Art & Creativity Quote by Lewis Carroll

Carroll’s complaint lands with the polite bite of a teacup thrown across the table: he’s not praising efficiency, he’s mocking the asymmetry of effort that polite society pretends not to notice. A writer bleeds time onto the page; the recipient skims it between appointments, maybe even while opening it. The exclamation point is doing work here, turning a mild observation into a little courtroom victory lap. He’s “proved” it “by actual trial” like a scientist, which is the joke: applying mock-empiricism to the most human of irritations, being undervalued.

The intent isn’t just to grumble about correspondence. It’s to expose a social contract that’s quietly lopsided: the sender is expected to be thoughtful, concise, charming, and legible, while the reader’s obligation is essentially to exist. Carroll frames the imbalance as a measurement problem, which lets him sound playful rather than needy. That’s classic Carrollian mischief, the logic-game tone that makes a complaint feel like a riddle. It’s a cousin to his fiction’s obsession with rules that don’t quite add up: time dilates in Wonderland; labor evaporates in the parlor.

Context matters, too. In the 19th century, letters were a serious medium of intimacy, obligation, and reputation. An hour spent composing isn’t just craft; it’s etiquette, self-presentation, emotional choreography. Carroll’s line anticipates a modern anxiety - the sinking feeling of sending a carefully composed message into the void - but dressed in Victorian manners. The subtext: if attention is the real currency, the writer is always overpaying.