What dance do the Gryphon and Mock Turtle perform?

The Gryphon and the Mock Turtle perform the Lobster Quadrille. Their fantastical dance appears in Chapter 10 of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, also titled “The Lobster Quadrille.”

The performance follows the Mock Turtle’s melancholy account of his supposed underwater schooling. He and the Gryphon sing about a whiting inviting a snail to move faster, then describe a dance involving lobsters, porpoises and the English Channel. The routine is deliberately absurd: the participants form a line, advance, and launch the lobsters toward France.

The song and dance parody Mary Botham Howitt’s popular poem “The Spider and the Fly.” Carroll replaces the spider’s threatening invitation with a bizarre marine spectacle, preserving the original poem’s rhythm and conversational structure while turning its moral danger into comic nonsense.

The title can cause confusion because the Mock Turtle’s song is also called “The Mock Turtle’s Song,” and the Gryphon later asks Alice to recite another poem, “‘Tis the Voice of the Lobster.” The foxtrot, tango and waltz are not dances performed by this pair in Carroll’s original book.