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

by Lewis Carroll

  “That would never do, I’m sure,” said Alice: “the governess would never think of excusing me lessons for that. If she couldn’t remember my name, she’d call me ‘Miss,’ as the servants do.”

  “Well, if she said ‘Miss,’ and didn’t say anything more,” the Gnat remarked, “of course you’d miss your lessons. That’s a joke. I wish you had made it.”

  “Why do you wish I had made it?” Alice asked. “It’s a very bad one.”

  But the Gnat only sighed deeply, while two large tears came rolling down its cheeks.

  “You shouldn’t make jokes,” Alice said, “if it makes you so unhappy.”

  Then came another of those melancholy little sighs, and this time the poor Gnat really seemed to have sighed itself away, for, when Alice looked up, there was nothing whatever to be seen on the twig, and, as she was getting quite chilly with sitting still so long, she got up and walked on.

  She very soon came to an open field, with a wood on the other side of it: it looked much darker than the last wood, and Alice felt a little timid about going into it. However, on second thoughts, she made up her mind to go on: “for I certainly won’t go back,”15 she thought to herself, and this was the only way to the Eighth Square.

  “This must be the wood,” she said thoughtfully to herself, “where things have no names. I wonder what’ll become of my name when I go in? I shouldn’t like to lose it at all—because they’d have to give me another, and it would be almost certain to be an ugly one. But then the fun would be, trying to find the creature that had got my old name! That’s just like the advertisements, you know, when people lose dogs—‘answers to the name of “Dash”:16 had on a brass collar’—just fancy calling everything you met ‘Alice,’ till one of them answered! Only they wouldn’t answer at all, if they were wise.”

  She was rambling on in this way when she reached the wood: it looked very cool and shady. “Well, at any rate it’s a great comfort,” she said as she stepped under the trees, “after being so hot, to get into the—into the—into what?” she went on, rather surprised at not being able to think of the word. “I mean to get under the—under the—under this, you know!” putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. “What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it’s got no name—why, to be sure it hasn’t!”

  She stood silent for a minute, thinking: then she suddenly began again. “Then it really has happened, after all! And now, who am I? I will remember, if I can! I’m determined to do it!” But being determined didn’t help her much, and all she could say, after a great deal of puzzling, was “L, I know it begins with L!”17

  Just then a Fawn18 came wandering by: it looked at Alice with its large gentle eyes, but didn’t seem at all frightened. “Here then! Here then!” Alice said, as she held out her hand and tried to stroke it; but it only started back a little, and then stood looking at her again.

  “What do you call yourself?” the Fawn said at last. Such a soft sweet voice it had!

  “I wish I knew!” thought poor Alice. She answered, rather sadly, “Nothing, just now.”

  “Think again,” it said: “that wo’n’t do.”

  Alice thought, but nothing came of it. “Please, would you tell me what you call yourself?” she said timidly. “I think that might help a little.”

  “I’ll tell you, if you’ll come a little further on,” the Fawn said. “I ca’n’t remember here.”

  So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice’s arm. “I’m a Fawn!”19 It cried out in a voice of delight. “And, dear me! you’re a human child!” A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.

  Alice stood looking after it, almost ready to cry with vexation at having lost her dear little fellow-traveler so suddenly. “However, I know my name now,” she said: “that’s some comfort. Alice—Alice—I wo’n’t forget it again. And now, which of these finger-posts ought I to follow, I wonder?”

  It was not a very difficult question to answer, as there was only one road through the wood, and the two finger-posts both pointed along it. “I’ll settle it,” Alice said to herself, “when the road divides and they point different ways.”

  But this did not seem likely to happen. She went on and on, a long way, but, wherever the road divided, there were sure to be two finger-posts pointing the same way, one marked “TO TWEEDLEDUM’S HOUSE,” and the other “TO THE HOUSE OF TWEEDLEDEE.”20

  “I do believe,” said Alice at last, “that they live in the same house! I wonder I never thought of that before—But I ca’n’t stay there long. I’ll just call and say ‘How d’ye do?’ and ask them the way out of the wood. If I could only get to the Eighth Square before it gets dark!” So she wandered on, talking to herself as she went, till, on turning a sharp corner, she came upon two fat little men, so suddenly that she could not help starting back, but in another moment she recovered herself, feeling sure that they must be21

  1. A. S. M. Dickins, in his article on the looking-glass chess game (see Chapter 9, Note 1), mentions that the letter B (aside from being a favorite of Carroll’s) is the symbol for a chess bishop, and that some six hundred years ago the chess bishop was called an elephant. “Alfil in Muslim, Hasti in Indian, and Kin or Siang in Chinese Chess. The Russians still to this day call it Slon, which means Elephant. So in this curious paragraph Lewis Carroll does introduce the Bishop into the story, but wrapped up in a very disguised code-name.”

  In a charming half-nonsense tale called “Isa’s Visit to Oxford,” written for his child-friend Isa Bowman, who reprints it in her book The Story of Lewis Carroll (J. M. Dent, 1899), Carroll speaks of walking with Isa through the gardens of Worcester College. They failed to “see the swans (who ought to have been on the Lake), nor the hippopotamus, who ought not to have been walking about among the flowers, gathering honey like a busy bee.”

  2. The six little brooks are the six horizontal lines separating Alice from the eighth square on which she is to be queened. Each time she crosses a line, the crossing is marked in the text by three rows of dots. Her first move, P-Q4, is a move of two squares, the only long “journey” permitted a pawn. Here she leaps into the third square, then the train carries her on to the fourth.

  3. Jabberwocky (March 1970) published my query: “Perhaps one of your readers can clear up what for me is one of the biggest mysteries yet unsolved about the Alice books. In the railway carriage scene the phrase ‘worth a thousand ——— a ———’ (with different words where the blanks are) is repeated several times. I feel certain Carroll was referring here to something familiar to his readers then (an advertising slogan?) but I have been unable to discover what it was.”

  The consensus among respondents, in the next issue, was that the phrase referred to a popular slogan for Beecham’s pills: “worth a guinea a box.” R. B. Shaberman and Denis Crutch, in Under the Quizzing Glass, offer a different theory. They think it echoes a well-known phrase used by Tennyson when he described the freshness of air on the Isle of Wight as “worth sixpence a pint.”

  Still another conjecture, in a letter from Wilfred Shepherd, ties the thousand pounds to the enormous publicity that surrounded the building of the Great Eastern, a British ship that was gigantic for its time (it was launched in 1858). The Encyclopaedia Britannica speaks of it as “perhaps the most discussed steamship that has ever been built, and the most historic failure.” Shepherd found an account of the affair in a book called The Great Iron Ship (1953) by James Duggan. It is filled with references to costs of a thousand pounds—a thousand pounds a foot to launch the ship, an investment on capital of a thousand pounds a day, and so on. Perhaps someone should check the newspaper accounts Carroll would have read to see if there are references to “a thousand pounds a puff.”

  Frankie Morris, writing on “ ‘Smiles
and Soap:’ Lewis Carroll and the ‘Blast of Puffery,’ ” in Jabberwocky (Spring 1997), writes that the word puff was a common Victorian term for the promotion of a product by advertising and personal endorsements. He quotes from E. S. Turner’s The Shocking History of Advertising (1953, Chapter 3) a pill maker’s offer to Dickens of “a thousand pounds for a puff.”

  4. Tenniel’s illustration for this scene may have been a deliberate parody of My First Sermon, a famous painting by John Everett Millais. The resemblance in the way the two girls are dressed is remarkable: porkpie hat with feather, striped stockings, a skirt with rows of tucks at the bottom, pointed black shoes, and a muff. A purse beside Alice takes the place of a Bible at the left of the girl in the church pew. In his diary (April 7, 1864) Carroll records a visit to Millais’s house, where he met his six-year-old daughter, Effie, the original of the girl in the painting.

  Spencer D. Brown was the first to spot the resemblance of Tenniel’s Alice in the train to Millais’s girl at church. The parallels are even more striking if Tenniel’s drawing is taken as a composite of My First Sermon and a later picture, My Second Sermon, showing the same girl sleeping in the pew.

  My First Sermon was widely reproduced in England. In the United States, Currier and Ives sold a copy in black and white (some were hand-colored) titled Little Ella. It is an exact replica of the Millais painting except that it is mirror-reversed (Carroll would have been amused) and the girl’s face has been altered to make it more doll-like. The date of the Currier and Ives print is unknown, as is the name of the artist who modified it. Nor is it known whether the picture was pirated, or if Currier and Ives obtained permission to copy it.

  Roger Green convinced me that the resemblance of Tenniel’s drawing to the two Millais paintings may have been coincidental. He referred me to pictures of the day in Punch that show little girls in railway carriages dressed exactly like Alice, with their hands in muffs. Michael Hearn sent a similar picture from Walter Crane’s 1869 book Little Annie and Jack in London.

  Still, the resemblance of Tenniel’s Alice to Millais’s daughter in church is so striking that it is impossible to believe Tenniel was not at least aware of it. You can form your own opinion by studying the two pictures reproduced below.

  5. A comparison of the illustration of the man in white paper with Tenniel’s political cartoons in Punch leaves little doubt that the face under the folded paper hat is Benjamin Disraeli’s. Tenniel and/or Carroll may have had in mind the “white papers” (official documents) with which such statesmen are surrounded.

  6. It is easy to overlook the humor in having a horse passenger call out not “change horses” but “change engines.”

  7. There is an old joke based on this pun. “I’m a little hoarse,” a person says, then adds, “I have a little colt.”

  8. In England, packages containing glass objects are commonly labeled “Glass, with care.”

  9. Head was Victorian slang for a postage stamp. Because Alice has a head, the voices suggest she should be posted. Note the grim suggestion of a post with an enemy’s severed head on top.

  10. Carroll may have intended this as a quote of the first line of a Mother Goose melody:

  I would, if I could,

  If I couldn’t how could I?

  I couldn’t, without I could, could I?

  Could you, without you could, could ye?

  Could ye? could ye?

  Could you, without you could, could ye?

  11. In the “Wasp in a Wig” episode (reprinted in this book) the aged Wasp’s long sigh may have expressed Carroll’s sadness over the gulf time had placed between himself and Alice. George Garcin says in a letter that he thinks the Gnat’s sigh carries similar overtones. Time, symbolized by the train, is carrying Alice (his “dear friend, and an old friend”) the “wrong way”—toward womanhood, when she will soon be lost to him. This passage of time may be the “shadow of a sigh” in the last stanza of Carroll’s prefatory poem.

  Fred Madden, writing on “Orthographic Transformations in Through the Looking-Glass,” in Jabberwocky (Autumn 1985), has an intriguing explanation of why Carroll put a gnat in the railway carriage alongside a goat. In Carroll’s game of Doublets, the word gnat becomes goat by the change of a single letter. Madden supports this contention by referring to a word ladder that actually appears in Carroll’s pamphlet Doublets: A Word Puzzle (Macmillan, third edition, 1880, page 31), in which Carroll changed GNAT to BITE in six steps: GNAT, GOAT, BOAT, BOLT, BOLE, BILE, BITE.

  12. The train’s leap completes Alice’s move of P-Q4. In Carroll’s original manuscript Alice grabbed the hair of an old lady in the carriage, but on June 1, 1870, Tenniel wrote Carroll:

  My Dear Dodgson:

  I think that when the jump occurs in the railway scene you might very well make Alice lay hold of the goat’s beard as being the object nearest to her hand—instead of the old lady’s hair. The jerk would actually throw them together.

  Don’t think me brutal, but I am bound to say that the “wasp” chapter does not interest me in the least, and I can’t see my way to a picture. If you want to shorten the book, I can’t help thinking—with all submission—that this is your opportunity.

  In an agony of haste,

  Yours sincerely,

  J. TENNIEL

  Carroll adopted both suggestions. The old lady and a thirteenth chapter about the wasp were removed.

  13. Snapdragon (or flapdragon) is the name of a pastime that delighted Victorian children during the Christmas season. A shallow bowl was filled with brandy, raisins were tossed in, and the brandy set on fire. Players tried to snatch raisins from the flickering blue flames and pop them, still blazing, into their mouths. The burning raisins also were called snapdragons.

  14. Frumenty is a wheat pudding, usually prepared with sugar, spice, and raisins.

  15. Yossi Natanson, an Israeli correspondent, points out that Alice knows she can’t go back because she is a pawn and pawns are unable to move backward.

  16. Queen Victoria, Charles Lovett informed me, owned a spaniel named Dash that was well known in England. The queen was often photographed and painted with Dash at her side or on her lap.

  17. Alice may be thinking of Lily, the name of the white pawn whose place she has taken, and also of her own last name, Liddell. Perhaps, as readers Josephine van Dyk and Mrs. Carlton Hyman independently proposed, Alice is vaguely recalling the sound of her first name, which seems to begin with an L—“L-is.” Ada Brown supported this conjecture by sending the following lines from “Bruno’s Picnic,” a chapter in Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded: “What does an Apple-Tree begin with, when it wants to speak?” asks Sylvie. The narrator replies: “Doesn’t ‘Apple-Tree’ always begin with ‘Eh!’?”

  In Language and Lewis Carroll (Mouton, 1970), Robert Sutherland points out that the theme of forgetting one’s name is common in Carroll’s writings. “Who are you?” the Caterpillar asks Alice, and she is too confused to answer; the Red Queen admonishes Alice, “Remember who you are!”; the man in white paper tells her, “So young a child ought to know where she’s going, even if she doesn’t know her name”; the White Queen is so frightened by thunder that she forgets her name; the Baker forgets his name in The Hunting of the Snark, and so does the Professor in Sylvie and Bruno. Perhaps this theme reflects Carroll’s own confusion over whether he is Charles Dodgson, the Oxford professor, or Lewis Carroll, writer of fantasy and nonsense.

  18. Fred Madden (see this chapter’s Note 11) observes that Alice, a pawn, is here meeting a fawn, and that in Carroll’s game of doublets the change of a single letter turns pawn to fawn. According to Carroll’s Dramatis Personae, at the beginning of the book, the fawn is actually a pawn in the chess game. Presumably the two pawns, both white, are now adjacent to each other.

  19. The wood in which things have no name is in fact the universe itself, as it is apart from symbol-manipulating creatures who label portions of it because—as Alice earlier remarked with pragmatic wisdom—“i
t’s useful to the people that name them.” The realization that the world by itself contains no signs—that there is no connection whatever between things and their names except by way of a mind that finds the tags useful—is by no means a trivial philosophic insight. The fawn’s delight in recalling its name reminds one of the old joke about Adam naming the tiger the tiger because it looked like a tiger.

  20. Reader Greg Stone calls my attention to the way “house” and the names of the Tweedle brothers are left-right reversed on these signs, in keeping with the fact that Carroll intended the brothers to be mirror images of each other.

  21. Carroll clearly intended this last clause and title of the next chapter to be a rhymed couplet:

  Feeling sure that they must be

  Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

  CHAPTER IV

  Tweedledum and Tweedledee

  They were standing under a tree, each with an arm round the other’s neck, and Alice knew which was which in a moment, because one of them had “DUM” embroidered on his collar, and the other “DEE.” “I suppose they’ve each got ‘TWEEDLE’ round at the back of the collar,” she said to herself.

  They stood so still that she quite forgot they were alive, and she was just going round to see if the word “TWEEDLE” was written at the back of each collar, when she was startled by a voice coming from the one marked “DUM.”

  “If you think we’re wax-works,” he said, “you ought to pay, you know. Wax-works weren’t made to be looked at for nothing. Nohow!”

  “Contrariwise,” added the one marked “DEE,” “if you think we’re alive, you ought to speak.”

  “I’m sure I’m very sorry,” was all Alice could say; for the words of the old song kept ringing through her head like the ticking of a clock, and she could hardly help saying them out loud:—1