Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded

by David Day

  Alice was rather doubtful whether she ought not to lie down on her face like the three gardeners, but she could not remember ever having heard of such a rule at processions; “and besides, what would be the use of a procession,” thought she, “if people had all to lie down upon their faces, so that they couldn’t see it?” So she stood still where she was, and waited.

  When the procession came opposite to Alice, they all stopped and looked at her, and the Queen said severely “Who is this?” She said it to the Knave of Hearts, who only bowed and smiled in reply.

  “Idiot!” said the Queen, tossing her head impatiently; and, turning to Alice, she went on, “What’s your name, child?”

  “My name is Alice, so please your Majesty,” said Alice very politely; but she added, to herself, “Why, they’re only a pack of cards, after all. I needn’t be afraid of them!”

  “And who are these?” said the Queen, pointing to the three gardeners who were lying round the rose-tree; for, you see, as they were lying on their faces, and the pattern on their backs was the same as the rest of the pack, she could not tell whether they were gardeners, or soldiers, or courtiers, or three of her own children.

  “How should I know?” said Alice, surprised at her own courage. “It’s no business of mine.”

  The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, screamed “Off with her head! Off—”

  Royal visit: Prince and Princess of Wales at Christ Church.

  This was particularly true of royal visits. The royal garden scene in Wonderland would certainly remind Alice Liddell of Queen Victoria’s visit to Christ Church in 1860, and the reception held on the evening of her stay at the Deanery. She would also vividly remember the grand processions of soldiers and high-ranking officials during the 1863 royal visit of the newlywed Prince and Princess of Wales. On this occasion, a photograph was taken in Tom Quad in which Alice and her family can be seen seated next to the royal couple on a dais under a pavilion tent before a large gathering of soldiers and guests and the Fountain of Mercury.

  Henry Liddell: King of Hearts.

  Alice Liddell’s parents were the closest thing to royalty that academia had to offer. Consequently, in Wonderland, the King and Queen of Hearts are Alice’s parents: HENRY GEORGE LIDDELL (1811–1898) and LORINA HANNAH LIDDELL (1826–1910). Henry Liddell—dean of Christ Church and chief administrator of Oxford University—was an authentic aristocrat, with an earl on one side of the family and a baron on the other. He became the confidant of three prime ministers, Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli, and was on intimate terms with the Queen and her family.

  “Nonsense!” said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent.

  The King laid his hand upon her arm, and timidly said “Consider, my dear: she is only a child!”

  The Queen turned angrily away from him, and said to the Knave “Turn them over!”

  The Knave did so, very carefully, with one foot.

  “Get up!” said the Queen, in a shrill, loud voice, and the three gardeners instantly jumped up, and began bowing to the King, the Queen, the royal children, and everybody else.

  “Leave off that!” screamed the Queen. “You make me giddy.” And then, turning to the rose-tree, she went on, “What have you been doing here?”

  “May it please your Majesty,” said Two, in a very humble tone, going down on one knee as he spoke, “we were trying—”

  “I see!” said the Queen, who had meanwhile been examining the roses. “Off with their heads!” and the procession moved on, three of the soldiers remaining behind to execute the unfortunate gardeners, who ran to Alice for protection.

  Liddell was also highly respected as an academic. He was the foremost Greek scholar of his day, and co-author of the still-authoritative Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon. His administration was noted for its liberal reforms and the academic modernization of Oxford. Furthermore, Liddell architecturally transformed Christ Church by carrying out the most ambitious building program in its history. Although sometimes intimidating and aristocratic in his bearing, he was also noted for his kindly nature.

  Like the King of Hearts, Liddell was generally seen as well-meaning but—like many academics—somewhat vague and careless as an administrator. In this, the dean was certainly comparable to the vague and indecisive King of Hearts, who demonstrates a similar cavalier disregard for legal procedures as he flip-flops on court rulings: “ ‘important—unimportant—unimportant—important’ as if he were trying which word sounded best.”

  On the mythological level, the King of Hearts and Dean Liddell both assume the mantel of Hades, the King of the Underworld. As his subterranean world was also the source of minerals and gemstones, Hades was sometimes known as “the rich one” or Plouton, derived from the Greek word for “wealth,” from which the Romans came to know him as Pluto. He also was given the epithet Eubuleus, meaning “good counsel” or “well-intentioned.” For, despite our modern view of this underworld god, in Greek mythology, Hades was commonly portrayed as passive rather than evil. Like the rather benign King of Hearts, his role was to maintain balance between worlds.

  Hades’s Queen is most commonly portrayed as the goddess Persephone. But she assumed this role only after her marriage to Hades—and then only for a third of each year. Clearly, the character of the Queen of Hearts is conveyed on the mythological level by another, more archaic goddess who preceded Persephone as Queen of the Underworld.

  Twenty years after writing his fairy tale, Lewis Carroll himself provided his readers with a specific clue to the mythological origin of the Queen of Hearts. In his essay “ ‘Alice’ on the Stage,” Carroll tells us: “I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury.”

  The Furies, or in Greek the Erinyes, meaning “the avengers,” were the underworld servants of Hades. These demonic women would inflict condemned murderers and perjurers with tormenting madness. After a considerable mythological investigation, the Carroll biographer Donald Thomas names the prototype of Wonderland’s Queen of Hearts as Tisiphone, the Queen of Furies.

  “You shan’t be beheaded!” said Alice, and she put them into a large flower-pot that stood near. The three soldiers wandered about for a minute or two, looking for them, and then quietly marched off after the others.

  “Are their heads off?” shouted the Queen.

  “Their heads are gone, if it please your Majesty!” the soldiers shouted in reply.

  “That’s right!” shouted the Queen. “Can you play croquet?”

  The soldiers were silent, and looked at Alice, as the question was evidently meant for her.

  “Yes!” shouted Alice.

  “Come on, then!” roared the Queen, and Alice joined the procession, wondering very much what would happen next.

  “It’s—it’s a very fine day!” said a timid voice at her side. She was walking by the White Rabbit, who was peeping anxiously into her face.

  “Very,” said Alice: “—where’s the Duchess?”

  Ungovernable passion: Orestes Pursued by the Furies, by Adolphe William Bouguereau, 1862.

  Tisiphone the Fury would certainly be an excellent model temperamentally for the heartless and vengeful Queen of Hearts. The Furies, as the underworld court’s avenging spirits, had a duty to enforce the penalty for the crime of perjury, which may go some way toward explaining the Queen’s irrational suspicion of any witness or defendant in her court. Also, “Tisiphone”—meaning “voice of revenge”—fits the shrieking Queen of Hearts with her cry of “Off with his head!”

  Or, as Donald Thomas concludes in Lewis Carroll: A Portrait with Background: “As in Wonderland so in the underworld, the Queen of Furies presides over the punishments, in ways more colourful than a mere command of ‘Off with his head!’ ” However, this being a child’s fairy tale, Carroll has reduced the terror of the Queen of Furies to that of a cardboard Queen of Hearts, who, we are assured, actu
ally “never executes nobody, you know.”

  “Hush! Hush!” said the Rabbit in a low, hurried tone. He looked anxiously over his shoulder as he spoke, and then raised himself upon tiptoe, put his mouth close to her ear, and whispered “She’s under sentence of execution.”

  “What for?” said Alice.

  “Did you say ‘What a pity!’?” the Rabbit asked.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Alice: “I don’t think it’s at all a pity. I said ‘What for?’ ”

  “She boxed the Queen’s ears—” the Rabbit began. Alice gave a little scream of laughter. “Oh, hush!” the Rabbit whispered in a frightened tone. “The Queen will hear you! You see, she came rather late, and the Queen said—”

  “Get to your places!” shouted the Queen in a voice of thunder, and people began running about in all directions, tumbling up against each other; however, they got settled down in a minute or two, and the game began. Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches.

  Lorina Liddell: Queen of Hearts.

  Alice’s mother, Lorina Hannah Liddell—the real-life Queen of Hearts—was beautiful when young. In later life, this mother of ten became stouter and temperamentally rather overbearing. As the Deanery became the hub of Oxford society, it was only through the dean’s wife that access might be granted to visiting prime ministers, archbishops, aristocrats and royalty. Consequently, like Wonderland’s royal family under the authority of the Queen, the Liddells were very much seen as Oxford’s royal family firmly under the authority of Mrs. Liddell.

  Certainly, Lewis Carroll was not the first to observe how Mrs. Liddell often held court at the Deanery. There was a jingle—not of Carroll’s composition—that made its rounds at Oxford:

  I am the Dean and this is Mrs. Liddell

  She plays the first, and I the second fiddle.

  She is the Broad; I am the High:

  And we are the University.

  The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing; and, when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed.

  The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting “Off with his head!” or “Off with her head!” about once in a minute.

  To some, the Deanery must have seemed haunted by its former royal inhabitants: the ill-fated King Charles I and his Queen, Henrietta Maria. The royal couple had made Christ Church and the Deanery their palace during the English Civil War. It appears that by reputation Queen Henrietta Maria, Lorina Hannah Liddell and the Queen of Hearts were temperamentally well matched, as were King Charles I, Dean Liddell and the King of Hearts. Even those most sympathetic to royalty, such as the loyal Bishop Kennet, wrote that all regretted “the influence of a stately queen over an affectionate husband.”

  Many believed that Charles’s fatal flaw was submissiveness to the opinions of his Queen, who frequently “precipitated him into hasty and imprudent counsels.” Others drew a picture of Queen Henrietta Maria that was not unlike the Queen of Hearts: volatile, haughty, uneducated and unreflective. This was also how the Oxford dean’s enemies characterized Lorina Liddell.

  PLATO’S TYRANT AND THE HEARTLESS QUEEN Wonderland’s Republic-like society is no utopia. It is an underground dystopia. Carroll seems to be (rightly) suggesting that Plato’s ideal republic was so abstract and logical that no human could possibly live in it for long. And indeed, The Republic portrayed a philosopher’s dream that would undoubtedly become a political nightmare if applied to any society of human inhabitants.

  The Queen of Hearts is obviously aligned with The Republic’s “worst” possible ruler as portrayed in Plato’s tyrant’s allegory. The word savage is used several times in Wonderland to describe her. Likewise, Plato’s self-indulgent tyrant is possessed of a “terrible, savage and lawless form of desires” that is so extreme, it is the cause of suffering hundreds of times greater than that of the average man. And as we have already observed, Carroll himself described the Queen of Hearts as the “embodiment of ungovernable passion.” This unmistakably conforms to Plato’s description of the tyrant as being “filled with passion without restraint.”

  Both the Queen of Hearts and Plato’s “worst” ruler hold power by the force of an unquestioning bodyguard. In The Republic, we have the unquestioning military auxiliaries, while in Wonderland, we have the unquestioning club soldiers. Without hesitation or remorse, the tyrant and the Queen of Hearts both order the execution of friend and foe alike.

  Also, Plato informs us, the absolute power of the tyrant brings absolute misery: “the misery of the despot is really in proportion to the extent and duration of his power.” This certainly appears to hold true for the “savage” Queen of Hearts, who, “like a wild beast,” is consumed by fits of self-indulgent rage not unlike Plato’s tyrant, who, we are told, also behaves like a “savage beast.”

  Furthermore, when the child Alice eventually overrules the Queen’s outrageously childish fitful commands, there is another direct parallel with the tyrant, for in Plato’s allegory, “The parent falls into the habit of behaving like the child, and the child like the parent.”

  And finally, just as Alice discovers she has nothing to fear from the Queen or her henchmen because they are “nothing but a pack of cards,” there is a comparable revelation in the tyrant’s allegory, when it is revealed—in Allan Bloom’s translation—that “this phantom of tyrannical pleasure is without substance.”

  Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, “and then,” thought she, “what would become of me? They’re dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is, that there’s any one left alive!”

  She was looking about for some way of escape, and wondering whether she could get away without being seen, when she noticed a curious appearance in the air: it puzzled her very much at first, but after watching it a minute or two, she made it out to be a grin, and she said to herself “It’s the Cheshire Cat: now I shall have somebody to talk to.”

  “How are you getting on?” said the Cat, as soon as there was mouth enough for it to speak with.

  Alice waited till the eyes appeared, and then nodded. “It’s no use speaking to it,” she thought, “till its ears have come, or at least one of them.” In another minute the whole head appeared, and then Alice put down her flamingo, and began an account of the game, feeling very glad she had someone to listen to her. The Cat seemed to think that there was enough of it now in sight, and no more of it appeared.

  Just as the plot of Through the Looking-Glass was based on a chess game, this chapter of Wonderland appears to be linked to some sort of card game. Just what card game has always been in question. The obvious choice would be some form of the game of Hearts. And indeed, as if to confirm this, Tenniel chose to illustrate the Queen of Hearts wearing the pattern of the queen of spades, the most powerful and fatal card in Hearts. However, not much else is comparable. And why are we left with only the King and Queen
of Hearts along with Alice at the end of play?

  In fact, it seems that the game suggested here is Lewis Carroll’s own original card game of Court Circular, the rules of which he published in a pamphlet in 1860. In this game, the highest possible hand is a three-card royal straight flush in hearts—that is, ace, king and queen of hearts. How does Alice fit into this game? Her identity—in terms of card ranking—is hinted at by the King of Hearts.

  The King informs the Queen that Alice “is only a child,” and, as we have already learned, the numbered heart cards are “the royal children.” If we presume that Alice is the youngest child/card, she must be number one—that is, an ace. The rules of Court Circular tell us that the ace may be played as either the lowest or highest card in the suit. And as the ace of hearts, Alice completes the winning hand: a three-card royal flush in hearts.

  The other game being played in “The Queen’s Croquet-Ground” is, of course, croquet. The trend-setting Liddells installed one of Oxford’s first croquet grounds on the Deanery lawn in 1856, the same year the first set of rules for this new game were published in London. In this, they proved to be leaders in fashionable Oxford society, for the next two decades were known as “the era of crinoline croquet,” in which parties centering on the game were all the rage.

  Croquet became known as “the Queen of Games.” The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club was formed in 1868, and annual championships were held at Wimbledon in the 1870s. Croquet outstripped all other games in popularity; a single edition of Jaques’s “Croquet: The Laws and Regulations of the Game” sold over sixty thousand copies in a year. As with his own card game, Lewis Carroll—who seems to have followed every fad—invented and published his own variation of this game, called Croquet Castles. Unlike the Wonderland game, Croquet Castles was not played with flamingos and hedgehogs.