Mock Turtle

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The Mock Turtle and The Gryphon

The Mock Turtle is a fictional character devised by Lewis Carroll from his popular book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Its name is a pun on a dish that was popular in the Victorian period, mock turtle soup.

Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, "Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet?"

"No," said Alice. "I don't even know what a Mock Turtle is."

"It's the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from," said the Queen. (Alice in Wonderland, chapter 9)

Carroll enjoyed such puns on Victorian fashions and etiquette, and showed this frequently. The description and drawing by John Tenniel give comedic value to the Mock Turtle, as he is clearly an assemblage of creatures, therefore not a real turtle as his name rightly suggests.

To say that the Mock Turtle's name is a pun on the name of the soup, however, is incomplete. The Tenniel illustration of the Mock Turtle specifically depicts it as a collection of creatures that make up the ingredients of mock turtle soup; they are not random. The pun is not only of the name, but of the nature of the soup itself.

Traditionally, mock turtle soup takes the parts of a calf that were not frequently used and often discarded, including the head, hooves, and tail; and uses the non-muscular meat to imitate turtle meat. Tenniel's illustration shows the Mock Turtle with the body of a turtle, and the head, hooves, and tail of a calf. The complicated pun, then, is both word-play and picture-play, and is quite as satisfying in a literary sense as the soup presumably was in the culinary.

The Mock Turtle makes an appearance in the computer game American McGee's Alice, having the head of a calf and the body of a turtle. In the beginning, Alice has to help the Mock Turtle find his shell, which was stolen by the Duchess.

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