The Modern Library Children's Classics

by Kenneth Grahame

  2. “Will you walk a little faster?”: parody of the best-known poem by Mary Howitt (1799–1888), “The Spider and the Fly,” and based on an older song. In the poem, the duplicitous spider invites the fly into her parlor.

  3. whiting: a fish in the cod family.

  4. all over crumbs: Alice is referring to the way that whiting was often prepared.

  5. blacking: shoe polish.

  6. ‘ ’Tis the voice of the sluggard’: The poem Alice recites is a parody of Isaac Watts’s poem “The Sluggard,” which would have been as well-known to Carroll’s readers as his “Against Idleness and Mischief” (burlesqued in chapter II). The first stanza of Watts’s didactic verse reads, “ ’Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain, / ‘You have wak’d me too soon, I must slumber again.’ / As the door on its hinges, so he on his bed, / Turns his sides and his shoulders and his heavy head.”

  7. Beautiful Soup, so rich and green: parody of “Beautiful Star,” a popular song by J. M. Sayles, often sung by the Liddell girls.

  CHAPTER XI. WHO STOLE THE TARTS?

  1. The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts: first stanza of a poem of unknown origin that first appeared in 1782. This stanza was reprinted in a collection of Mother Goose rhymes and became widely known. Haughton comments that this poem is the only “true” nursery rhyme in the first Alice book, though nursery rhymes abound in Looking-Glass (p. 320, n. 3).

  2. shillings and pence: Alice and other Victorian schoolgirls would have been required to practice adding sums of money together and reducing the answer to the appropriate pounds, shillings, and pence. Before Britain converted to the decimal system (in which £1 = 100 pence) three-column bookkeeping was required to note the three place values, in which £1 = 20 shillings and 1 shilling = 12 pence.

  CHAPTER XII. ALICE’S EVIDENCE

  1. They told me you had been to her: Carroll first began to play with writing nonsense verse filled with vague pronoun references in an earlier poem, “She’s All My Fancy Painted Him,” published in 1855 in The Comic Times. The first line of this poem mimicked the first line of a popular song, “Alice Gray” by William Mee. Carroll later revised his poem to become the White Rabbit’s evidence and an example of a “phenomenal pronominal comedy of errors,” in Haughton’s phrase (p. 322, n. 4).

  2. dull reality: Cohen argues that Carroll based many of the creatures and scenes of Wonderland (and eventually Looking-Glass Land) on his own happy childhood in the Cheshire countryside, where his father was curate of the Daresbury parsonage (this page).

  3. happy summer days: Carroll obviously has placed himself in the position of Alice’s “older sister,” and in this heartfelt reverie articulates his own hopes for a future Alice who will retain the child-likeness so dear to him. By imagining this older Alice as essentially unchanged from his “ideal child friend,” Carroll attempts to maintain his position of importance in Alice Liddell’s life. (In a 1885 letter to Alice Liddell Hargreaves asking whether she objected to his borrowing the manuscript copy of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, Carroll calls Alice his “ideal child-friend”).

  THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

  “CHILD OF THE PURE UNCLOUDED BROW”

  1. Cohen argues that the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland also had its origin in “shared experiences” with the Liddell family, including a railway trip from Gloucester to Oxford undertaken by the Liddell sisters and chaperoned by Carroll, and a 1863 banquet held for the Prince and Princess of Wales (see pp. 136–37). Yet this nostalgic poem introducing Looking-Glass is colored by longing and regret, as it was composed after the break with the Liddell family.

  2. A tale begun in other days: refers to July 4 boat trip during which the tale that would eventually become Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first told to the Liddell sisters.

  3. Without, the frost, the blinding snow: Looking-Glass is a winter tale, set exactly six months after the events of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The date of Alice’s trip to Wonderland was May 4, Alice Liddell’s birthday (see ch. VII, note 3). Alice will later inform the White Queen that she is “seven and a half, exactly”; thus, the second adventure begins on November 4. (For additional evidence about the date, see ch. I, note 2.)

  4. “happy summer days”: the last three words of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  5. bale: woe or sorrow.

  6. pleasance: Alice Liddell’s middle name.

  AUTHOR’S PREFACE

  1. chess-problem: Although scholarly opinions are divided as to the playability of the chess game that undergirds the plot of Looking-Glass, in his notes to the Centenary Edition of the Alice books, Haughton defends Carroll’s game by emphasizing both the unconventional nature of such a contest played in a land of reversal, and the unusual point of view: “In Through the Looking-Glass Carroll has used his dexterity not to bring the game ‘up to chess standard’ but to represent a dream of a pawn’s-eye view of a looking-glass game of chess” (p. 325).

  CHAPTER I. LOOKING-GLASS HOUSE

  1. worsted: wool yarn used in knitting.

  2. bonfire: Preparations are being made for the celebration of Guy Fawkes’s Day, November 5, when bonfires and fireworks are lit to commemorate the capture of Guy Fawkes, one of the plotters of the failed 1605 Gunpowder Plot designed to blow up Parliament and King James.

  3. Wednesday week: British phrase that means the Wednesday after the upcoming Wednesday.

  4. chess: a popular game with the Liddell family and one of Carroll’s delights.

  5. Knight, that came wriggling: Alice is referring to the “L”-shaped move that the knight makes in chess—two spaces forward and one to either side, or two spaces back and one to either side—which can be imagined as “wriggling.” The knight’s odd movements will become significant later in the text when Alice meets the White Knight, who is continually falling off his horse.

  6. Looking-glass House: The setting for Carroll’s sequel was suggested by another young Alice—a distant cousin, Alice Raikes—as he was thinking about a sequel to the first Alice book. Carroll gave Alice an orange and asked which hand held it. After she answered that she held the orange in her right hand, Carroll asked her to look into a mirror while holding the orange and decide with which hand the little girl in the mirror held the orange. Alice answered that if she was on the other side of the glass then she would still have the orange in her right hand. Carroll was delighted with this response and later indicated that this Alice had suggested a “back-to-front” country. (See Green, pp. 68–69).

  7. chimney-piece: mantel.

  8. memorandum-book: small notebook.

  9. Carroll was fond of creating mirror-writing and would sometimes send letters to young friends that could only be read in a mirror.

  10. “JABBERWOCKY”: The first stanza of this poem had been written years before, in 1855, and confined to Carroll’s private family magazine, Misch-Masch, where Carroll supplied definitions for a number of the imaginary “Anglo-Saxon” words. Humpty Dumpty supplies additional exegesis in chapter VI. John Tenniel suggested the Jabberwock as frontispiece illustration to Looking-Glass, but Carroll was concerned that the image of the monster would be too frightening for children. His informal poll of thirty mothers showed that others felt so, too, and thus the White Knight took the pride of place.

  “Jabberwocky,” like “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” is one of Carroll’s best-known poems and is widely quoted, memorized, and translated. Many of the nonsense words Carroll coined in “Jabberwocky”—such as “burble,” “chortle,” and “galumphing”—have made their way into dictionaries and common usage. The schoolboys in Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky and Co. (1899) casually use Carroll’s coinages throughout the text. See Gardner for a complete discussion of the vocabulary and prominence of “Jabberwocky” (pp. 148–52, n. 15).

  CHAPTER II. THE GARDEN OF LIVE FLOWERS

  1. Tiger-lily: All of the flowers mentioned in this scene (except for the Tiger-lily) can be found in Tennyson’s p
oem Maud, in section XXII, which begins, “Come into the garden, Maud.” Carroll changed his “Passion-flower” (which is included in Maud) to a Tiger-lily after it was pointed out that passion-flowers had a religious connotation. Carroll might also have been poking fun at the popular “language of flowers” books in which each flower species expresses a different sentiment or emotion. Although their remarks are similarly personal, Carroll’s flowers voice rather unconventional opinions.

  2. Violet: The Violet and Rose represent Alice Liddell’s youngest sisters, Violet and Rhoda.

  3. opposite direction: Reversals rule the day in Looking-Glass Land, so Alice must walk away from something in order to approach it.

  4. remember who you are!: The issue of Alice’s shifting identity recurs in this new adventure. The Red Queen, a figure similar to the Duchess or Queen of Hearts from the first book, consistently challenges Alice on her identity, as did the Caterpillar and Pigeon in Alice’s Adventures.

  CHAPTER III. LOOKING-GLASS INSECTS

  1. proboscis: both the trunk of an elephant and the protruding mouth parts of an insect.

  2. white paper: official position paper. Alice’s traveling companion is commonly accepted to resemble Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), a leader of the Tory (now Conservative) Party and sometime prime minister whose second ministry spanned 1874–80. Tenniel often drew Disraeli for Punch, the satiric periodical founded in 1841.

  3. Lass, with care: Cartons containing breakables were often marked “Glass, with care.”

  4. she’s got a head on her: Stamps were called “heads” in reference to the image of Queen Victoria’s profile that appeared on each one.

  5. Snap-dragon-fly: refers to a Christmas pastime in which flaming, brandy-soaked raisins (the “snapdragons”) were popped into the mouth. “Christmas Crackers,” a short story by Juliana Horatia Ewing (1841–85), a popular children’s writer, opens with a scene in a country-house in which a family gathers around the snap-dragon bowl on Christmas Eve. In 1867, Carroll published the germ of his longest fictional work, Sylvie and Bruno (1889), as “Bruno’s Revenge” in Aunt Judy’s Magazine, which was named after Juliana Ewing and edited by her mother, Margaret Gatty.

  6. Frumenty: a bland, semifermented porridge of hulled wheat, sweetened with sugar, cinnamon, and raisins.

  7. L: perhaps refers to Alice’s last name, Liddell.

  CHAPTER IV. TWEEDLEDUM AND TWEEDLEDEE

  1. wax-works: Today, the most famous wax-works museum is Madame Tussaud’s, located in London. Marie Tussaud, a Swiss modeler in wax, worked as an art tutor at Versailles. During the Reign of Terror she was imprisoned as a royalist and given the job of constructing death masks in wax of the heads of famous people killed during the French Revolution. She eventually moved to London and established Madame Tussaud’s Wax-Works Exhibition, first as a touring show and later as a museum. Carroll took his twelve-year-old brother, Edwin, to Madame Tussaud’s in 1858 (Cohen, p. 71).

  2. Tweedledum and Tweedledee: refers to an old song that tells the story of two characters who fight over a “spoiled” rattle until the appearance of an enormous crow frightens them into a truce. Haughton and others note that this tale of a silly battle between two men may have originated in a 1725 feud between Bononcini and Handel, called “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” by John Byrom, the author of a humorous verse about the feud. See The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, new ed., ed. Iona and Peter Opie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 501–502.

  3. mulberry bush: The traditional children’s dance rhyme originally began “Here we go round the bramble bush,” which later became “mulberry bush.” Each stanza begins by calling to mind a certain activity—“this is the way we wash our clothes”—and requires the corresponding movement by the children playing the game. See The Annotated Mother Goose, notes by William S. Baring-Gould and Ceil Baring-Gould (New York: Meridian, 1967), pp. 251–53.

  4. ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’: not a parody of any known poem, though written in a popular meter.

  5. dream: Gardner engages in a detailed discussion of the complex metaphysics of the Red King’s dream (p. 189, n. 10).

  6. monstrous crow: Alice is referring to the event that ends the fight in the nursery rhyme.

  CHAPTER V. WOOL AND WATER

  1. never jam to-day: In his third book of Alice annotations, Gardner comments that many Latin teachers wrote to him after the publication of The Annotated Alice (1960) to point out his failure to explain adequately the White Queen’s discussion about jam. Carroll was, in fact, playing with the Latin iam (as j and i represent the same sound in Latin)—which means “now” in the past and future tenses only. The word for “now” in the present tense is “nunc.” Thus, one can have jam/iam tomorrow and yesterday, but only nunc today (p. 196, n. 3).

  2. King’s Messenger: Tenniel has drawn the King’s Messenger as the Mad Hatter from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  3. little dark shop: As the Liddell girls and their two adult chaperones cheerfully tramped toward Folly Bridge, where boats could be hired, they would pass a dark shop on Saint Algate’s Street. Tenniel based his drawing of the Sheep’s shop on this small grocery. Gardner reproduces a photograph of the front of the shop, today called “The Alice in Wonderland Shop” and stocked with items related to the Alice books (p. 200, n. 10).

  4. teetotum: a child’s top in the form of a die with four sides, each marked with a letter. Used in a game of chance.

  5. Feather!: Carroll is making a joke about teaching the Liddell girls how to row correctly by “feathering” the oars (turning the oars almost horizontal to the water after a stroke in preparation for the next stroke). Alice Liddell said, “ ‘I can remember what hard work it was rowing upstream from Nuneham, but this was nothing if we thought we were learning and getting on. It was a proud day when we could “feather our oars” properly’ ” (quoted in Cohen, p. 88).

  6. catching a crab: another rowing term, referring to an improperly plied oar that seems to be stuck under the water, as if a crab were pulling it down, and which can unseat the rower. (See Haughton, p. 343, n. 12.)

  CHAPTER VI. HUMPTY DUMPTY

  1. HUMPTY DUMPTY: character from a well-known nursery rhyme whose skills as a philosopher and linguist are showcased in Carroll’s text. The ancient verse is a riddle, and the answer is that Humpty Dumpty was an egg.

  2. left off at seven: This is just one of the many death jokes that Carroll sprinkled liberally throughout his two books about Alice. Carroll’s first death joke occurs in chapter I of Alice’s Adventures. The narrator agrees with Alice that “[it] was very likely true” that she would be unable to “say anything” about falling off the rooftop after surviving the stupendous fall down the rabbit hole. The narrator’s point is that she would not be able to speak, of course, because she would be dead.

  3. cravat: man’s tie.

  4. portmanteau: valise or suitcase. A portmanteau word combines more than one word to create a new word of enlarged meaning.

  5. In winter, when the fields are white: possibly inspired by a poem called “Summer Days” by forgotten Victorian poet Wathen Mark Wilks Call (1817–70) and unattributed in many Victorian anthologies (Gardner, p. 216).

  CHAPTER VII. THE LION AND THE UNICORN

  1. Anglo-Saxon attitudes: The messenger’s antic behavior, Gardner argues, “spoof [s] the Anglo-Saxon scholarship fashionable in [Carroll’s] day” (p. 223, n. 3). The Caedmon Manuscript of the Junian codex, located in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and known to Carroll and perhaps Tenniel, includes illustrations of Anglo-Saxon dress and “attitudes.”

  2. Haigha: the March Hare from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. If “Haigha” is pronounced to rhyme with “mayor” it sounds like “hare.” The spelling, according to Haughton, is “pseudo-Anglo-Saxon” (p. 346, n. 4).

  3. I love my love with an H: Victorian parlor game in which each player is assigned a letter by turns and must finish each chanted sentence, such as “His name is—�
�, and he lives in——,” using an appropriate word and without missing a beat.

  4. Hatta: the Mad Hatter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, now dressed in Anglo-Saxon costume, except for his hat.

  5. sal-volatile: ammonium carbonate, used in the making of smelling salts and baking powder.

  6. The Lion and the Unicorn: nursery rhyme that may refer to the historic competition between Scotland and England and the uneasy truce that resulted in the seventeenth century, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England and the British Royal coat of arms pictorially represented both the Scottish unicorn and the English lion supporting the English shield. However, only the lion wears a crown, which may have enhanced the traditional rivalry. (See The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, pp. 316–17.) The rivalry was resolved politically in 1707 with the Act of Union, which united England and Scotland as Great Britain; Ireland was joined to this union in 1801.

  7. Bandersnatch: creature described in “Jabberwocky.”

  CHAPTER VIII. “IT’S MY OWN INVENTION”

  1. White Knight: Many critics hold that the melancholy yet good-hearted, bumbling yet gentle White Knight represents Lewis Carroll himself. Cohen believes that Carroll can also be found in the character of the Red Knight, who attempts to take Alice prisoner, and in the moody Wasp (from the suppressed “wasp in a wig” episode, which was removed in deference to Tenniel’s opinion that it was useless and impossible to illustrate; see Cohen, p. 215). Cohen argues, “The man who emerges as the aggregate of these three characters, with their painful admissions, is affecting and piteous. Loss and rejection have replaced friendship and conviviality, and Charles’s only consolation now lies in nostalgia,” which can be located in the two personal poems that bookend the text (Cohen, p. 217). Carroll himself wrote that the White Knight’s character was written to conform with the speaker of the ballad The Aged, Aged Man (see note 6 below). In addition, a recently discovered description of a game board drawn by Carroll in 1892 and inscribed (to a child friend) “Olive Butler, from the White Knight” lends great credit to the interpretation that Carroll viewed himself as this figure. See Jeffrey Stern, “Carroll Identifies Himself at Last” (Jabberwocky, Summer/Autumn 1990), discussed in Gardner, pp. 234–36, n. 2.