Meaning

The Duchess is making a pointed, if absurd, observation about how much human energy goes into meddling in other people's affairs. The implication is that collective interference creates drag on the world, slowing everything down. It sounds like a reasonable argument for minding one's own business, but coming from a character as overbearing and intrusive as the Duchess, it has an obvious comic irony at its core.

Context

This line appears in Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel, spoken by the Duchess during one of her characteristic bursts of moralizing. Carroll used the Duchess to parody a certain type of Victorian adult who was always ready with a tidy lesson regardless of whether the situation called for one. The joke here is partly that the Duchess herself is among the least private characters in the book, making her advocacy for minding one's own business spectacularly self-unaware. Carroll's humor often worked this way, placing wisdom in the mouths of characters least qualified to deliver it.

About the author

The Duchess is a supporting character in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, memorable for her aggressive manner and her habit of extracting a moral from every conversation whether one exists or not. She functions largely as a comic foil to Alice's genuine curiosity and good sense. Lewis Carroll, born Charles Dodgson, was a nineteenth-century English author and academic whose two Alice novels established him as one of the great practitioners of literary nonsense and remain among the most widely read works in the English language.