This paper examines the relationship between the narrative text and illustrations in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as illustrated by John Tenniel, and Dodgeson’s self-illustrated manuscript of Alice Under Ground. By situating Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a text in dialogue with Darwinian economics and theories of evolution, this paper argues that Tenniel and Carroll’s illustrations depict the impossibility of maintaining innocence and the state of childhood in a world overrun by consumption, riddled with unstable Darwinian economics and theories, and corrupted by inefficient and arbitrary authoritarian institutions. Indeed, the interplay between text and image ultimately suggests that these systems regulating Victorian England will inevitably force the child to enter an absurd world where everyone is mad, or adopt an adult rationalist viewboth choices curtailing the possibility of the carefree, innocent child.