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Lewis Carroll wrote You Are Old Father William as a parody of Robert Southey's The Old Man's Comforts And How He Gained Them.

The Old Man's Comforts is precisely the sort of improving verse which Alice (in Wonderland) would have been expected to learn and recite in her lessons.

Much of the point of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is to poke fun at the very earnest attitude of both Victorian education and literature, and to subvert their intentions to turn children into better people. Instead, Carroll hoped to encourage children to have fun and enjoy words and literature for their own sake.

You Are Old Father William is a very clear example of this. Compare the first two verses of each poem:

Southey

You are old, Father William, the young man cried,

The few locks which are left you are grey;

You are hale, Father William, a hearty old man,

Now tell me the reason I pray.

In the days of my youth, Father William replied,

I remember'd that youth would fly fast,

And abused not my health and my vigour at first

That I never might need them at last.

Carroll

"You are old, Father William," the young man said,

"And your hair has become very white;

And yet you incessantly stand on your head---

Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,

"I feared it might injure the brain;

But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,

Why, I do it again and again."

In Southey's poem the young man admires his elder, and seeks an explanation as to how William has been so successful, presumably with a view to following the same path himself. Whereas the youth in Carroll's rhyme appears to be admonishing William for his foolishness. Southey's poem continues, in a very earnest tone with the ways in which William has had the good sense to preserve his health (with an implicit suggestion that we, as readers would do well to do the same) but Carroll's verse does no such thing. It is full of silliness and joie de vivre.'We don't want moral lessons,' Carroll's poem seems to say, 'we want head stands!'

In this way Carroll is rebelling against the stifling attitude that Victorians had towards children, and supplying them instead with fun and laughter.

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