Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded
Page 22
“And how did you manage on the twelfth?” Alice went on eagerly.
“That’s enough about lessons,” the Gryphon interrupted in a very decided tone. “Tell her something about the games now.”
Everything about this strange school “in the sea” is a scrambled version of subjects taught in terrestrial schools. Students were taught “Reeling and Writhing” (reading and writing), “Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision” (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), “Mystery” and “Seaography” (history and geography), “Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils” (which we met earlier) and “Laughing and Grief” (a double pun that combines Latin and Greek with comedy and tragedy).
The British public school system is not the only target of Carroll’s satire here. The Wonderland Gryphon also attacks the real-life Oxford Gryphon John Ruskin’s great theme of beautification by transforming it into a gospel of “Uglification.” In the opinion of the reactionary conservative Lewis Carroll, the liberalizing changes being forced on the ancient and hallowed institutions of learning at Oxford were like those described by the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon—empty and ugly. Carroll’s conservative politics appear to have quite blinded him to the immense good work Ruskin did by inspiring appreciation of the arts and broadening the availability of education at all levels.
Ruskin’s influence on art, architecture, literature and social change was remarkable. He was the inspiration for and champion of the Pre-Raphaelites, Christian Socialists, Working Men’s Colleges and the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as the advancement of education of working-class children, women and men.
Chapter 10: The Lobster Quadrille
“How the creatures order one about, and make one repeat lessons!”
STALKING TENNYSON After all those lessons that lessened and lessened, the Gryphon and the mock turtle decide Alice must be given instructions in song and dance. They begin with their crazed demonstration of the lobster Quadrille, a parody of the Lancers Quadrille, a popular dance that would have been familiar to the Liddell girls.
Not coincidentally, our Oxford Gryphon, John Ruskin, recorded in his memoirs that among the happiest times of his life were those spent at Winnington Hall school for girls, in Cheshire, of which he was a major patron and where he was known to join in with the girls’ dances. In 1861, at the time of the first of his many visits to this progressive school, Ruskin wrote to his father: “they dance like Dryads. I never saw any dancing at once so finished & so full of life.” Georgiana, wife of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, recorded a scene reminiscent of the lobster Quadrille: “Ruskin joined the Quadrille looking very tall and thin, scarcely more than a black line amongst … the white [dresses of the] girls.” (Coincidentally, Ruskin’s lecture on the education of young girls was entitled “Of Queens’ Gardens” and was published the same year as Wonderland).
THE LOBSTER QUADRILLE.
The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and drew the back of one flapper across his eyes. He looked at Alice, and tried to speak, but for a minute or two sobs choked his voice. “Same as if he had a bone in his throat,” said the Gryphon; and it set to work shaking him and punching him in the back. At last the Mock Turtle recovered his voice, and, with tears running down his cheeks, he went on again:—
“You may not have lived much under the sea—” (“I haven’t,” said Alice) “—and perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster—” (Alice began to say “I once tasted—” but checked herself hastily, and said “No, never”) “—so you can have no idea what a delightful thing a Lobster Quadrille is!”
The lessons in “The lobster Quadrille” are followed by a series of songs and recitations that the Liddell sisters would easily recognize as parodies of poems and songs they knew well. The mock turtle’s song to accompany the lobster dance lampoons “The Spider and the Fly” (1829) by Mary Botham Howitt. Next Alice is commanded to recite another well-known poem, “The Sluggard.” This was written in 1715 by Isaac Watts, author of the didactic poem “Against Idleness and Mischief”—about a “busy Bee”—that was parodied earlier by Alice as the crocodile poem. Alice finds that her mind is so filled with fishy ideas in this seaside academy that instead of “ ’Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain,” she begins with, “ ’Tis the voice of the lobster; I heard him declare.”
John Everett Millais: Allegedly alluded to in “Lobster.”
In the original and more personal version of the fairy tale, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the mock turtle sings a different song:
Beneath the waters of the sea Are lobsters thick as thick can be—They love to dance with you and me,
My own, my gentle Salmon!
Chorus:
Salmon, come up! Salmon, go down!
Salmon, come twist your tail around!
Of all the fishes of the sea
There’s none so good as Salmon!
This spoofs a then-popular minstrel song with a chorus beginning, “Sally come up! Sally go down! / Sally come twist your heel around!” The three Liddell sisters sang it on the very day before the river journey of July 4, 1862 that inspired Wonderland. Carroll’s diary of July 3 reads: “I went to lunch at the Deanery, after which we were to have gone down the river with the children, but as it rained, we remained to hear some music and singing instead. The three sang ‘Sally come up’ with great spirit.”
“No, indeed,” said Alice. “What sort of a dance is it?”
“Why,” said the Gryphon, “you first form into a line along the sea-shore—”
“Two lines!” cried the Mock Turtle. “Seals, turtles, salmon, and so on; then, when you’ve cleared all the jelly-fish out of the way—”
“That generally takes some time,” interrupted the Gryphon.
“—you advance twice—”
“Each with a lobster as a partner!” cried the Gryphon.
“Of course,” the Mock Turtle said: “advance twice, set to partners—”
“—change lobsters, and retire in same order,” continued the Gryphon.
“Then, you know,” the Mock Turtle went on, “you throw the—”
“The lobsters!” shouted the Gryphon, with a bound into the air.
“—as far out to sea as you can—”
“Swim after them!” screamed the Gryphon.
“Turn a somersault in the sea!” cried the Mock Turtle, capering wildly about.
“Change lobsters again!” yelled the Gryphon at the top of its voice.
The mock turtle’s “Beautiful Soup” is a parody of another song sung by the Liddell sisters. Carroll’s diary informs us that on August 1, 1862, the girls performed for him the song “Beautiful Star.” This would be “Star of the Evening” (1855) by the American composer James M. Sayles, with its chorus, “Beautiful star, / Beautiful star, / Star of evening, beautiful star.”
There have been many attempts to match the creatures of the seashore academy with Victorian artists, particularly members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone, authors of The Red King’s Dream, claim to have found allusions in “Voice of the lobster” to the Pre-Raphaelites Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, Ford Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris.
THE UNDER GROUND SALMON The appearance of the “Salmon, come up” song in Alice’s Adventures Under Ground may have another level of allusion beyond the “Sally come up” minstrel song. Just as Wonderland’s bat in “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat” is generally accepted as an allusion to Carroll’s mathematics tutor and mentor Bartholomew “Bat” Price, it is likely that the salmon in “Salmon, come up” is an allusion to noted mathematician GEORGE SALMON (1819–1904).
A decade before the publication of Wonderland, in his diary Carroll recorded his first encounter with what he called “Salmon’s Algebraic Geometry—A Treatise on Conic Sections.” Salmon’s book was the highly respected standard text at that time and remained so for many years. In his diaries of 1855, w
e find a perplexed Carroll writing: “Went over the first 30 pages of Salmon. I talked over ‘Calculus of Variations’ with Price today, but without any effect. I see no prospect of understanding the subject at all.”
Nonetheless, he persisted over the next two years, slogging through chapter after chapter in reading circles and tutorials with other students and Bartholomew Price. This study appears to have transformed Carroll’s opinion of Salmon to one of admiration; as the song states, “There’s none so good as Salmon!”
In 1866, Carroll wrote a treatise, “Condensation of Determinants, Being a New and Brief Method for Computing their Arithmetical Values,” as an improved method of “condensation.” Then, in 1867, two years after the publication of Wonderland, he published a larger work, An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, with their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraical Geometry.
The Carrollian mathematical scholar Francine Abeles believes there must be a link between the Alice books and Carroll’s work on determinants. The editor of his journals, Edward Wakeling, agreed, and suggested that Carroll’s “method of condensation is like Alice shrinking as a result of drinking from the bottle marked ‘drink me.’ A large array of numbers gradually shrinks in size until a single number remains: the determinant.”
Carroll was constantly indulging in mathematical nonsense based on puns and wordplay. There is an entirely silly episode in his Sylvie and Bruno wherein a professor draws “a long line upon the black board, and marking it with the letters ‘A,’ ‘B,’ at the two ends, and ‘C’ in the middle,” says, “If AB were to be divided into two parts at C—” The fairy child Bruno confidently interrupts to say that the bee—“the bumble-bee,” as he says—“would be drowned” and “the two bits would sink down in the sea.”
During the Wonderland years, Charles Dodgson found his way into the company of each of these famous artists, and virtually every other major figure in the world of art and literature to whom he was able to gain access. The popular view of Dodgson as a reclusive and shy Oxford mathematics don who shunned adult company could not be further from the truth.
In 1851, the same year that he became a resident of Christ Church, he visited the Great Exhibition—the first world’s fair—in the Crystal Palace originally erected in Hyde Park, London. Of the exhibition, filled with all the wonders of the age, Dodgson wrote: “It looks like a sort of fairyland. As far as you can look in any direction, you see nothing but … long avenues of statues, fountains, canopies, etc., etc., etc.”
“Back to land again, and that’s all the first figure,” said the Mock Turtle, suddenly dropping his voice; and the two creatures, who had been jumping about like mad things all this time, sat down again very sadly and quietly, and looked at Alice.
“It must be a very pretty dance,” said Alice timidly.
“Would you like to see a little of it?” said the Mock Turtle.
“Very much indeed,” said Alice.
“Come, let’s try the first figure!” said the Mock Turtle to the Gryphon. “We can do without lobsters, you know. Which shall sing?”
“Oh, you sing,” said the Gryphon. “I’ve forgotten the words.”
So they began solemnly dancing round and round Alice, every now and then treading on her toes when they passed too close, and waving their forepaws to mark the time, while the Mock Turtle sang this, very slowly and sadly:—
After dashing off a long account of the exhibition, Dodgson wrote his sister that he must now “go to the Royal Academy, so must stop,” but added: “On Tuesday to Tunbridge Wells, on Thursday to Gordon Square till Monday, on Monday to … Hastings.… Last night I dined with the Stones, and afterwards to a music party at the Watsons. Some day, I forget which, I am to a music party at the Campbells. Also Mr. Brinley Richards’ concert. Today I am going with my Aunt to ‘The Diorama of Jerusalem.’ ” Obviously, this is not the account of the life of a shy recluse.
Throughout the 1850s, ’60s and ’70s, Dodgson was a “virtual gadabout,” as Carroll’s biographer Morton N. Cohen politely phrases it. In fact, Dodgson was a relentless stalker of celebrities, or, to use the jargon of the day, a lionizer. From his undergraduate days at Oxford onward, he regularly wrote home to his sisters about his success on his latest “lion hunting” expeditions.
“Will you walk a little faster?” said a whiting to a snail.
“There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.
See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!
They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?
“You can really have no notion how delightful it will be
When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!”
But the snail replied “Too far, too far!” and gave a look askance—
Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the dance.
Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.
Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join the dance.
“What matters it how far we go?” his scaly friend replied.
“There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.
The further off from England the nearer is to France—
Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?”
“A sort of fairyland”: The Great Exhibition (Interior), by George Baxter, 1851.
Again to quote Cohen, Dodgson was “at heart a gadgeteer, an amateur inventor, a devotee of technological progress.” Like his maternal uncle and mentor Skeffington Lutwidge, the Commissioner in Lunacy, Dodgson was fascinated with gadgets and instruments of science. Lutwidge possessed microscopes, telescopes, lathes, crest stamps, magic lanterns, cameras obscura, peep show toys and a multitude of other gadgets that set a pattern of collecting for the young Charles. Dodgson was obsessed with all the fads and fancies of the day, and invented and published scores of pamphlets of new word games, card games, croquet games, tennis scoring systems, novel billiard games, anagrams, riddles and rhymes. He sought publication in all the magazines, including Vanity Fair, Punch, The Train, The Lady and Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle. He wrote letters to newspapers on every conceivable subject: lunar observations, timekeeping, horse betting, censorship, the war in Crimea and colonists on Tristan de Cunha.
“Thank you, it’s a very interesting dance to watch,” said Alice, feeling very glad that it was over at last: “and I do so like that curious song about the whiting!”
“Oh, as to the whiting,” said the Mock Turtle, “they—you’ve seen them, of course?”
“Yes,” said Alice, “I’ve often seen them at dinn—” she checked herself hastily.
“I don’t know where Dinn may be,” said the Mock Turtle; “but if you’ve seen them so often, of course you know what they’re like.”
“I believe so,” Alice replied thoughtfully. “They have their tails in their mouths—and they’re all over crumbs.”
“You’re wrong about the crumbs,” said the Mock Turtle: “crumbs would all wash off in the sea. But they have their tails in their mouths; and the reason is—” here the Mock Turtle yawned and shut his eyes. “Tell her about the reason and all that,” he said to the Gryphon.
“The reason is,” said the Gryphon, “that they would go with the lobsters to the dance. So they got thrown out to sea. So they had to fall a long way. So they got their tails fast in their mouths. So they couldn’t get them out again. That’s all.”
Dodgson moved like a shuttlecock between Oxford and London, attending the theatre, galleries, public lectures, symphonies, a public autopsy, photographic exhi
bitions, the Royal Academy, the Royal Botanic Gardens, the Ashmolean Institute, concert halls, choral societies, glee clubs, piano recitals, dances, horticultural shows, fireworks displays, debates at the House of Commons, cricket at Lord’s, tennis at Wimbledon, Oxford-Cambridge boat races, exhibitions of Egyptian and Greek antiquities, plays at the Adelphi and the Savoy, blackface minstrel shows and Covent Garden operas.
In the year of the Great Exhibition, the wet-plate collodion process of photography was invented, and it rapidly replaced the daguerreotype process. However, copyright issues meant it did not become available to amateurs until 1854. The following year, Dodgson was introduced to photography by fellow student Reginald Southey, the nephew of the former poet laureate Robert Southey.
Hiawatha’s Photographing: Illustration for Carroll’s poem by Arthur B. Frost.
Prince Leopold: This future beau of Alice was photographed by Dodgson at Oxford.
The young Dodgson immediately found photography the perfect vehicle for his lionizing. Very much a new art—the word photography (from the Greek for “light-drawing”) had been coined only in 1839—it provided the lower-middle-class Dodgson with, as Cohen states: “a magic wand: it broke down social barriers and gave him access to many celebrities.”
Dodgson and Southey were first admitted to the Deanery garden soon after the Liddells had moved to Oxford. The two men had been allowed to set up Southey’s camera in the garden to photograph the cathedral. No pictures resulted, thanks to poor chemicals and the two men’s inexperience, but there was another momentous outcome: Dodgson met Alice and her sisters.
Dodgson was genuinely fond of children, but it was chiefly through offering to photograph the children of canons and deans of the colleges—and later to photograph the canons and deans themselves—that he was able to mingle with a level of society that would not otherwise welcome him. As Morton Cohen observes, “the newfangled art form became much more than a personal indulgence—it was a passport to the rarefied world of art, enabling him to sign photographs that he gave away as ‘from the Artist.’ ”