In a letter to a friend, Carroll described his own dancing technique as follows:
“As to dancing, my dear, I never dance unless I am allowed to do it in my own peculiar way. There is no use trying to describe it: it has to be seen to be believed. The last house I tried it in, the floor broke through. But then it was a poor sort of floor- the beams were only six inches thick, hardly worth calling beams at all: stone arches are sensible when any dancing of my peculiar kind is to be done. Did you ever see the Rhinoceros and the Hippopotamus at the Zoological Gardens, trying to dance a minuet together? It is a touching sight.”