The Annotated Alice

by Lewis Carroll

  “I only wanted to see what the garden was like, your Majesty—”

  “That’s right,” said the Queen, patting her on the head, which Alice didn’t like at all: “though, when you say ‘garden’—I’ve seen gardens, compared with which this would be a wilderness.”

  Alice didn’t dare to argue the point, but went on: “—and I thought I’d try and find my way to the top of that hill—”

  “When you say ‘hill,’” the Queen interrupted, “I could show you hills, in comparison with which you’d call that a valley.”

  “No, I shouldn’t,” said Alice, surprised into contradicting her at last: “a hill ca’n’t be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense—”

  The Red Queen shook her head. “You may call it ‘nonsense’ if you like,” she said, “but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!”9

  Alice curtseyed again, as she was afraid from the Queen’s tone that she was a little offended: and they walked on in silence till they got to the top of the little hill.

  For some minutes Alice stood without speaking, looking out in all directions over the country—and a most curious country it was. There were a number of tiny little brooks running straight across it from side to side, and the ground between was divided up into squares by a number of little green hedges, that reached from brook to brook.

  “I declare it’s marked out just like a large chess-board!” Alice said at last. “There ought to be some men moving about somewhere—and so there are!” she added in a tone of delight, and her heart began to beat quick with excitement as she went on. “It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played—all over the world10—if this is the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is! How I wish I was one of them! I wouldn’t mind being a Pawn, if only I might join—though of course I should like to be a Queen, best.”

  She glanced rather shyly at the real Queen as she said this, but her companion only smiled pleasantly, and said “That’s easily managed. You can be the White Queen’s Pawn, if you like, as Lily’s11 too young to play; and you’re in the Second Square to begin with: when you get to the Eighth Square you’ll be a Queen—” Just at this moment, somehow or other, they began to run.

  Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying “Faster! Faster!” but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had no breath left to say so.

  The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. “I wonder if all the things move along with us?” thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried “Faster! Don’t try to talk!”

  Not that Alice had any idea of doing that. She felt as if she would never be able to talk again, she was getting so much out of breath: and still the Queen cried “Faster! Faster!” and dragged her along. “Are we nearly there?” Alice managed to pant out at last.

  “Nearly there!” the Queen repeated. “Why, we passed it ten minutes ago! Faster!” And they ran on for a time in silence, with the wind whistling in Alice’s ears, and almost blowing her hair off her head, she fancied.

  “Now! Now!” cried the Queen. “Faster! Faster!” And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.

  The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, “You may rest a little, now.”

  Alice looked round her in great surprise. “Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!”

  “Of course it is,” said the Queen. “What would you have it?”

  “Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time as we’ve been doing.”

  “A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.12 If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

  “I’d rather not try, please!” said Alice. “I’m quite content to stay here—only I am so hot and thirsty!”

  “I know what you’d like!” the Queen said good-naturedly, taking a little box out of her pocket. “Have a biscuit?”

  Alice thought it would not be civil to say “No,” though it wasn’t at all what she wanted. So she took it, and ate it as well as she could: and it was very dry: and she thought she had never been so nearly choked in all her life.

  “While you’re refreshing yourself,” said the Queen, “I’ll just take the measurements.” And she took a ribbon out of her pocket, marked in inches, and began measuring the ground, and sticking little pegs in here and there.

  “At the end of two yards,” she said, putting in a peg to mark the distance, “I shall give you your directions—have another biscuit?”

  “No, thank you,” said Alice: “one’s quite enough!”

  “Thirst quenched, I hope?” said the Queen.

  Alice did not know what to say to this, but luckily the Queen did not wait for an answer, but went on. “At the end of three yards I shall repeat them—for fear of your forgetting them. At the end of four, I shall say good-bye. And at the end of five, I shall go!”

  She had got all the pegs put in by this time, and Alice looked on with great interest as she returned to the tree, and then began slowly walking down the row.

  At the two-yard peg she faced round, and said “A pawn goes two squares in its first move, you know. So you’ll go very quickly through the Third Square—by railway, I should think—and you’ll find yourself in the Fourth Square in no time. Well, that square belongs to Tweedledum and Tweedledee—the Fifth is mostly water—the Sixth belongs to Humpty Dumpty—But you make no remark?”

  “I—I didn’t know I had to make one—just then,” Alice faltered out.

  “You should have said,” the Queen went on in a tone of grave reproof, “‘It’s extremely kind of you to tell me all this’—however, we’ll suppose it said—the Seventh Square is all forest—however, one of the Knights will show you the way—and in the Eighth Square we shall be Queens together, and it’s all feasting and fun!” Alice got up and curtseyed, and sat down again.

  At the next peg the Queen turned again, and this time she said “Speak in French when you ca’n’t think of the English for a thing—turn out your toes as you walk13—and remember who you are!” She did not wait for Alice to curtsey, this time, but walked on quickly to the next peg, where she turned for a moment to say “Good-bye,” and then hurried on to the last.

  How it happened, Alice never knew, but exactly as she came to the last peg, she was gone.14 Whether she vanished into the air, or whether she ran quickly into the wood (“and she can run very fast!” thought Alice), there was no way of guessing, but she was gone, and Alice began to remember that she was a Pawn, and that it would soon be time for her to move.

  1. Corkscrews are mentioned several times in Through the Looking-Glass. Carroll knew, of course, that corkscrews are helices, asymmetric three-dimensional curves that spiral the “other way” in the mirror. Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that the “toves” in “Jabberwocky” look something like corkscrews. He recites a poem in which he speaks of using a corkscrew to wake up the fish, and in Chapter 9 the White Queen recalls his coming to her door, corkscrew in hand, looking for a hippopotamus.

  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 Tenn
yson’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 soon 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!”