"Where shall I begin, please, your Majesty?" he asked. "Begin at the beginning," the King said, gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

The line appears in Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s adventures, during the trial scene in which the Knave of Hearts is accused of stealing the Queen’s tarts. A witness (the White Rabbit, acting as a sort of court official) asks the King of Hearts how to proceed with reading or presenting evidence. The King responds with mock-solemn procedural advice—“Begin at the beginning… then stop”—a comic parody of legal formality and authoritarian common sense. The exchange exemplifies the book’s satirical treatment of institutions (courts, rules, and “reason”) as simultaneously rigid and nonsensical within Wonderland’s logic.

On its surface, the King’s instruction is a truism about orderly narration: start at the start, proceed sequentially, and end when finished. In context, the humor comes from its pompous obviousness and from the way “common sense” becomes an instrument of authority—delivered “gravely” as if profound. More broadly, Carroll lampoons the pretensions of official discourse: courts and rulers cloak banality in ceremony, while the surrounding proceedings remain irrational. The line has endured because it doubles as practical advice for storytelling and argument, even as it exposes how rules can be invoked to sound decisive without adding real clarity.

1) “Begin at the beginning… and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
2) “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end; then stop.”
3) “Begin at the beginning… go on till you come to the end, then stop.”