Why Is a Raven Like a Writing Desk? Carroll Answered It

Bound into the front of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, just ahead of Chapter I, sits a short note from the author dated Christmas, 1896. It runs to two sentences and carries a page reference, “see p. 63”, steering the reader back to a joke told thirty-one years earlier. The note answers the most famous unanswerable riddle in English, and then its last clause takes the answer away again.

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

“Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!” Lewis Carroll printed that answer in an author’s note dated Christmas 1896, thirty-one years after the book appeared. Carroll called the answer an after-thought and added that the riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all.

The Hatter has no idea either

The riddle arrives in Chapter VII of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), the mad tea party. The Hatter and the March Hare have shouted “No room!” at Alice, she has sat down anyway, and the Hatter has just informed her that her hair wants cutting. His next line is the riddle, and Alice likes her chances. “Come, we shall have some fun now!” she thinks. “I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles.”

She gets nowhere, and the table is no help. “No, I give it up,” Alice replies: “what’s the answer?” The Hatter says, “I haven’t the slightest idea,” and the March Hare adds, “Nor I.” Alice’s verdict is that they might do something better with the time “than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers”.

Carroll built the scene as a dead end. A riddle-shaped object with nothing inside it is handed to a child who expects riddles to behave.

The note Carroll added three decades later

Letters kept arriving, so he put a reply at the front of the book:

Enquiries have been so often addressed to me, as to whether any answer to the Hatter’s Riddle (see p. 63) can be imagined, that I may as well put on record here what seems to me to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz. “Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!” This, however, is merely an after-thought: the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all.

Two puns carry it. A raven produces notes and so does a writing desk, and the word “flat” fits a bird’s tuneless call as well as a sheet of paper. Ravens attract that sort of specialised English, the word for a flock of them included. Transcriptions of the note differ on a single word: the printed copy checked here reads “though”, while the Straight Dope’s version of the passage reads “tho”.

The second half of the answer is thin on its own. A writing desk being never put with the wrong end in front is a remark about furniture, and it only becomes a pun once you know what Carroll wrote there first.

The clause that carries the real answer

The pun is the part that travels. The clause behind it is where the question people are typing actually gets answered: Carroll said the riddle never had a solution. The 1896 line is correspondence management by a man who had been asked once too often, and he labelled it as such in the same breath.

The pun a proofreader deleted

Carroll’s answer contains a second joke that almost nobody has read. In 1976, the Carroll enthusiast Denis Crutch pointed out that the author had originally written “nevar” instead of “never” - raven spelled backwards - inside a sentence about putting things with the wrong end in front.

Readers never got it. The note as printed reads “never”, because a proofreader saw a misspelling and repaired it. One letter was carrying the entire joke, and English has form for that sort of buried precision, as the question of how long a moment actually lasts shows.

It is also a joke that cannot survive being said out loud. The notes-and-flats half works in the ear; the raven half exists only as ink on a page, spelled one specific way, which is what made a single editorial correction enough to delete it.

Poe was never part of this

The answer that circulates as the hidden solution, “because Poe wrote on both”, is not Carroll’s. The Straight Dope traces it to the puzzle-maker Sam Loyd in 1914, forty-nine years after Wonderland. Loyd offered a second one in the same batch: “Because the notes for which they are noted are not noted for being musical notes.” A puzzle league did the same for the dictionary: in 1935 the National Puzzlers’ League recognized a 45-letter word, apparently coined by its own president, that went on into the Oxford English Dictionary.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” first appeared under his name in the New York Evening Mirror on 29 January 1845, twenty years before Wonderland, so the pairing was there to be made. Carroll’s own answer says nothing about Poe, and the Poe line reaches us through a puzzle book. A solution invented decades later and then reversed into an origin story is a shape that turns up well outside literature, including around the leather over-trousers cowboys wear.

Huxley’s answer is a joke about words

In 1928, Aldous Huxley offered this: “Because there is a B in both and an N in neither.” The sentence sounds like a statement about the raven and the desk, and readers go hunting for the letters there. Huxley put them somewhere else: the B sits in the word “both”, and the N sits in the word “neither”. He wrote a sentence that is entirely true and tells you nothing at all, which is the joke.

Answer	Attributed to	Year	What it is
”a few notes… very flat… never put with the wrong end in front”	Lewis Carroll	1896	The author’s own after-thought, disclaimed in the same paragraph
”Because Poe wrote on both”	Sam Loyd	1914	A puzzle-maker’s answer, 49 years after the book
”Because there is a B in both and an N in neither”	Aldous Huxley	1928	A joke about the words “both” and “neither”

The riddle was not in the first version of the story

The handwritten book Carroll gave Alice Liddell, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, runs to four chapters. Most of the famous furniture is already there: the caterpillar on its mushroom with a hookah, the gardeners painting the white roses red, croquet played with hedgehogs and ostriches, the Mock Turtle, the Lobster Quadrille, the trial. There is no Hatter in it, no March Hare, no tea party and no riddle. Alice leaves the caterpillar and heads for the garden.

The tea party was written for publication. The riddle exists because Carroll needed a scene, not because he was sitting on a solution.

Read his answer once more with the original spelling restored and it describes itself: “it is nevar put with the wrong end in front” is a raven put with the wrong end in front. Carroll wrote a joke that performs its own punchline, published it thirty-one years late, and lost it to a proofreader doing his job properly. Strictly FYI.