. The Cheshire Cat names the first two at the end of chapter six; the Dormouse arrives unannounced in chapter seven. All three are back at the trial, the Hatter still holding his teacup and bread and butter, the other two arguing about the date. |
| The Queen of Hearts Named chapter 6, appears chapters 8-12 | A playing card who solves every problem by ordering a beheading, and whose orders, the Gryphon tells Alice in chapter nine, are never actually carried out. |
| The King of Hearts Chapters 8, 9, 11-12 | Quietly pardons everyone his wife condemns, which Alice overhears him do in chapter nine in a low voice to the company generally. He then presides over the trial and invents Rule Forty-two when the proceedings stop going his way. |
| Two, Five and Seven of Spades Chapter 8 | The gardeners painting the white roses red, because the Queen wanted red ones and they planted the wrong tree. |
| The Mock Turtle Chapters 9-10 | A weeping soup-joke who delivers the book's longest sustained parody: a school curriculum of Reeling and Writhing, and the four branches of Arithmetic, which are Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision. |
| The Gryphon Chapters 9-12 | A heraldic beast who is asleep when Alice meets him and rude to everyone afterwards. He is the one who tells her the Queen's executions never happen, and he stays with her through the trial, whispering explanations of the court. |
| The Knave of Hearts Chapters 8, 11-12 | On trial for stealing the tarts and given almost nothing to say. The trial is not about him. |
The croquet ground is where the whole cast collides: play by the Queen's shifting rules, refuse the game outright, or spend the round talking to a floating cat's head instead. Role-play Alice's Adventures in Wonderland →
👑 The Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts are not the same character
This is the most common Alice mistake online, and films keep making it worse. The Queen of Hearts is a playing card, she is in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and she wants heads off. The Red Queen is a chess piece, she is in Through the Looking-Glass, and she wants Alice to run faster. The phrase “Red Queen” does not occur anywhere in Wonderland.
They do not even play the same role. The Queen of Hearts is a tyrant whose threats turn out to be empty. The Red Queen is closer to a strict examiner: she starts the game, sets Alice on the second square, explains the rules of the country, and at the end of the book Alice takes her, which is how a chess game is won. She and the White Queen are opposing pieces rather than villains, and the sequel treats them as such.
Tim Burton's 2010 film welds the two into a single antagonist, which is where a lot of the confusion now comes from; the book-versus-film comparison ranks that decision against the others, and the essay on the sequel covers what the chess frame is doing.
⚖️ What does Rule 42 mean in Alice in Wonderland?
It is a rule the King of Hearts makes up in the last chapter to remove the only witness who is arguing with him. Alice has been growing steadily through the trial, has already knocked the jury-box over with the edge of her skirt, and is now the largest thing in the courtroom. The King consults his notebook and reads out what he claims is the oldest rule in it.
“Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court.”
Alice's objection is the sharpest line she gets in either book. She points out that she is not a mile high, and then that this is not a regular rule because he invented it just now, and the King goes pale and shuts the notebook. If the rule were genuinely the oldest, she adds, it ought to be number one. The joke is legal rather than surreal: a court that writes its procedure as it goes, caught out by a seven-year-old who can count.
The number itself is not explained anywhere in the text, and nothing in the book turns on it. Readers have been decoding it for a century and the book gives them nothing to decode.
🎩 Does “mad as a hatter” come from mercury poisoning?
Possibly, and it is not settled. The phrase turns up in print in an 1829 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, decades before Carroll used the character, so he inherited it rather than invented it. The mercury explanation is real as far as it goes: mercury compounds were used in felt-making, prolonged exposure causes erethism, and the tremors and slurred speech were common enough among hat workers in Danbury, Connecticut to be nicknamed the Danbury Shakes.
The objection is one of timing. The lexicographers William and Mary Morris preferred a different derivation on the grounds that the phrase was current before hat-making was a recognised trade. Other candidates include the old verb “hatter”, meaning to harass or wear out, which is in Johnson's dictionary of 1755, and the Old English word “atter”, poison, the same root as adder. Take the mercury story as one theory with good evidence behind it, not as a settled fact.
One more thing the book itself settles: Carroll never calls him the Mad Hatter. The phrase appears zero times in Wonderland. He is “the Hatter”, every time, and the Cheshire Cat merely remarks that he is mad, along with everybody else in the vicinity. For the fuller case that Carroll engineered his nonsense rather than improvising it, the essay on the logic under the book is the one to read. Every chapter number above was checked against the free text at Project Gutenberg.
Sources
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Project Gutenberg #11) — Project Gutenberg
- Through the Looking-Glass (Project Gutenberg #12) — Project Gutenberg
- Mad as a hatter — Wikipedia
Frequently asked questions
- How many characters are in Alice in Wonderland?
- About twenty are named, plus crowds. The trial alone adds twelve jurors, described as creatures because some are birds and some are animals, and Carroll breaks the fourth wall in that chapter to tell the reader to look at the frontispiece if they want to see how the King wore his crown over his judicial wig.
- Is the Red Queen the same as the Queen of Hearts?
- No. The Queen of Hearts is a playing card in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; the Red Queen is a chess piece in Through the Looking-Glass. The Red Queen sets Alice on the second square at the start of the sequel and is captured by her at the end, which is how the printed chess problem is won. The phrase Red Queen never occurs in Wonderland.
- What does Rule 42 mean in Alice in Wonderland?
- It is a rule the King of Hearts invents in the final chapter to expel Alice from the courtroom: all persons more than a mile high to leave the court. Alice objects that she is not a mile high and that he made it up on the spot, and adds that if it really were the oldest rule in his book it would be Rule One. He goes pale and shuts the notebook.
- What does the White Rabbit symbolize in Alice in Wonderland?
- The book supplies no answer, and the Rabbit's job is structural rather than symbolic: he starts the story by running past, and he ends it as the court herald, standing beside the King with a trumpet in one hand and a scroll of parchment in the other. In between his entire occupation is errands, chiefly fetching a fan and a pair of white kid gloves for the Duchess. Readers who take him for time, or for anxiety, are supplying that themselves.
- What does each character in Alice in Wonderland symbolize?
- Carroll never provides a key, and the book contains a running joke at the expense of anyone looking for one. The Duchess spends most of chapter nine attaching morals to everything Alice says, on the principle that everything has got a moral if only you can find it, and every moral she produces is nonsense. The characters work as fixed comic positions rather than as symbols, which is why they survive being cut, reordered and recast.
- Does "mad as a hatter" come from mercury poisoning?
- Possibly, but it is disputed. The phrase is in print by 1829 in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and the lexicographers William and Mary Morris argued it predates hat-making as a recognised trade. Rival derivations include the old verb hatter, to harass or weary, which is in Johnson's dictionary of 1755, and the Old English atter, meaning poison.
- What happens in the Caucus-race in Alice in Wonderland?
- The Dodo organises a race with no marked course, no starting signal and no finish; everyone runs in whatever direction they like for about half an hour and stops when they feel dry. The Dodo then rules that everybody has won and all must have prizes, and Alice has to supply them from a box of comfits in her own pocket.
- Is the Mad Hatter called the Mad Hatter in the book?
- Never. Carroll writes the Hatter every time; the phrase Mad Hatter does not appear in the text at all. He turns up twice, at the tea party in chapter seven and in the witness box in chapter eleven, where he arrives still holding a teacup in one hand and a piece of bread and butter in the other and is too frightened to give evidence.
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