The Annotated Alice

by Lewis Carroll

  The long grass rustled at her feet as the White Rabbit hurried by—the frightened Mouse splashed his way through the neighbouring pool—she could hear the rattle of the teacups as the March Hare and his friends shared their never-ending meal, and the shrill voice of the Queen ordering off her unfortunate guests to execution—once more the pig-baby was sneezing on the Duchess’s knee, while plates and dishes crashed around it—once more the shriek of the Gryphon, the squeaking of the Lizard’s slate-pencil, and the choking of the suppressed guinea-pigs, filled the air, mixed up with the distant sob of the miserable Mock Turtle.

  So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality—the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds—the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen’s shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd-boy—and the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard—while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle’s heavy sobs.

  Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.10

  1. In The Nursery “Alice” Carroll points out that all twelve jury members are visible in Tenniel’s drawing of this scene, and he lists them as a frog, dormouse, rat, ferret, hedgehog, lizard, bantam cock, mole, duck, squirrel, storkling, mousling. Of the last two Carroll writes: “Mr. Tenniel says the screaming bird is a Storkling (of course you know what that is?) and the little white head is a Mousling. Isn’t it a little Darling?”

  2. The number forty-two held a special meaning for Carroll. The first Alice book had forty-two illustrations. An important nautical rule, Rule 42, is cited in Carroll’s preface to The Hunting of the Snark, and in Fit 1, stanza 7, the Baker comes aboard the ship with forty-two carefully packed boxes. In his poem “Phantasmagoria,” Canto 1, stanza 16, Carroll gives his age as forty-two although he was five years younger at the time. In Through the Looking-Glass the White King sends 4,207 horses and men to restore Humpty Dumpty, and seven is a factor of forty-two. Alice’s age in the second book is seven years and six months, and seven times six equals forty-two. It is probably coincidental, but (as Philip Benham has observed) each Alice book has twelve chapters, or twenty-four in all, and twenty-four is forty-two backwards.

  For more numerology about forty-two—in Carroll’s life, in the Bible, in the Sherlock Holmes canon, and elsewhere—see the forty-second issue of Bandersnatch, the newsletter of England’s Lewis Carroll Society. (The issue was published in January 1942 plus 42.) See also Edward Wakeling’s “What I Tell You Forty-two Times Is True!” (Jabberwocky, Autumn 1977), his “Further Findings About the Number Forty-two” (Jabberwocky, Winter/Spring 1988) and Note 32 of my Annotated Snark as it appears in The Hunting of the Snark (William Kaufmann, Inc., 1981). In Douglas Adams’s popular science-fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, forty-two is said to be the answer to the “Ultimate Question about Everything.” See Chapter 1, Note 4, for still another forty-two.

  3. If the Knave didn’t write it, asks Selwyn Goodacre, how did he know it wasn’t signed?

  4. The White Rabbit’s evidence consists of six verses with confused pronouns and very little sense. They are taken in considerably revised form from Carroll’s eight-verse nonsense poem, “She’s All My Fancy Painted Him,” which first appeared in The Comic Times of London in 1855. The first line of the original copies the first line of “Alice Gray,” a sentimental song by William Mee that was popular at the time. The rest of the poem has no resemblance to the song except in meter.

  Carroll’s earlier version, with his introductory note, follows:

  This affecting fragment was found in MS. among the papers of the well-known author of “Was it You or I?” a tragedy, and the two popular novels, “Sister and Son,” and “The Niece’s Legacy, or the Grateful Grandfather.”

  She’s all my fancy painted him

  (I make no idle boast);

  If he or you had lost a limb,

  Which would have suffered most?

  He said that you had been to her,

  And seen me here before;

  But, in another character,

  She was the same of yore.

  There was not one that spoke to us,

  Of all that thronged the street:

  So he sadly got into a ’bus,

  And pattered with his feet.

  They sent him word I had not gone

  (We know it to be true);

  If she should push the matter on,

  What would become of you?

  They gave her one, they gave me two,

  They gave us three or more;

  They all returned from him to you,

  Though they were mine before.

  If I or she should chance to be

  Involved in this affair,

  He trusts to you to set them free,

  Exactly as we were.

  It seemed to me that you had been

  (Before she had this fit)

  An obstacle, that came between

  Him, and ourselves, and it.

  Don’t let him know she liked them best,

  For this must ever be

  A secret, kept from all the rest,

  Between yourself and me.

  Did Carroll introduce this poem into his story because the song behind it tells of the unrequited love of a man for a girl named Alice? I quote from John M. Shaw’s booklet (cited in Note 4 of Chapter 6) the song’s opening stanzas:

  She’s all my fancy painted her,

  She’s lovely, she’s divine,

  But her heart it is another’s,

  She never can be mine.

  Yet loved I as man never loved,

  A love without decay,

  O, my heart, my heart is breaking

  For the love of Alice Gray.

  5. “A statement that is a measure of her increasing confidence,” comments Selwyn Goodacre (Jabberwocky, Spring 1982), “because we know she hasn’t a coin in her pocket—she told the Dodo she only had the thimble.”

  6. This is the first of two references to throwing ink on someone’s face. In the first chapter of Through the Looking-Glass, Alice intends to revive the White King by tossing ink on his face.

  7. A similar reaction to a pun is one of the five characteristic traits of a snark, as we learn in the second “fit” of Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark:

  The third is its slowness in taking a jest;

  Should you happen to venture on one,

  It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:

  And it always looks grave at a pun.

  Tenniel’s illustration of the King looking around with a faint smile was clearly intended to show the King only a moment after the scene that appeared in the book’s frontispiece. The Knave has not altered his defiant stance, although the King (as Selwyn Goodacre noticed) has managed to change his crown, put on spectacles, and discard his orb and scepter, and the three court officials have fallen asleep. Observe that in both pictures Tenniel shaded the Knave’s nose to suggest that he is a lush. Victorians thought of criminals as heavy drinkers, and shading noses was a convention among cartoonists then, as it is now, to signify boozers. In The Nursery “Alice,” whose illustrations were hand-colored by Tenniel, the tip of the Knave’s nose is a rosy color in the frontispiece as well as in the picture in Chapter 8 where the Knave is presenting the King with his crow
n.

  CHARLES BENNETT’S FRONTISPIECE FOR

  The Fables of Aesop and Others.

  Jeffrey Stern, in Jabberwocky (Spring 1978), calls attention to many similarities between this frontispiece and the frontispiece of The Fables of Aesop and Others Translated into Human Nature (1857), illustrated by Tenniel’s fellow Punch artist Charles Henry Bennett:

  The Court clerk (the owl) has the stunned look of the King, and the Lion has an identical scowl to the Queen’s (she is even looking the same way). Some of the jurors and the bewigged bird/lawyers are in similar pose, and the pleading dog is in something of the same position as the Knave. All this would not mean very much but for the fact that Bennett’s book appeared in 1857—eight years before Wonderland. The fable illustrated, incidentally, is “Man tried at the Court of the Lion for the Ill-treatment of a Horse.”

  8. In Tenniel’s illustration of this scene the cards have become ordinary playing cards, though three have retained vestigial noses. In Peter Newell’s version some even have heads, arms, and legs.

  In many editions of Alice in Wonderland (I have not checked first editions), the card hidden by the six of spades has on its left margin the mysterious letters “B. ROLLITZ.” Perhaps he was an employee of the Dalziel brothers, who made the wood engravings.

  To underscore the return from dream to reality, as Richard Kelly notes in his contribution to Lewis Carroll: A Celebration, edited by Edward Guiliano, Tenniel has undressed the White Rabbit.

  9. This dream-within-a-dream motif (Alice’s sister dreaming of Alice’s dream) reoccurs in a more complicated form in the sequel. See Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 4, Note 10.

  10. On the last page of Carroll’s hand-lettered manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, which he gave to Alice Liddell, he pasted an oval photograph of her face that he had taken in 1859 when she was seven, the age of Alice in the story. It was not until 1977 that Morton Cohen discovered concealed underneath this photograph a drawing of Alice’s face. It is the only known sketch Dodgson ever made of the real Alice.

  Contents

  Preface to the 1897 Edition

  I. Looking-Glass House

  II. The Garden of Live Flowers

  III. Looking-Glass Insects

  IV. Tweedledum and Tweedledee

  V. Wool and Water

  VI. Humpty Dumpty

  VII. The Lion and the Unicorn

  VIII. “It’s My Own Invention”

  IX. Queen Alice

  X. Shaking

  XI. Waking

  XII. Which Dreamed it?

  White Pawn (Alice) to play, and win in eleven moves.

  RED

  WHITE

  1. Alice meets R. Q. 1. R. Q. to K. R’s 4th

  2. Alice through Q’s 3d (by railway) to Q’s 4th (Tweedledum and Tweedledee) 2. W. Q. to Q. B’s 4th (after shawl)

  3. Alice meets W. Q. (with shawl) 3. W. Q. to Q. B’s 5th (becomes sheep)

  4. Alice to Q’s 5th (shop, river, shop) 4. W. Q. to K. B’s 8th (leaves egg on shelf)

  5. Alice to Q’s 6th (Humpty Dumpty) 5. W. Q. to Q. B’s 8th (flying from R. Kt.)

  6. Alice to Q’s 7th (forest) 6. R. Kt. to K’s 2nd (ch.)

  7. W. Kt. takes R. Kt. 7. W. Kt. to K. B’s 5th

  8. Alice to Q’s 8th (coronation) 8. R. Q. to K’s sq. (examination)

  9. Alice becomes Queen 9. Queens castle

  10. Alice castles (feast) 10. W. Q. to Q. R’s 6th (soup)

  11. Alice takes R. Q. & wins

  Preface to

  the 1897 Edition

  As the chess-problem, given on the previous page, has puzzled some of my readers, it may be well to explain that it is correctly worked out, so far as the moves are concerned. The alternation of Red and White is perhaps not so strictly observed as it might be, and the “castling” of the three Queens is merely a way of saying that they entered the palace:1 but the “check” of the White King at move 6, the capture of the Red Knight at move 7, and the final “checkmate” of the Red King, will be found, by any one who will take the trouble to set the pieces and play the moves as directed, to be strictly in accordance with the laws of the game.2

  The new words, in the poem “Jabberwocky,” have given rise to some differences of opinion as to their pronunciation: so it may be well to give instructions on that point also. Pronounce “slithy” as if it were the two words “sly, the”: make the “g” hard in “gyre” and “gimble”: and pronounce “rath” to rhyme with “bath.”

  For this sixty-first thousand, fresh electrotypes have been taken from the wood-blocks (which, never having been used for printing from, are in as good condition as when first cut in 1871), and the whole book has been set up afresh with new type. If the artistic qualities of this re-issue fall short, in any particular, of those possessed by the original issue, it will not be for want of painstaking on the part of author, publisher, or printer.

  I take this opportunity of announcing that the Nursery “Alice,” hitherto priced at four shillings, net, is now to be had on the same terms as the ordinary shilling picture-books—although I feel sure that it is, in every quality (except the text itself, on which I am not qualified to pronounce), greatly superior to them. Four shillings was a perfectly reasonable price to charge, considering the very heavy initial outlay I had incurred: still, as the Public have practically said “We will not give more than a shilling for a picture-book, however artistically got-up,” I am content to reckon my outlay on the book as so much dead loss, and, rather than let the little ones, for whom it was written, go without it, I am selling it at a price which is, to me, much the same thing as giving it away.

  Christmas, 1896

  Child of the pure unclouded brow3

  And dreaming eyes of wonder!

  Though time be fleet, and I and thou

  Are half a life asunder,

  Thy loving smile will surely hail

  The love-gift of a fairy-tale.

  I have not seen thy sunny face,

  Nor heard thy silver laughter:

  No thought of me shall find a place

  In thy young life’s hereafter—4

  Enough that now thou wilt not fail

  To listen to my fairy-tale.

  A tale begun in other days,

  When summer suns were glowing—

  A simple chime, that served to time

  The rhythm of our rowing—

  Whose echoes live in memory yet,

  Though envious years would say “forget.”

  Come, hearken then, ere voice of dread,

  With bitter tidings laden,

  Shall summon to unwelcome bed5

  A melancholy maiden!

  We are but older children, dear,

  Who fret to find our bedtime near.

  Without, the frost, the blinding snow,

  The storm-wind’s moody madness—

  Within, the firelight’s ruddy glow,

  And childhood’s nest of gladness.

  The magic words shall hold thee fast:

  Thou shalt not heed the raving blast.

  And, though the shadow of a sigh

  May tremble through the story,

  For “happy summer days”6 gone by,

  And vanish’d summer glory—

  It shall not touch, with breath of bale,7

  The pleasance8 of our fairy-tale.

  1. There is no chess move in which queens castle. Carroll is here explaining that when the three Queens (the Red Queen, the White Queen, and Alice) have entered the “castle,” they have moved to the eighth row, where pawns become queens.

  2. Carroll’s description of the chess problem, which underlies the book’s action, is accurate. One is at loss to account for the statement on page 48 of A Handbook of the Literature of the Rev. C. L. Dodgson, by Sidney Williams and Falconer Madan, that “no attempt” is made to execute a normal checkmate. The final mate is completely orthodox. It is true, however, as Carroll himself points out, that red and white do not alternate moves p
roperly, and some of the “moves” listed by Carroll are not represented by actual movements of the pieces on the board (for example, Alice’s first, third, ninth and tenth “moves,” and the “castling” of the queens).

  The most serious violation of chess rules occurs near the end of the problem, when the White King is placed in check by the Red Queen without either side taking account of the fact. “Hardly a move has a sane purpose, from the point of view of chess,” writes Mr. Madan. It is true that both sides play an exceedingly careless game, but what else could one expect from the mad creatures behind the mirror? At two points the White Queen passes up a chance to checkmate and on another occasion she flees from the Red Knight when she could have captured him. Both oversights, however, are in keeping with her absent-mindedness.

  Considering the staggering difficulties involved in dovetailing a chess game with an amusing nonsense fantasy, Carroll does a remarkable job. At no time, for example, does Alice exchange words with a piece that is not then on a square alongside her own. Queens bustle about doing things while their husbands remain relatively fixed and impotent, just as in actual chess games. The White Knight’s eccentricities fit admirably the eccentric way in which Knights move; even the tendency of the Knights to fall off their horses, on one side or the other, suggests the knight’s move, which is two squares in one direction followed by one square to the right or left. In order to assist the reader in integrating the chess moves with the story, each move will be noted in the text at the precise point where it occurs.

  The rows of the giant chessboard are separated from each other by brooks. The columns are divided by hedges. Throughout the problem Alice remains on the queen’s file except for her final move when (as queen) she captures the Red Queen to checkmate the dozing Red King. It is amusing to note that it is the Red Queen who persuades Alice to advance along her file to the eighth square. The Queen is protecting herself with this advice, for white has at the outset an easy, though inelegant, checkmate in three moves. The White Knight first checks at KKt.3. If the Red King moves to either Q6 or Q5, white can mate with the Queen at QB3. The only alternative is for the Red King to move to K4. The White Queen then checks on QB5, forcing the Red King to K3. The Queen then mates on Q6. This calls, of course, for an alertness of mind not possessed by either the Knight or Queen.