Lewis Carroll, the pen name of Charles Dodgson, is best known for Alice, but "A Game of Fives" shows a different side of his comedy. It takes one household of five sisters and runs the clock forward in eight short stanzas, from girls rolling on the hearthrug to women whose ages are better left unspoken. The central idea is that all five grow up in lockstep while the world's verdict on them narrows to a single question: who will propose? The joke falls on the daughters, and just as much on the person who pays for them.
The construction is as tidy as a sum. Nearly every stanza is a rhyming couplet that opens "Five … girls", and only the adjective changes: little, rosy, growing, winsome, dashing, showy, dressy, and finally "PASSE". Those words work as a chart of declining market value. The age ranges follow the same system, five-year blocks (Five to One, Ten to Six, Fifteen to Eleven, Twenty to Sixteen) until the pattern jumps from twenty-one to "Thirty is an age". The missing years are the poem's quiet cruelty. Nobody proposed, and the speaker skips ahead rather than watch.
The rhythm tells the same story. The first couplet bounces: "Rolling on the hearthrug, full of tricks and fun." By the next stanza "tricks" comes back, but now it is something there is "no more time for", so the repeated word marks how much has been lost. The lines then stretch as the girls do. The third stanza's list, "Music, Drawing, Languages, and food enough for seven!", spills over the usual length, and the comic exaggeration of "food enough for seven" hints that this growing is expensive. The list also reads like a bill, which the last stanza will make explicit.
Carroll's wordplay sharpens in the middle. The capitals in "Now tell me which you MEAN!" turn a father's (or at least a householder's) question to every young caller into a stage direction. They make us hear the speaker's weary emphasis. Then comes the best pun: "girls may be ENGAGING, but they somehow don't ENGAGE." One word carries two meanings, charming and betrothed, and the line balances on the gap between them. The couplet before it asks, "if nobody proposes, what is there to be done?", which makes marriage sound less like romance than like a problem with no solution. Even the seventh stanza's "so gracious to the shy young men they snubbed so much before!" has a hissing run of s-sounds, as though the poem itself were whispering the gossip.
The last stanza breaks the pattern. It runs to four lines, drops the tidy "Five … girls" couplet, and the age question is waved away with "Well, never mind!" That reads as tact, or perhaps as embarrassment. Then the tone softens: "We jog along together, like the rest of human kind." The sisters are no longer a joke but part of an ordinary family. The final lines turn to the "quondam 'careless bachelor'", a mock-learned way of saying "former". Judging by the text, he may be the head of the household and perhaps the speaker himself. He now "begins to think he knows / The answer to that ancient problem 'how the money goes'!" The whole poem has been answering that question: the lessons, the food, the dresses, the years of waiting. What looked like a satire on daughters is also a confession by the man who funded them.
The poem is worth reading for its blend of cold arithmetic and warm feeling. A modern reader may wince at its assumption that a woman's worth is measured in proposals. But the poem takes in everyone, including the snubbed suitors, the hopeful callers, and the poor, poorer father, so its mockery is spread around rather than aimed at the girls alone. It also shows how a numbers-minded writer can build a joke from counting. The title's "Fives" may suggest the game of that name, but the "game" here is the marriage market, where the rules are unspoken and the cost shows up only at the end.