The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (The Annotated Books)

by Lewis Carroll

  “Thinking again?” the Duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin.

  “I’ve a right to think,” said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a little worried.

  “Just about as much right,” said the Duchess, “as pigs have to fly;9 and the m—”

  But here, to Alice’s great surprise, the Duchess’s voice died away, even in the middle of her favourite word “moral”, and the arm that was linked into hers began to tremble. Alice looked up, and there stood the Queen in front of them, with her arms folded, frowning like a thunderstorm.

  “A fine day, your Majesty!” the Duchess began in a low, weak voice.

  “Now, I give you fair warning,” shouted the Queen, stamping on the ground as she spoke; “either you or your head must be off, and that in about half no time! Take your choice!”

  The Duchess took her choice, and was gone in a moment.

  “Let’s go on with the game,” the Queen said to Alice; and Alice was too much frightened to say a word, but slowly followed her back to the croquet-ground.

  The other guests had taken advantage of the Queen’s absence, and were resting in the shade: however, the moment they saw her, they hurried back to the game, the Queen merely remarking that a moment’s delay would cost them their lives.

  All the time they were playing the Queen never left off quarreling with the other players, and shouting “Off with his head!” or “Off with her head!” Those whom she sentenced were taken into custody by the soldiers, who of course had to leave off being arches to do this, so that, by the end of half an hour or so, there were no arches left, and all the players, except the King, the Queen, and Alice, were in custody and under sentence of execution.

  Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice “Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet?”

  “No,” said Alice. “I don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is.”

  “It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup10 is made from,” said the Queen.

  “I never saw one, or heard of one,” said Alice.

  “Come on, then,” said the Queen, “and he shall tell you his history.”

  As they walked off together, Alice heard the King say in a low voice, to the company generally, “You are all pardoned.” “Come, that’s a good thing!” she said to herself, for she had felt quite unhappy at the number of executions the Queen had ordered.

  They very soon came upon a Gryphon,11 lying fast asleep in the sun. (If you don’t know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.) “Up, lazy thing!” said the Queen, “and take this young lady to see the Mock Turtle, and to hear his history. I must go back and see after some executions I have ordered;” and she walked off, leaving Alice alone with the Gryphon. Alice did not quite like the look of the creature, but on the whole she thought it would be quite as safe to stay with it as to go after that savage Queen: so she waited.

  The Gryphon sat up and rubbed its eyes: then it watched the Queen till she was out of sight: then it chuckled. “What fun!” said the Gryphon, half to itself, half to Alice.

  “What is the fun?” said Alice.

  “Why, she,” said the Gryphon. “It’s all her fancy, that: they never executes nobody, you know.12 Come on!”

  “Everybody says ‘come on!’ here,” thought Alice, as she went slowly after it: “I never was so ordered about before, in all my life, never!”

  They had not gone far before they saw the Mock Turtle in the distance, sitting sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock, and, as they came nearer, Alice could hear him sighing as if his heart would break. She pitied him deeply. “What is his sorrow?” she asked the Gryphon. And the Gryphon answered, very nearly in the same words as before, “It’s all his fancy, that: he hasn’t got no sorrow, you know. Come on!”

  So they went up to the Mock Turtle, who looked at them with large eyes full of tears, but said nothing.

  “This here young lady,” said the Gryphon, “she wants for to know your history, she do.”

  “I’ll tell it her,” said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow tone. “Sit down, both of you, and don’t speak a word till I’ve finished.”

  So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to herself “I don’t see how he can ever finish, if he doesn’t begin.” But she waited patiently.

  “Once,” said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, “I was a real Turtle.”

  These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only by an occasional exclamation of “Hjckrrh!” from the Gryphon, and the constant heavy sobbing of the Mock Turtle. Alice was very nearly getting up and saying “Thank you, Sir, for your interesting story,” but she could not help thinking there must be more to come, so she sat still and said nothing.

  “When we were little,” the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, “we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle—we used to call him Tortoise—”

  “Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?”13 Alice asked.

  “We called him Tortoise because he taught us,”14 said the Mock Turtle angrily. “Really you are very dull!”

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question,” added the Gryphon; and then they both sat silent and looked at poor Alice, who felt ready to sink into the earth. At last the Gryphon said to the Mock Turtle “Drive on, old fellow! Don’t be all day about it!” and he went on in these words:—

  “Yes, we went to school in the sea, though you mayn’t believe it—”

  “I never said I didn’t!” interrupted Alice.

  “You did,” said the Mock Turtle.15

  “Hold your tongue!” added the Gryphon, before Alice could speak again. The Mock Turtle went on.

  “We had the best of educations—in fact, we went to school every day—”

  “I’ve been to a day-school, too,” said Alice. “You needn’t be so proud as all that.”

  “With extras?” asked the Mock Turtle, a little anxiously.

  “Yes,” said Alice: “we learned French and music.”

  “And washing?” said the Mock Turtle.

  “Certainly not!” said Alice indignantly.

  “Ah! Then yours wasn’t a really good school,” said the Mock Turtle in a tone of great relief. “Now, at ours, they had, at the end of the bill, ‘French, music, and washing—extra.’ ”16

  “You couldn’t have wanted it much,” said Alice; “living at the bottom of the sea.”

  “I couldn’t afford to learn it,” said the Mock Turtle, with a sigh. “I only took the regular course.”

  “What was that?” inquired Alice.

  “Reeling and Writhing,17 of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”

  “I never heard of ‘Uglification,’ ” Alice ventured to say. “What is it?”

  The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. “Never heard of uglifying!” it exclaimed. “You know what to beautify is, I suppose?”

  “Yes,” said Alice doubtfully: “it means—to—make—anything—prettier.”

  “Well, then,” the Gryphon went on, “if you don’t know what to uglify is, you are a simpleton.”

  Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about it: so she turned to the Mock Turtle, and said “What else had you to learn?”

  “Well, there was Mystery,” the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers,—“Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling—the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a week: he taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.”18

  “What was that like?” said Alice.

  “Well, I ca’n’t show it you, myself,” the Mock Turtle said: “I’m too stiff. And the Gryphon never learnt it.”

  “Hadn’t time,” said the Gryphon: “I went to the Classical master, though. He was an old crab, he was.”
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  “I never went to him,” the Mock Turtle said with a sigh. “He taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say.”

  “So he did, so he did,” said the Gryphon, sighing in his turn; and both creatures hid their faces in their paws.

  “And how many hours a day did you do lessons?” said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.

  “Ten hours the first day,” said the Mock Turtle: “nine the next, and so on.”

  “What a curious plan!” exclaimed Alice.

  “That’s the reason they’re called lessons,” the Gryphon remarked: “because they lessen from day to day.”

  This was quite a new idea to Alice, and she thought it over a little before she made her next remark. “Then the eleventh day must have been a holiday?”

  “Of course it was,” said the Mock Turtle.

  “And how did you manage on the twelfth?” Alice went on eagerly.19

  “That’s enough about lessons,” the Gryphon interrupted in a very decided tone. “Tell her something about the games now.”

  1. Camomile was an extremely bitter medicine, widely used in Victorian England. It was extracted from the plant of the same name.

  2. Barley sugar is a transparent, brittle candy, usually in twisted-stick form, still sold in England. It was formerly made by boiling cane sugar in a concoction of barley.

  3. M. J. C. Hodgart calls my notice to the following statement in Charles Dickens’s novel Dombey and Son (Chapter 2): “There’s a moral in everything, if we would only avail ourselves of it.” James Kincaid, in one of his notes for the Pennyroyal edition of Through the Looking-Glass (1983), illustrated by Barry Moser, quotes from Carroll’s monograph The New Belfry of Christ Church, Oxford: “Everything has a moral if you choose to look for it. In Wordsworth a good half of every poem is devoted to the Moral: in Byron, a smaller proportion: in Tupper, the whole.”

  4. A popular French song of the time contains the lines “C’est l’amour, l’amour, l’amour / Qui fait le monde à la ronde,” but Roger Green thinks the Duchess is quoting the first line of an equally old English song, “The Dawn of Love.” He calls attention to the similar statement that closes Dante’s Paradiso.

  “ ’Tis love that makes the world go round, my baby,” writes Dickens (Our Mutual Friend, Book 4, Chapter 4), and there are endless other expressions of the sentiment in English literature.

  5. The “somebody” was the Duchess herself, in Chapter 6.

  6. Surely few American readers have recognized this for what it is, an extremely ingenious switch on the British proverb, “Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves.” The Duchess’s remark is sometimes quoted as a good rule to follow in writing prose or even poetry. Unsound, of course.

  7. Carroll seems to have invented this proverb. It describes what in modern game theory is called a two-person zero-sum game—a game in which the payoff to the winner exactly equals the losses of the loser. Poker is a many-person zero-sum game because the total amount of money won equals the total amount of money lost.

  8. Alice has gone from animal to mineral to vegetable. As reader Jane Parker writes in a letter, we have here a reference to the popular Victorian parlor game “animal, vegetable, mineral,” in which players tried to guess what someone was thinking of. The first questions asked were traditionally: Is it animal? Is it vegetable? Is it mineral? Answers had to be yes or no, and the object was to guess correctly in twenty or fewer questions. A more explicit reference to the game can be found in Chapter 7 of the second Alice book.

  9. A reference to flying pigs occurs in Tweedledee’s song in the second Alice book when the Walrus wonders if pigs have wings. “Pigs may fly,” so goes an old Scottish proverb, “but it’s not likely.” You’ll see winged pigs in Henry Holiday’s illustration of the Beaver’s lesson in The Hunting of the Snark.

  10. Mock turtle soup is an imitation of green turtle soup, usually made from veal. This explains why Tenniel drew his Mock Turtle with the head, hind hoofs, and tail of a calf.

  11. The gryphon, or griffin, is a fabulous monster with the head and wings of an eagle and the lower body of a lion. In the Purgatorio, Canto 29, of Dante’s Divine Comedy (that lesser-known tour of Wonderland by way of a hole in the ground), the chariot of the Church is pulled by a gryphon. The beast was a common medieval symbol for the union of God and man in Christ. Here both the Gryphon and Mock Turtle are obvious satires on the sentimental college alumnus, of which Oxford has always had an unusually large share.

  I am indebted to Vivien Greene for informing me that the gryphon is the emblem of Oxford’s Trinity College. It appears on Trinity’s main gate; a fact surely familiar to Carroll and the Liddell sisters.

  Reader James Bethune thinks there is satirical significance in the Gryphon’s sleeping. Griffins were supposed to guard fiercely the gold mines of ancient Scythia, and this led to their becoming heraldic emblems of extreme vigilance. See Anne Clark’s article “The Griffin and the Gryphon,” in Jabberwocky (Winter 1977).

  12. If the Gryphon’s “nobody” is never executed, then Alice may well have seen nobody on the road in Chapter 7 of the second Alice book.

  13. In Alice’s day the word tortoise was usually given to land turtles to distinguish them from turtles that lived in the sea.

  14. Carroll used this pun again in his article “What the Tortoise said to Achilles,” in Mind (April 1895). After explaining a disconcerting logical paradox to Achilles, the tortoise remarks: “And would you mind, as a personal favor—considering what a lot of instruction this colloquy of ours will provide for the Logicians of the Nineteenth Century—would you mind adopting a pun that my cousin the Mock-Turtle will then make, and allowing yourself to be re-named Taught-Us?”

  Achilles buries his face in his hands, then in low tones of despair he counters with another pun: “As you please! Provided that you, for your part, will adopt a pun the Mock-Turtle never made, and allow yourself to be renamed A Kill-Ease!”

  15. As Peter Heath has pointed out in The Philosopher’s Alice, the Mock Turtle is telling Alice that she has just said “I didn’t.” Heath reminds us of how Humpty, in the next book, catches Alice in a similar verbal trap by referring to something she didn’t say.

  16. The phrase “French, music and washing—extra” often appeared on boarding-school bills. It meant, of course, that there was an extra charge for French and music, and for having one’s laundry done by the school.

  17. Needless to say, all the Mock Turtle’s subjects are puns (reading, writing, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, history, geography, drawing, sketching, painting in oils, Latin, Greek). In fact, this chapter and the one to follow fairly swarm with puns. Children find puns very funny, but most contemporary authorities on what children are supposed to like believe that puns lower the literary quality of juvenile books.

  18. The “Drawling-master” who came once a week to teach “Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils” is a reference to none other than the art critic John Ruskin. Ruskin came once a week to the Liddell home to teach drawing, sketching, and painting in oils to the children. They were taught well. It takes only a glance at Alice’s many watercolors and those of her brother Henry, and at an oil painting of Alice by her younger sister Violet, to appreciate the talent for art that they inherited from their father. See Colin Gordon’s Beyond the Looking Glass (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982) for reproductions, many in color, of works of art produced by the Liddells.

  Photographs of Ruskin at the time, and a caricature by Max Beerbohm, show him tall and thin, and strongly resembling a conger eel. Like Carroll, he was attracted to little girls precisely because of their sexual purity. His marriage to Euphemia (“Effie”) Gray, ten years his junior, was annulled after six miserable years on grounds of “incurable impotency.” Effie promptly married young John Millais, whose Pre-Raphaelite paintings Ruskin greatly admired. She bore him eight children, one of whom was the little girl pictured in Millais’s famous My First Sermon. (See Chapter
3, Note 4, of the second Alice book.)

  Four years later Ruskin fell passionately in love with Rosie La Touche, daughter of an Irish banker, whose wife admired Ruskin’s writings. She was then ten, and he was forty-seven. He proposed marriage when she was eighteen, but she turned him down. It was a crushing blow. Ruskin continued to fall in love with little girls as virginal as himself, proposing marriage to one girl when he was seventy. In 1900 he died after ten years of severe manic-depression. An autobiography speaks of his admiration for Alice Liddell, but there is no mention of Lewis Carroll.

  19. Alice’s excellent question rightly puzzles the Gryphon because it introduces the possibility of mysterious negative numbers (a concept that also puzzled early mathematicians), which seem to have no application to hours of lessons in the “curious” educational scheme. On the twelfth day and succeeding days did the pupils start teaching their teacher?

  CHAPTER X

  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!”1

  “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.