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

by Lewis Carroll

  1. In the 1720s there was a bitter rivalry between George Frederick Handel, the German-English composer, and Giovanni Battista Bononcini, an Italian composer. John Byrom, an eighteenth-century hymn writer and teacher of shorthand, described the controversy as follows:

  Some say, compared to Bononcini

  That Mynheer Handel’s but a ninny;

  Others aver that he to Handel

  Is scarcely fit to hold a candle;

  Strange all this difference should be

  Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.

  No one knows whether the nursery rhyme about the Tweedle brothers originally had reference to this famous musical battle, or whether it was an older rhyme from which Byrom borrowed in the last line of his doggerel. (See the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, 1952, edited by Iona and Peter Opie, page 418.)

  2. Tenniel’s Tweedle brothers, in their schoolboy skeleton suits, as they were called, strongly resemble his drawings of John Bull in Punch. See the first chapter of Michael Hancher’s The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books.

  “First Boy,” Everett Bleiler writes in a letter, was a term used in British schools for the brightest boy in a class, or an older boy who served as a sort of class monitor.

  3. Tweedledum and Tweedledee are what geometers call “enantiomorphs,” mirror-image forms of each other. That Carroll intended this is strongly suggested by Tweedledee’s favorite word, “contrariwise,” and by the fact that they extend right and left hands for a handshake. Tenniel’s picture of the two enantiomorphs arrayed for battle, standing in identical postures, indicates that he looked upon the twins in the same way. Note that the position of the fingers of Tweedledum’s right hand (or is it Tweedledee’s?—the bolster was put around the neck of Dee, but the saucepan marks him as Dum) exactly matches the position of his brother’s left fingers.

  The Tweedle brothers are mentioned in Finnegans Wake (Viking, 1959) on page 258.

  4. “In composing ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter,’ ” Carroll wrote to an uncle in 1872, “I had no particular poem in my mind. The metre is a common one, and I don’t think ‘Eugene Aram’ [a poem by Thomas Hood] suggested it more than the many other poems I have read in the same metre” (The Letters of Lewis Carroll, edited by Morton Cohen, Vol. 1, page 177).

  As a check against the tendency to find too much intended symbolism in the Alice books it is well to remember that, when Carroll gave the manuscript of this poem to Tenniel for illustrating, he offered the artist a choice of drawing a carpenter, butterfly, or baronet. Each word fitted the rhyme scheme, and Carroll had no preference so far as the nonsense was concerned. Tenniel chose the carpenter.

  The boxlike paper hat that Tenniel placed on the carpenter’s head is no longer folded by carpenters. However, these hats are still widely used by operators of newspaper printing presses; they fold them from blank sheets of newsprint and wear them to keep the ink out of their hair. J. B. Priestley has written an amusing article on “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (New Statesman, August 10, 1957, p. 168) in which he interprets the two figures as archetypes of two kinds of politicians.

  5. Richard Boothe notices in a letter that Peter Newell, in his illustration for this scene, violated the poem by putting both birds and clouds in the sky. (See More Annotated Alice, page 219.) Newell’s Walrus wears a Victorian bathing suit. The key hanging from his neck is for a bathing machine that Newell placed in the background.

  6. At Tenniel’s suggestion this line was altered from “Were walking hand in hand.”

  7. Cabbages and Kings was the title of O. Henry’s first book. The first four lines of this stanza are the best known and most often quoted lines of the poem. In “The Adventure of the Mad Tea Party,” the last story in The Adventures of Ellery Queen, these lines are an important element in the detective’s curious method of frightening a confession out of a murderer.

  Jane O’Connor Creed wrote to point out how Carroll’s lines echo the following portion of King Richard’s speech in Shakespeare’s Richard the Second, Act 3, Scene 2:

  Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

  Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

  Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

  Let’s choose executors and talk of wills;

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

  And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

  8. For Savile Clarke’s Alice operetta Carroll added an additional verse:

  The Carpenter he ceased to sob;

  The Walrus ceased to weep;

  They’d finished all the oysters;

  And they laid them down to sleep—

  And of their craft and cruelty

  The punishment to reap.

  After the Walrus and Carpenter have gone to sleep, the ghosts of two oysters appear on the stage to sing and dance and punish the sleepers by stamping on their chests. Carroll felt, and apparently audiences agreed with him, that this provided a more effective ending for the episode and also somewhat mollified oyster sympathizers among the spectators.

  The ghost of the first oyster dances a mazurka and sings:

  The Carpenter is sleeping, the butter’s on his face,

  The vinegar and pepper are all about the place!

  Let oysters rock your cradle and lull you into rest;

  And if that will not do it, we’ll sit upon your chest!

  We’ll sit upon your chest! We’ll sit upon your chest!

  The simplest way to do it is to sit upon your chest!

  The ghost of the second oyster dances a horn-pipe and sings:

  O woeful, weeping Walrus, your tears are all a sham!

  You’re greedier for Oysters than children are for jam.

  You like to have an Oyster to give the meal a zest—

  Excuse me, wicked Walrus, for stamping on your chest!

  For stamping on your chest!

  For stamping on your chest!

  Excuse me, wicked Walrus, for stamping on your chest!

  (All the above stanzas are quoted from Roger Green’s notes to The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, Vol. II, pages 446–47.)

  9. Alice is puzzled because she faces here the traditional ethical dilemma of having to choose between judging a person in terms of acts or in terms of intentions.

  10. This well-known, much-quoted discussion of the Red King’s dream (the monarch is snoring on a square directly east of the square currently occupied by Alice) plunges poor Alice into grim metaphysical waters. The Tweedle brothers defend Bishop Berkeley’s view that all material objects, including ourselves, are only “sorts of things” in the mind of God. Alice takes the common-sense position of Samuel Johnson, who supposed that he refuted Berkeley by kicking a large stone. “A very instructive discussion from a philosophical point of view,” Bertrand Russell remarked, commenting on the Red King’s dream in a radio panel discussion of Alice. “But if it were not put humorously, we should find it too painful.”

  The Berkeleyan theme troubled Carroll as it troubles all Platonists. Both Alice adventures are dreams, and in Sylvie and Bruno the narrator shuttles back and forth mysteriously between real and dream worlds. “So, either I’ve been dreaming about Sylvie,” he says to himself early in the novel, “and this is the reality. Or else I’ve really been with Sylvie, and this is a dream! Is Life itself a dream, I wonder?” In Through the Looking-Glass Carroll returns to the question in the first paragraph of Chapter 8, in the closing lines of the book, and in the last line of the book’s terminal poem.

  An odd sort of infinite regress is involved here in the parallel dreams of Alice and the Red King. Alice dreams of the King, who is dreaming of Alice, who is dreaming of the King, and so on, like two mirrors facing each other, or that preposterous cartoon of Saul Steinberg’s in which a fat lady paints a picture of a thin lady who is painting a picture of the fat lady who is painting a picture of the thin lady, and so on deeper into the two canvases.

  James
Branch Cabell, in Smire, the last novel of his Smirt, Smith, Smire trilogy, introduces the same circular paradox of two persons, each dreaming the other. Smire and Smike confront one another in Chapter 9, each claiming to be asleep and dreaming the other. In a preface to his trilogy, Cabell described it as a “full-length dream story” that attempts “to extend the naturalism of Lewis Carroll.”

  The Red King sleeps throughout the entire narrative until he is checkmated at the close of Chapter 9 by Queen Alice when she captures the Red Queen. No chess player needs reminding that kings tend to sleep throughout most chess games, sometimes not moving after castling. Tournament games are occasionally played in which a king remains on its starting square throughout the entire game.

  11. This remark of Tweedledum’s was anticipated by Alice in the first chapter of the previous book where she wonders if her shrinking size might result in her “going out altogether, like a candle.”

  12. Molly Martin, in a letter, suggests that Tweededee’s “Ditto, ditto” underscores the doubling of twins and the identical forms of objects and their mirror reflections.

  13. The broken rattle can be seen on the ground in Tenniel’s illustration for this scene. In a letter to Henry Savile Clark (November 29, 1886) Carroll complained about how Tenniel had slyly drawn a watchman’s rattle: “Mr. Tenniel has introduced a false ‘reading’ in his picture of the quarrel of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I am certain that ‘my nice new rattle’ meant, in the old nursery-song, a child’s rattle not a watchman’s rattle as he has drawn it.”

  In those days a watchman’s rattle consisted of a thin wooden strip that vibrated against the teeth of a ratchet wheel when the rattle was whirled, producing a loud clacking noise that sounded an alarm. They are sold today mainly as party noisemakers. As reader H. P. Young pointed out in a letter, they are fragile and easily broken.

  In a shrewd analysis of the objects attached to the White Knight’s horse in Chapter 8, Janis Lull identifies a large watchman’s rattle at the front of the horse. It is visible in three pictures, as well as in the book’s frontispiece. Tenniel had earlier drawn such a rattle in the Punch cartoon (January 19, 1856) shown below.

  14. Tenniel’s illustration of this scene seems to show Alice arranging a bolster around Tweedledee’s neck, which would make the other brother Tweedledum. But if you look closely you will see a string in both her hands. The twin on the left is Tweedledum, and Alice is tying a pot on his head. As Michael Hancher points out in his book on the Tenniel pictures, the artist apparently made a mistake here in giving the wooden sword to Tweedledee.

  15. J. B. S. Haldane, in his book Possible Worlds (Chapter 2), thinks that the monstrous black crow of the nursery rhyme is a way of describing a solar eclipse:

  Every one, for example, has heard of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, whose battle was interrupted by a monstrous crow as big as a tar-barrel. The true story of these heroes is as follows: King Alyattes of Lydia, father of the celebrated Croesus, had been engaged for five years in a war with Cyaxares, king of the Medes. In its sixth year, on May 28, 585 B.C., as we now know, a battle was interrupted by a total eclipse of the sun. The kings not only stopped the battle, but accepted mediation. One of the two mediators was no less a person than Nebuchadnezzar, who in the preceding year had destroyed Jerusalem and led its people into captivity.

  CHAPTER V

  Wool and Water

  She caught the shawl as she spoke, and looked about for the owner: in another moment the White Queen came running wildly through the wood, with both arms stretched out wide, as if she were flying, and Alice very civilly went to meet her with the shawl.1

  “I’m very glad I happened to be in the way,” Alice said, as she helped her to put on her shawl again.

  The White Queen only looked at her in a helpless frightened sort of way, and kept repeating something in a whisper to herself that sounded like “Bread-and-butter, bread-and-butter,”2 and Alice felt that if there was to be any conversation at all, she must manage it herself. So she began rather timidly: “Am I addressing the White Queen?”

  “Well, yes, if you call that a-dressing,” the Queen said. “It isn’t my notion of the thing, at all.”

  Alice thought it would never do to have an argument at the very beginning of their conversation, so she smiled and said “If your Majesty will only tell me the right way to begin, I’ll do it as well as I can.”

  “But I don’t want it done at all!” groaned the poor Queen. “I’ve been a-dressing myself for the last two hours.”

  It would have been all the better, as it seemed to Alice, if she had got some one else to dress her, she was so dreadfully untidy. “Every single thing’s crooked,” Alice thought to herself, “and she’s all over pins!—May I put your shawl straight for you?” she added aloud.

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with it!” the Queen said, in a melancholy voice. “It’s out of temper, I think. I’ve pinned it here, and I’ve pinned it there, but there’s no pleasing it!”

  “It ca’n’t go straight, you know, if you pin it all on one side,” Alice said, as she gently put it right for her; “and, dear me, what a state your hair is in!”

  “The brush has got entangled in it!” the Queen said with a sigh. “And I lost the comb yesterday.”

  Alice carefully released the brush, and did her best to get the hair into order. “Come, you look rather better now!” she said, after altering most of the pins. “But really you should have a lady’s-maid!”

  “I’m sure I’ll take you with pleasure!” the Queen said. “Twopence a week, and jam every other day.”

  Alice couldn’t help laughing, as she said “I don’t want you to hire me—and I don’t care for jam.”

  “It’s very good jam,” said the Queen.

  “Well, I don’t want any to-day, at any rate.”

  “You couldn’t have it if you did want it,” the Queen said. “The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.”3

  “It must come sometimes to ‘jam to-day,’ ” Alice objected.

  “No, it ca’n’t,” said the Queen. “It’s jam every other day: to-day isn’t any other day, you know.”

  “I don’t understand you,” said Alice. “It’s dreadfully confusing!”

  “That’s the effect of living backwards,” the Queen said kindly: “it always makes one a little giddy at first—”

  “Living backwards!” Alice repeated in great astonishment. “I never heard of such a thing!”4

  “—but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.”

  “I’m sure mine only works one way,” Alice remarked. “I ca’n’t remember things before they happen.”

  “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.

  “What sort of things do you remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.

  “Oh, things that happened the week after next,” the Queen replied in a careless tone. “For instance, now,” she went on, sticking a large piece of plaster on her finger as she spoke, “there’s the King’s Messenger.5 He’s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.”

  “Suppose he never commits the crime?” said Alice.

  “That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?” the Queen said, as she bound the plaster round her finger with a bit of ribbon.

  Alice felt there was no denying that. “Of course it would be all the better,” she said: “but it wouldn’t be all the better his being punished.”

  “You’re wrong there, at any rate,” said the Queen. “Were you ever punished?”

  “Only for faults,” said Alice.

  “And you were all the better for it, I know!” the Queen said triumphantly.

  “Yes, but then I had done the things I was punished for,” said Alice: “that makes all the difference.”

  “But if you hadn’t done them,” the Queen said, “that would have been better still;
better, and better, and better!” Her voice went higher with each “better,” till it got quite to a squeak at last.

  Alice was just beginning to say “There’s a mistake somewhere—,” when the Queen began screaming, so loud that she had to leave the sentence unfinished. “Oh, oh, oh!” shouted the Queen, shaking her hand about as if she wanted to shake it off. “My finger’s bleeding! Oh, oh, oh, oh!”

  Her screams were so exactly like the whistle of a steam-engine, that Alice had to hold both her hands over her ears.

  “What is the matter?” she said, as soon as there was a chance of making herself heard. “Have you pricked your finger?”

  “I haven’t pricked it yet,” the Queen said, “but I soon shall—oh, oh, oh!”

  “When do you expect to do it?” Alice asked, feeling very much inclined to laugh.

  “When I fasten my shawl again,” the poor Queen groaned out: “the brooch will come undone directly. Oh, oh!” As she said the words the brooch flew open, and the Queen clutched wildly at it, and tried to clasp it again.

  “Take care!” cried Alice. “You’re holding it all crooked!” And she caught at the brooch; but it was too late: the pin had slipped, and the Queen had pricked her finger.

  “That accounts for the bleeding, you see,” she said to Alice with a smile. “Now you understand the way things happen here.”

  “But why don’t you scream now?” Alice asked, holding her hands ready to put over her ears again.

  “Why, I’ve done all the screaming already,” said the Queen. “What would be the good of having it all over again?”

  By this time it was getting light. “The crow must have flown away, I think,” said Alice: “I’m so glad it’s gone. I thought it was the night coming on.”

  “I wish I could manage to be glad!” the Queen said. “Only I never can remember the rule. You must be very happy, living in this wood, and being glad whenever you like!”

  “Only it is so very lonely here!” Alice said in a melancholy voice; and, at the thought of her loneliness, two large tears came rolling down her cheeks.