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

by Lewis Carroll

  2. Carroll originally planned to use the passion flower here but changed it to tiger lily when he learned that the name had reference not to human passions but to the Passion of Christ on the Cross. The entire episode is a parody on the talking flowers in section 22 of Tennyson’s poem Maud.

  3. Robert Hornback (in an article cited in Chapter 5, Note 6, of Alice in Wonderland) suggests that the daisies are varieties of the wild English daisy: “They have ray petals that are white on top and reddish underneath. When these unfold in the morning, the daisies appear to change from pink to white.”

  4. In addition to the three Liddell girls of whom Carroll was so fond, there were two younger Liddell sisters, Rhoda and Violet. They appear in this chapter as the Rose and Violet—the only reference to them in the Alice books.

  5. In the first edition of Through the Looking-Glass the sentence “She’s one of the kind that has nine spikes . . .” read “She’s one of the thorny kind.” The “spikes” refer to the nine points on the Red Queen’s crown. Tenniel’s queens all have nine-pointed crowns, and when Alice reaches the eighth square and becomes a queen, her gold crown has nine points as well.

  6. Compare with the following stanza from Tennyson’s Maud:

  There has fallen a splendid tear

  From the passion-flower at the gate.

  She is coming, my dove, my dear;

  She is coming, my life, my fate;

  The red rose cries, “She is near, she is near;”

  And the white rose weeps, “She is late;”

  The larkspur listens, “I hear, I hear;”

  And the lily whispers, “I wait.”

  7. An obvious allusion to the fact that forward and back are reversed by a mirror. Walk toward a mirror, the image moves in the opposite direction.

  8. In his article “Alice on the Stage,” cited earlier, Carroll wrote:

  The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm; she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the tenth degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses!

  It has been conjectured that the Red Queen was modeled after Miss Prickett, governess for the Liddell children (who called her by the nickname of “Pricks”). Oxford gossip once linked Carroll and Miss Prickett romantically, because of his frequent visits to the Liddell home, but it soon became evident that Carroll was interested in the children, not the governess. In Paramount’s motion picture of Alice the role of Red Queen was taken by Edna May Oliver.

  9. Eddington, in the concluding chapter of The Nature of the Physical World, quotes this remark of the Red Queen in connection with a subtle discussion of what he calls the physicist’s “problem of nonsense.” In brief, Eddington argues that, although it may be nonsense for the physicist to affirm a reality of some sort beyond the laws of physics, it is as sensible as a dictionary beside the nonsense of supposing that there is no such reality.

  10. So many memorable passages have been written in which life itself is compared to an enormous game of chess that a sizable anthology could be assembled out of them. Sometimes the players are men themselves, seeking to manipulate their fellowmen as one manipulates chess pieces. The following passage is from George Eliot’s Felix Holt:

  Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary’s men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your Knight could shuffle himself on to a new square on the sly; if your Bishop, in disgust at your Castling, could wheedle your Pawns out of their places; and if your Pawns, hating you because they are Pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deductive reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own Pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt.

  Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments . . .

  Sometimes the players are God and Satan. William James dallies with this theme in his essay on The Dilemma of Determinism, and H. G. Wells echoes it in the prologue of his fine novel about education, The Undying Fire. Like the Book of Job on which it is modeled, Wells’s story opens with a conversation between God and the devil. They are playing chess.

  But the chess they play is not the little ingenious game that originated in India; it is on an altogether different scale. The Ruler of the Universe creates the board, the pieces, and the rules; he makes all the moves; he may make as many moves as he likes whenever he likes; his antagonist, however, is permitted to introduce a slight inexplicable inaccuracy into each move, which necessitates further moves in correction. The Creator determines and conceals the aim of the game, and it is never clear whether the purpose of the adversary is to defeat or assist him in his unfathomable project. Apparently the adversary cannot win, but also he cannot lose so long as he can keep the game going. But he is concerned, it would seem, in preventing the development of any reasoned scheme in the game.

  Sometimes the gods themselves are pieces in a higher game, and the players of this game in turn are pieces in an endless hierarchy of larger chessboards. “And there is merriment overhead,” says Mother Sereda, after enlarging on this theme, in James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen, “but it is very far away.”

  11. Lily, the White Queen’s daughter and one of the white pawns, was encountered by Alice in the previous chapter. In choosing the name “Lily,” Carroll may have had in mind his young friend Lilia Scott MacDonald, the eldest daughter of George MacDonald (Chapter 1, Note 2). Lilia was called “My White Lily” by her father, and Carroll’s letters to her (after she passed fifteen) contain many teasing references to her advancing age. The statement here that Lily is too young to play chess may well have been part of this teasing.

  There is a record (Collingwood’s biography of Carroll, page 427) of a white kitten named Lily (“My imperial kitten” the White Queen calls her child in the previous chapter), which Carroll gave to one of his child-friends. This, however, may have been after the writing of Through the Looking-Glass.

  12. This has probably been quoted more often (usually in reference to rapidly changing political situations) than any other passage in the Alice books.

  13. Gerald M. Weinberg, in a letter, makes two interesting observations about the Queen’s advice. Because she is instructing Alice on how to behave as a pawn, “Speak in French when you ca’n’t think of the English for a thing” could refer to pawns capturing en passant (there is no English term for this ploy), and “turn out your toes” could indicate the way pawns capture by forward diagonal moves to the left or right.

  14. A glance at the position of the chess pieces, on the diagram in Carroll’s preface, shows that Alice (the white pawn) and the Red Queen are side by side on adjacent squares. The first move of the problem now takes place as the Queen moves away to KR4 (the fourth square on the Red King’s rook file, counting from the red side of the board. In this notation the squares are always numbered from the side of the piece that is moved).

  CHAPTER III

  Looking-Glass Insects

  Of course the first thing to do was to make a grand survey of the country she was going to travel through. “It’s something very like learning geography,” thought Alice, as she stood on tiptoe in hopes of being able to see a little further. “Principal rivers—there are none. Principal mountains—I’m on the only one, but I don’t think it’s got any name. Principal towns—why, what are those creatures, making honey down there? They ca’n’t be bees—nobody ever saw bees a mile off, you know—” and for some time she stood silent, watching one of them that was bustling about among the flowers, poking its proboscis into them, “just as if it was a regular bee,” thought Alice.

  However, this was anything but a regular bee: in fact, it was an elephant1—as Alice soo
n found out, though the idea quite took her breath away at first. “And what enormous flowers they must be!” was her next idea. “Something like cottages with the roofs taken off, and stalks put to them—and what quantities of honey they must make! I think I’ll go down and—no, I wo’n’t go just yet,” she went on, checking herself just as she was beginning to run down the hill, and trying to find some excuse for turning shy so suddenly. “It’ll never do to go down among them without a good long branch to brush them away—and what fun it’ll be when they ask me how I liked my walk. I shall say ‘Oh, I liked it well enough—’ (here came the favourite little toss of the head), ‘only it was so dusty and hot, and the elephants did tease so!’

  “I think I’ll go down the other way,” she said after a pause; “and perhaps I may visit the elephants later on. Besides, I do so want to get into the Third Square!”

  So, with this excuse, she ran down the hill, and jumped over the first of the six little brooks.2

  “Tickets, please!” said the Guard, putting his head in at the window. In a moment everybody was holding out a ticket: they were about the same size as the people, and quite seemed to fill the carriage.

  “Now then! Show your ticket, child!” the Guard went on, looking angrily at Alice. And a great many voices all said together (“like the chorus of a song,” thought Alice) “Don’t keep him waiting, child! Why, his time is worth a thousand pounds a minute!”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t got one,” Alice said in a frightened tone: “there wasn’t a ticket-office where I came from.” And again the chorus of voices went on. “There wasn’t room for one where she came from. The land there is worth a thousand pounds an inch!”

  “Don’t make excuses,” said the Guard: “you should have bought one from the engine-driver.” And once more the chorus of voices went on with “The man that drives the engine. Why, the smoke alone is worth a thousand pounds a puff!”3

  Alice thought to herself “Then there’s no use in speaking.” The voices didn’t join in, this time, as she hadn’t spoken, but, to her great surprise, they all thought in chorus (I hope you understand what thinking in chorus means—for I must confess that I don’t), “Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!”

  “I shall dream about a thousand pounds to-night, I know I shall!” thought Alice.

  All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera-glass.4 At last he said “You’re traveling the wrong way,” and shut up the window, and went away.

  “So young a child,” said the gentleman sitting opposite to her, (he was dressed in white paper,)5 “ought to know which way she’s going, even if she doesn’t know her own name!”

  A Goat, that was sitting next to the gentleman in white, shut his eyes and said in a loud voice, “She ought to know her way to the ticket-office, even if she doesn’t know her alphabet!”

  There was a Beetle sitting next the Goat (it was a very queer carriage-full of passengers altogether), and, as the rule seemed to be that they should all speak in turn, he went on with “She’ll have to go back from here as luggage!”

  Alice couldn’t see who was sitting beyond the Beetle, but a hoarse voice spoke next. “Change engines—”6 it said, and there it choked and was obliged to leave off.

  “It sounds like a horse,” Alice thought to herself. And an extremely small voice, close to her ear, said “You might make a joke on that—something about ‘horse’ and ‘hoarse,’ you know.”7

  Then a very gentle voice in the distance said, “She must be labeled ‘Lass, with care,’8 you know—”

  And after that other voices went on (“What a number of people there are in the carriage!” thought Alice) saying “She must go by post, as she’s got a head on her—”9 “She must be sent as a message by the telegraph—” “She must draw the train herself the rest of the way—,” and so on.

  But the gentleman dressed in white paper leaned forwards and whispered in her ear, “Never mind what they all say, my dear, but take a return-ticket every time the train stops.”

  “Indeed I sha’n’t!” Alice said rather impatiently. “I don’t belong to this railway journey at all—I was in a wood just now—and I wish I could get back there!”

  “You might make a joke on that,” said the little voice close to her ear: “something about ‘you would if you could,’ you know.”10

  “Don’t tease so,” said Alice, looking about in vain to see where the voice came from. “If you’re so anxious to have a joke made, why don’t you make one yourself?”

  The little voice sighed deeply.11 It was very unhappy, evidently, and Alice would have said something pitying to comfort it, “if it would only sigh like other people!” she thought. But this was such a wonderfully small sigh, that she wouldn’t have heard it at all, if it hadn’t come quite close to her ear. The consequence of this was that it tickled her ear very much, and quite took off her thoughts from the unhappiness of the poor little creature.

  “I know you are a friend,” the little voice went on: “a dear friend, and an old friend. And you wo’n’t hurt me, though I am an insect.”

  “What kind of insect?” Alice inquired, a little anxiously. What she really wanted to know was, whether it could sting or not, but she thought this wouldn’t be quite a civil question to ask.

  “What, then you don’t—” the little voice began, when it was drowned by a shrill scream from the engine, and everybody jumped up in alarm, Alice among the rest.

  The Horse, who had put his head out of the window, quietly drew it in and said “It’s only a brook we have to jump over.” Everybody seemed satisfied with this, though Alice felt a little nervous at the idea of trains jumping at all. “However, it’ll take us into the Fourth Square, that’s some comfort!” she said to herself. In another moment she felt the carriage rise straight up into the air, and in her fright she caught at the thing nearest to her hand, which happened to be the Goat’s beard.12

  But the beard seemed to melt away as she touched it, and she found herself sitting quietly under a tree—while the Gnat (for that was the insect she had been talking to) was balancing itself on a twig just over her head, and fanning her with its wings.

  It certainly was a very large Gnat: “about the size of a chicken,” Alice thought. Still, she couldn’t feel nervous with it, after they had been talking together so long.

  “—then you don’t like all insects?” the Gnat went on, as quietly as if nothing had happened.

  “I like them when they can talk,” Alice said. “None of them ever talk, where I come from.”

  “What sort of insects do you rejoice in, where you come from?” the Gnat inquired.

  “I don’t rejoice in insects at all,” Alice explained, “because I’m rather afraid of them—at least the large kinds. But I can tell you the names of some of them.”

  “Of course they answer to their names?” the Gnat remarked carelessly.

  “I never knew them do it.”

  “What’s the use of their having names,” the Gnat said, “if they wo’n’t answer to them?”

  “No use to them,” said Alice; “but it’s useful to the people that name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?”

  “I ca’n’t say,” the Gnat replied. “Further on, in the wood down there, they’ve got no names—however, go on with your list of insects: you’re wasting time.”

  “Well, there’s the Horse-fly,” Alice began, counting off the names on her fingers.

  “All right,” said the Gnat. “Half way up that bush, you’ll see a Rocking-horse-fly, if you look. It’s made entirely of wood, and gets about by swinging itself from branch to branch.”

  “What does it live on?” Alice asked, with great curiosity.

  “Sap and sawdust,” said the Gnat. “Go on with the list.”

  Alice looked at the Rocking-horse-fly with great interest, and made up her mind that it must have been just repainted, it loo
ked so bright and sticky; and then she went on.

  “And there’s the Dragon-fly.”

  “Look on the branch above your head,” said the Gnat, “and there you’ll find a Snap-dragon-fly. Its body is made of plum-pudding, its wings of holly-leaves, and its head is a raisin burning in brandy.”13

  “And what does it live on?” Alice asked, as before.

  “Frumenty14 and mince-pie,” the Gnat replied; “and it makes its nest in a Christmas-box.”

  “And then there’s the Butterfly,” Alice went on, after she had taken a good look at the insect with its head on fire, and had thought to herself, “I wonder if that’s the reason insects are so fond of flying into candles—because they want to turn into Snap-dragon-flies!”

  “Crawling at your feet,” said the Gnat (Alice drew her feet back in some alarm), “you may observe a Bread-and-butter-fly. Its wings are thin slices of bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump of sugar.”

  “And what does it live on?”

  “Weak tea with cream in it.”

  A new difficulty came into Alice’s head. “Supposing it couldn’t find any?” she suggested.

  “Then it would die, of course.”

  “But that must happen very often,” Alice remarked thoughtfully.

  “It always happens,” said the Gnat.

  After this, Alice was silent for a minute or two, pondering. The Gnat amused itself meanwhile by humming round and round her head: at last it settled again and remarked “I suppose you don’t want to lose your name?”

  “No, indeed,” Alice said, a little anxiously.

  “And yet I don’t know,” the Gnat went on in a careless tone: “only think how convenient it would be if you could manage to go home without it! For instance, if the governess wanted to call you to your lessons, she would call out ‘Come here—,’ and there she would have to leave off, because there wouldn’t be any name for her to call, and of course you wouldn’t have to go, you know.”