The Annotated Alice

by Lewis Carroll

  That opens the enchanted door.

  In his notes for an Oxford edition of the Alice books, Roger Green links this gold key to the magic key to Heaven in George MacDonald’s famous fantasy tale “The Golden Key.” The story first appeared in an 1867 book, Dealings with Fairies, two years after the publication of Alice in Wonderland, but Carroll and MacDonald were good friends and it is possible, Green writes, that Carroll saw the story in manuscript. MacDonald also wrote a poem titled “The Golden Key” that was published early enough (1861) for Carroll to have read it. The story is reprinted in Michael Hearn’s splendid anthology The Victorian Fairy Tale Book (Pantheon, 1988).

  7. T. S. Eliot revealed to the critic Louis L. Martz that he was thinking of this episode when he wrote the following lines for “Burnt Norton,” the first poem in his Four Quartets:

  Time present and time past

  Are both perhaps present in time future.

  And time future contained in time past.

  If all time is eternally present

  All time is unredeemable.

  What might have been is an abstraction

  Remaining a perpetual possibility

  Only in a world of speculation.

  What might have been and what has been

  Point to one end, which is always present.

  Footfalls echo in the memory

  Down the passage which we did not take

  Towards the door we never opened

  Into the rose-garden.

  The little door to a secret garden also appears in Eliot’s The Family Reunion. It was for him a metaphor for events that might have been, had one opened certain doors.

  8. The Victorian medicine bottle had neither a screw top nor a label on the side. It was corked, with a paper label tied to the neck.

  9. The “nice little stories,” Charles Lovett reminds me, were not so nice. They were the traditional fairy tales, filled with episodes of horror and usually containing a pious moral. By doing away with morals, the Alice books opened up a new genre of fiction for children.

  10. This is the first of twelve occasions in the book on which Alice alters in size. Richard Ellmann has suggested that Carroll may have been unconsciously symbolizing the great disparity between the small Alice whom he loved but could not marry and the large Alice she would soon become. See “On Alice’s Changes in Size in Wonderland,” by Selwyn Goodacre, in Jabberwocky (Winter 1977), for many discrepancies in Tenniel’s pictures with respect to Alice’s size.

  11. Note Tweedledum’s use of the same candle-flame metaphor in the fourth chapter of the second Alice book.

  12. “alas for poor Alice!”: Did Carroll intend a pun on “alas”? It is hard to be sure, but there is no question about the intent in Finnegans Wake (Viking revised edition, 1959, page 528) when James Joyce writes: “Alicious, twinstreams twinestraines, through alluring glass or alas in jumboland?” And again (page 270): “Though Wonderlawn’s lost us for ever. Alis, alas, she broke the glass! Liddell lokker through the leafery, ours is mistery of pain.”

  For the hundreds of references to Dodgson and the Alice books in Finnegans Wake, see Ann McGarrity Buki’s excellent paper “Lewis Carroll in Finnegans Wake,” in Lewis Carroll: A Celebration (Clarkson N. Potter, 1982), edited by Edward Guiliano, and J. S. Atherton’s earlier paper “Lewis Carroll and Finnegans Wake,” in English Studies (February 1952). Most of the allusions are not in dispute, though what is one to make of such oddities as the identical initial letters of the names Alice Pleasance Liddell and Anna Livia Plurabelle? Is it a coincidence, like the correspondences in the names of Carroll and Alice (noticed by reader Dennis Green) with respect to word lengths, and the positions of vowels, consonants, and double letters in the last names?

  ALICE LIDDELL

  LEWIS CARROLL

  More letterplay: Consider the initial consonants of “Dear Lewis Carroll.” Backwards they are the initials of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

  Of more serious interest is the fact that Alice had a son named Caryl Liddell Hargreaves. Another coincidence? Alice’s one major romance, before she married Reginald Hargreaves, was with England’s Prince Leopold. They met when he was a Christ Church undergraduate. Queen Victoria considered unthinkable his marrying anyone other than a princess, and Mrs. Liddell agreed. Alice wore a gift from the prince on her wedding gown, and she named her second son Leopold. A few weeks later, Prince Leopold, married to a princess, named a daughter Alice. It is hard to believe that when Alice called her third son Caryl she did not have her old mathematician friend in mind, but according to Anne Clark, in her marvelous book The Real Alice (Stein & Day, 1982), Alice always insisted that the name came from a novel. The novel’s identity is unknown.

  13. There is no evidence, Denis Crutch and R. B. Shaberman maintain in their booklet Under the Quizzing Glass (Magpie Press, 1972), that Alice Liddell liked to pretend she was two people. However, in keeping with their contention that Carroll injected much of himself into his fictional Alice, they remind us that Carroll was always careful to keep separate Charles Dodgson, the Oxford mathematician, and Lewis Carroll, writer of children’s books and lover of little girls.

  Chapter II

  The Pool of Tears

  “Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). “Now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!” (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off). “Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I’m sure I sha’n’t be able! I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself about you: you must manage the best way you can—but I must be kind to them,” thought Alice, “or perhaps they wo’n’t walk the way I want to go! Let me see. I’ll give them a new pair of boots every Christmas.”

  And she went on planning to herself how she would manage it. “They must go by the carrier,” she thought; “and how funny it’ll seem, sending presents to one’s own feet! And how odd the directions will look!

  Alice’s Right Foot, Esq.

  Hearthrug,

  near the Fender,1

  (with Alice’s love).

  Oh dear, what nonsense I’m talking!”

  Just at this moment her head struck against the roof of the hall: in fact she was now rather more than nine feet high, and she at once took up the little golden key and hurried off to the garden door.

  Poor Alice! It was as much as she could do, lying down on one side, to look through into the garden with one eye; but to get through was more hopeless than ever: she sat down and began to cry again.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Alice, “a great girl like you,” (she might well say this), “to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!” But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep, and reaching half down the hall.

  After a time she heard a little pattering of feet in the distance, and she hastily dried her eyes to see what was coming. It was the White Rabbit returning, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid-gloves in one hand and a large fan in the other: he came trotting along in a great hurry, muttering to himself, as he came, “Oh! The Duchess, the Duchess! Oh! Wo’n’t she be savage if I’ve kept her waiting!” Alice felt so desperate that she was ready to ask help of any one: so, when the Rabbit came near her, she began, in a low, timid voice, “If you please, Sir—” The Rabbit started violently, dropped the white kid-gloves and the fan, and scurried away into the darkness as hard as he could go.2

  Alice took up the fan and gloves, and, as the hall was very hot, she kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking. “Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’
m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” And she began thinking over all the children she knew that were of the same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of them.

  “I’m sure I’m not Ada,” she said, “for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn’t go in ringlets at all; and I’m sure I ca’n’t be Mabel,3 for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh, she knows such a very little! Besides, she’s she, and I’m I, and—oh dear, how puzzling it all is! I’ll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!4 However, the Multiplication-Table doesn’t signify: let’s try Geography. London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome, and Rome—no, that’s all wrong, I’m certain! I must have been changed for Mabel! I’ll try and say ‘How doth the little—’,” and she crossed her hands on her lap, as if she were saying lessons, and began to repeat it, but her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words did not come the same as they used to do:—5

  “How doth the little crocodile

  Improve his shining tail,

  And pour the waters of the Nile

  On every golden scale!

  “How cheerfully he seems to grin,

  How neatly spreads his claws,

  And welcomes little fishes in,

  With gently smiling jaws!”

  “I’m sure those are not the right words,” said poor Alice, and her eyes filled with tears again as she went on, “I must be Mabel after all, and I shall have to go and live in that poky little house, and have next to no toys to play with, and oh, ever so many lessons to learn! No, I’ve made up my mind about it: if I’m Mabel, I’ll stay down here! It’ll be no use their putting their heads down and saying ‘Come up again, dear!’ I shall only look up and say ‘Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else’—but, oh dear!” cried Alice, with a sudden burst of tears, “I do wish they would put their heads down! I am so very tired of being all alone here!”

  As she said this she looked down at her hands, and was surprised to see that she had put on one of the Rabbit’s little white kid-gloves while she was talking. “How can I have done that?” she thought. “I must be growing small again.” She got up and went to the table to measure herself by it, and found that, as nearly as she could guess, she was now about two feet high, and was going on shrinking rapidly: she soon found out that the cause of this was the fan she was holding, and she dropped it hastily, just in time to save herself from shrinking away altogether.

  “That was a narrow escape!” said Alice, a good deal frightened at the sudden change, but very glad to find herself still in existence.6 “And now for the garden!” And she ran with all speed back to the little door; but, alas! the little door was shut again, and the little golden key was lying on the glass table as before, “and things are worse than ever,” thought the poor child, “for I never was so small as this before, never! And I declare it’s too bad, that it is!”

  As she said these words her foot slipped, and in another moment, splash! she was up to her chin in salt-water. Her first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, “and in that case I can go back by railway,” she said to herself. (Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the general conclusion that, wherever you go to on the English coast, you find a number of bathing-machines7 in the sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging-houses, and behind them a railway station.) However, she soon made out that she was in the pool of tears which she had wept when she was nine feet high.

  “I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer to-day.”

  Just then she heard something splashing about in the pool a little way off, and she swam nearer to make out what it was: at first she thought it must be a walrus or hippopotamus, but then she remembered how small she was now, and she soon made out that it was only a mouse, that had slipped in like herself.

  “Would it be of any use, now,” thought Alice, “to speak to this mouse? Everything is so out-of-the-way down here, that I should think very likely it can talk: at any rate, there’s no harm in trying.” So she began: “O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O Mouse!” (Alice thought this must be the right way of speaking to a mouse: she had never done such a thing before, but she remembered having seen, in her brother’s Latin Grammar,8 “A mouse—of a mouse—to a mouse—a mouse—O mouse!”) The mouse looked at her rather inquisitively, and seemed to her to wink with one of its little eyes, but it said nothing.

  “Perhaps it doesn’t understand English,” thought Alice. “I daresay it’s a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror.” (For, with all her knowledge of history, Alice had no very clear notion how long ago anything had happened.) So she began again: “Où est ma chatte?” which was the first sentence in her French lesson-book.9 The Mouse gave a sudden leap out of the water, and seemed to quiver all over with fright. “Oh, I beg your pardon!” cried Alice hastily, afraid that she had hurt the poor animal’s feelings. “I quite forgot you didn’t like cats.”

  “Not like cats!” cried the Mouse in a shrill, passionate voice. “Would you like cats, if you were me?”

  “Well, perhaps not,” said Alice in a soothing tone: “don’t be angry about it. And yet I wish I could show you our cat Dinah. I think you’d take a fancy to cats, if you could only see her. She is such a dear quiet thing,” Alice went on, half to herself, as she swam lazily about in the pool, “and she sits purring so nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her face—and she is such a nice soft thing to nurse—and she’s such a capital one for catching mice—oh, I beg your pardon!” cried Alice again, for this time the Mouse was bristling all over, and she felt certain it must be really offended. “We wo’n’t talk about her any more, if you’d rather not.”

  “We, indeed!” cried the Mouse, who was trembling down to the end of its tail. “As if I would talk on such a subject! Our family always hated cats: nasty, low, vulgar things! Don’t let me hear the name again!”

  “I wo’n’t indeed!” said Alice, in a great hurry to change the subject of conversation. “Are you—are you fond—of—of dogs?” The Mouse did not answer, so Alice went on eagerly: “There is such a nice little dog, near our house, I should like to show you! A little bright-eyed terrier, you know, with oh, such long curly brown hair! And it’ll fetch things when you throw them, and it’ll sit up and beg for its dinner, and all sorts of things—I ca’n’t remember half of them—and it belongs to a farmer, you know, and he says it’s so useful, it’s worth a hundred pounds! He says it kills all the rats and—oh dear!” cried Alice in a sorrowful tone. “I’m afraid I’ve offended it again!” For the Mouse was swimming away from her as hard as it could go, and making quite a commotion in the pool as it went.

  So she called softly after it, “Mouse dear! Do come back again, and we wo’n’t talk about cats, or dogs either, if you don’t like them!” When the Mouse heard this, it turned round and swam slowly back to her: its face was quite pale (with passion, Alice thought), and it said, in a low trembling voice, “Let us get to the shore, and then I’ll tell you my history, and you’ll understand why it is I hate cats and dogs.”

  It was high time to go, for the pool was getting quite crowded with the birds and animals that had fallen into it: there was a Duck and a Dodo, a Lory and an Eaglet, and several other curious creatures.10 Alice led the way, and the whole party swam to the shore.

  1. A fender is a low metal frame or screen, sometimes ornamental, between the hearthrug and an open fireplace.

  Selwyn Goodacre suspe
cts that when Alice addresses her right foot as “Esquire,” Carroll may have intended a subtle English/French joke. The French word for “foot” is pied. Its gender is masculine regardless of the owner’s sex.

  2. In his article “Alice on the Stage” (cited in the first note on the book’s prefatory poem) Carroll wrote:

  And the White Rabbit, what of him? Was he framed on the “Alice” lines, or meant as a contrast? As a contrast, distinctly. For her “youth,” “audacity,” “vigour,” and “swift directness of purpose,” read “elderly,” “timid,” “feeble,” and “nervously shilly-shallying,” and you will get something of what I meant him to be. I think the White Rabbit should wear spectacles. I am sure his voice should quaver, and his knees quiver, and his whole air suggest a total inability to say “Bo” to a goose!

  In Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the original manuscript, the rabbit drops a nosegay instead of a fan. Alice’s subsequent shrinking is the result of smelling these flowers.

  3. In his original story, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the names are Gertrude and Florence; these were cousins of Alice Liddell.

  4. The simplest explanation of why Alice will never get to 20 is this: the multiplication table traditionally stops with the twelves, so if you continue this nonsense progression—4 times 5 is 12, 4 times 6 is 13, 4 times 7 is 14, and so on—you end with 4 times 12 (the highest she can go) is 19—just one short of 20.

  A. L. Taylor, in his book The White Knight, advances an interesting but more complicated theory. Four times 5 actually is 12 in a number system using a base of 18. Four times 6 is 13 in a system with a base of 21. If we continue this progression, always increasing the base by 3, our products keep increasing by one until we reach 20, where for the first time the scheme breaks down. Four times 13 is not 20 (in a number system with a base of 42), but “1” followed by whatever symbol is adopted for “10.”