This chapter considers how the nonsense of Lear, Carroll and Rossetti charts a course through the unknown territories of late-Victorian modernity. It explores the flourishing of nonsense in the 1870s in the context of accounts of the decade as a time when Victorian culture was forced to reckon with the changes and developments that the century had been driving towards. Focusing on puzzling geographies of Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark and Through the Looking-Glass, the playful exploration of new ways of knowing in Lear’s poetry and the interrogation of likeness and difference in Christina Rossetti’s works for children, it proposes nonsense as a genre well-placed to express the period’s political and epistemological uncertainties.