The Annotated Alice

by Lewis Carroll

  Lastly, the White Queen seemed, to my dreaming fancy, gentle, stupid, fat and pale; helpless as an infant; and with a slow, maundering, bewildered air about her just suggesting imbecility, but never quite passing into it; that would be, I think, fatal to any comic effect she might otherwise produce. There is a character strangely like her in Wilkie Collins’ novel No Name: by two different converging paths we have somehow reached the same ideal, and Mrs. Wragg and the White Queen might have been twin-sisters.

  The role of the White Queen was played by Louise Fazenda in Paramount’s film version.

  2. Edwin Marsden recalls in a letter that when growing up in Massachusetts he was taught to whisper “Bread and butter, bread and butter” whenever he was being circled by a wasp, bee, or other insect. The phrase was intended to keep one from being stung. If this was a custom in Victorian England, it may explain the White Queen’s use of the phrase while being pursued by the giant crow.

  It is also possible that the Queen, who is running with outstretched arms “as if she were flying,” is imagining that she is one of the Bread-and-butter-flies encountered by Alice in Chapter 3. “Bread and butter” seems to be much on her mind. In Chapter 9 she asks Alice: “Divide a loaf by a knife—what’s the answer to that?” The Red Queen interrupts Alice to answer this problem in division with the reply “Bread-and-butter, of course,” meaning that after cutting a slice of bread, you butter it.

  In the United States a more common use of bread and butter occurs when two people, walking together, are forced to “divide” and go on both sides of a tree, post, or similar obstruction.

  Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English gives several colloquial meanings of bread and butter current in Victorian England. One of them is “schoolgirlish”; a girl who acts like a schoolgirl was called a “schoolgirlish miss.” The White Queen may be applying the phrase to Alice.

  3. In AA I completely missed the way Carroll plays on the Latin word iam (i and j are interchangeable in classical Latin), which means “now.” The word iam is used in the past and future tenses, but in the present tense the word for “now” is nunc. I received more letters about this than about any other oversight, mostly from Latin teachers. They tell me that the Queen’s remark is often used in class as a mnemonic for recalling the proper usage of the word.

  4. In Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded there is a wild episode in which events go backward in time in response to turning the “reversal peg” on the German professor’s Outlandish Watch.

  Carroll was as fascinated by time reversal as he was by mirror reversals. In The Story of Lewis Carroll, Isa Bowman tells of Carroll’s fondness for playing tunes backward on music boxes to produce what he called “music standing on its head.” In Chapter 5 of Carroll’s “Isa’s Visit to Oxford,” he speaks of playing an orguinette backward. This American device operated with a perforated roll of paper like the roll of a player piano, which could be rotated by turning a handle:

  They put one [roll] in wrong end first, and had a tune backwards, and soon found themselves in the day before yesterday. So they dared not go on, for fear of making Isa so young she would not be able to talk. The A.A.M. [Aged Aged Man] does not like visitors who only howl, and get red in the face, from morning to night.

  In a letter (November 30, 1879) to child-friend Edith Blakemore, Carroll said he was so busy and tired that he would go back to bed the minute after he got up, “and sometimes I go to bed again a minute before I get up.”

  Since Carroll used it, “backward living” has been the basis of many fantasy and science-fiction tales. The best known is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “The Strange Case of Benjamin Button.”

  5. The King’s Messenger, as Tenniel’s illustration makes clear and as we shall see in Chapter 7, is none other than the Mad Hatter of the previous book.

  In keeping with the whimsical idea that Tenniel anticipated the face of Bertrand Russell when he drew the Mad Hatter, Peter Heath claims that the picture of the Hatter in prison (facing page, top) shows Russell, circa 1918, working on his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy while in a British prison for opposing England’s entry into the First World War. Evidently Carroll asked Tenniel to redraw this picture, because a different version of it has survived. It is reproduced below from Michael Hearn’s article “Alice’s Other Parent: Sir John Tenniel as Lewis Carroll’s Illustrator,” in the American Book Collector (May/June 1983).

  Why is the Mad Hatter being punished? It seems to be for a crime he has yet to commit, but behind the mirror time can go either way. Perhaps he has had a stay of execution for “murdering the time”—that is, singing out of rhythm at a concert given by the Queen of Hearts in the previous book (Chapter 7). You will recall that the Queen had ordered him beheaded.

  The Queen’s remark about the “week after next” is echoed in Chapter 9 when the creature with the long beak, before he shuts a door, tells Alice, “No admittance till the week after next.”

  AN UNUSED TENNIEL ILLUSTRATION.

  6. Carroll practiced the White Queen’s advice. In his introduction to Pillow Problems he speaks of working mathematical problems in his head at night, during wakeful hours, as a kind of mental work-therapy to prevent less wholesome thoughts from tormenting him. “There are sceptical thoughts, which seem for the moment to uproot the firmest faith: there are blasphemous thoughts, which dart unbidden into the most reverent souls; there are unholy thoughts, which torture, with their hateful presence, the fancy that would fain be pure. Against all these some real mental work is a most helpful ally.”

  7. “I believe it,” declared Tertullian in an oft-quoted defense of the paradoxical character of certain Christian doctrines, “because it is absurd.” In a letter to child-friend Mary MacDonald, 1864, Carroll warned:

  Don’t be in such a hurry to believe next time—I’ll tell you why—If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the muscles of your mind, and then you’ll be so weak you won’t be able to believe the simplest true things. Only last week a friend of mine set to work to believe Jack-the-giant-killer. He managed to do it, but he was so exhausted by it that when I told him it was raining (which was true) he couldn’t believe it, but rushed out into the street without his hat or umbrella, the consequence of which was his hair got seriously damp, and one curl didn’t recover its right shape for nearly two days.

  8. The White Queen moves forward one square to QB5.

  9. Alice likewise advances one square. This carries her to Q5 alongside of the Queen (now a sheep) again.

  10. Williams and Madan, in their Handbook of the Literature of the Rev. C. L. Dodgson, reveal (and they reproduce a photograph to prove it) that Tenniel’s two pictures of the shop faithfully copy the window and door of a small grocery shop at 83 Saint Aldgate’s Street, Oxford. Tenniel was careful, however, to reverse the positions of door and window as well as the sign giving the price of tea as two shillings. These reversals support the view that Alice is not an anti-Alice.

  The little shop (shown below) is now called The Alice in Wonderland Shop, and one can buy there books and items of all sorts related to the Alice books.

  ALICE’S SHOP AS IT APPEARS TODAY

  David Piggins and C. J. C. Phillips, writing on “Sheep Vision in Through the Looking-Glass” (Jabberwocky, Spring 1994), consider whether the sheep’s spectacles were intended for close-up vision because she wore them only when knitting. She does not have them on when she is in the boat with Alice. (In Peter Newell’s picture of this scene the glasses remain.) Research has shown, the authors write, that sheep eyes lack the power of accommodation (the ability to focus); hence the sheep’s glasses, they conclude, make no optical sense.

  11. Alice’s difficulty in looking straight at the objects on sale in the shop has been compared by popularizers of quantum theory to the impossible task of pinning down the precise location of an electron in its path around the nucleus of an atom. One thinks also of those minute specks that sometimes appear slightly off
the center of one’s field of vision, and that can never be seen directly because they move as the eye moves.

  12. Carroll was a great admirer of Pascal’s Pensées. Jeffrey Stern, writing on “Lewis Carroll and Blaise Pascal” (in Jabberwocky, Spring 1983), quotes a passage that Carroll may well have had in mind when he wrote about how things flow about in the Sheep’s little shop:

  [We are] incapable of certain knowledge or absolute ignorance. We are floating in a medium of vast extent, always drifting uncertainly, blown to and fro; whenever we think we have a fixed point to which we can cling and make fast, it shifts and leaves us behind; if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips away, and flees eternally before us. Nothing stands still for us. This is our natural state and yet the state most contrary to our inclinations. We burn with desire to find a firm footing, an ultimate, lasting base on which to build a tower rising up to infinity, but our whole foundation cracks.

  13. A teetotum is a small top similar to what in England and the United States is now called a “put-and-take top.” It was popular in Victorian England as a device used in children’s games. The flat sides of the top are labeled with letters or numbers, and when the top comes to rest, the uppermost side indicates what the player is to do in the game. Early forms of the top were square-shaped and marked with letters. The letter T, on one of the sides, stood for the Latin word totum, indicating that the player took all.

  14. In his prefatory poem to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll describes the Liddell girls as rowing “with little skill.” Perhaps Alice Liddell, on one of Carroll’s rowboat excursions, was as mystified as Alice is here by the rowing term feather. The Sheep is asking Alice to turn her oar blades horizontally as she moves them back for the next “catch” so that the lower edge of the blade will not drag through the water.

  15. Catching a crab is rowing slang for a faulty stroke in which the oar is dipped so deeply in the water that the boat’s motion, if rapid enough, can send the oar handle against the rower’s chest with sufficient force to unseat him. This actually happens to Alice later on. “The phrase probably originated,” says the Oxford English Dictionary, “in the humorous suggestion that the rower had caught a crab, which was holding his oar down under water.” The phrase is sometimes used (improperly) for other rowing errors that can unseat the rower.

  16. It is possible that Carroll thought of these dream-rushes as symbols of his child-friends. The loveliest seem to be the most distant, just out of reach, and, once picked, they quickly fade and lose their scent and beauty. They are, of course, consciously intended symbols of the fleeting, short-lived, hard-to-keep quality of all beauty.

  17. Undergraduates at Christ Church, in Carroll’s day, insisted that if you ordered one boiled egg for breakfast you usually received two, one good and one bad. (See The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, Vol. I, page 176.)

  18. The Sheep’s movement to the other end of the shop is indicated on the chessboard by a move of the White Queen to KB8.

  19. Note that the Sheep places the egg upright on the shelf—not an easy thing to do without adopting Columbus’s stratagem of tapping the egg on a table to crack its lower end slightly.

  20. The dots show that Alice has crossed the brook by advancing to Q6. She is now on the square to the right of the White King, although she does not meet him until after the Humpty Dumpty episode of the next chapter.

  Chapter VI

  Humpty Dumpty

  However, the egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human: when she had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose and mouth; and, when she had come close to it, she saw clearly that it was HUMPTY DUMPTY himself. “It ca’n’t be anybody else!” she said to herself. “I’m as certain of it, as if his name were written all over his face!”

  It might have been written a hundred times, easily, on that enormous face. Humpty Dumpty was sitting, with his legs crossed like a Turk,1 on the top of a high wall—such a narrow one that Alice quite wondered how he could keep his balance2—and, as his eyes were steadily fixed in the opposite direction, and he didn’t take the least notice of her, she thought he must be a stuffed figure, after all.

  “And how exactly like an egg he is!” she said aloud, standing with her hands ready to catch him, for she was every moment expecting him to fall.

  “It’s very provoking,” Humpty Dumpty said after a long silence, looking away from Alice as he spoke, “to be called an egg—very!”

  “I said you looked like an egg, Sir,” Alice gently explained. “And some eggs are very pretty, you know,” she added, hoping to turn her remark into a sort of compliment.

  “Some people,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking away from her as usual, “have no more sense than a baby!”

  Alice didn’t know what to say to this: it wasn’t at all like conversation, she thought, as he never said anything to her; in fact, his last remark was evidently addressed to a tree—so she stood and softly repeated to herself:—3

  “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall:

  Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

  All the King’s horses and all the King’s men

  Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty in his place again.”

  “That last line is much too long for the poetry,” she added, almost out loud, forgetting that Humpty Dumpty would hear her.

  “Don’t stand chattering to yourself like that,” Humpty Dumpty said, looking at her for the first time, “but tell me your name and your business.”

  “My name is Alice, but—”

  “It’s a stupid name enough!” Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. “What does it mean?”

  “Must a name mean something?” Alice asked doubtfully.

  “Of course it must,” Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: “my name means the shape I am—and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.”4

  “Why do you sit out here all alone?” said Alice, not wishing to begin an argument.

  “Why, because there’s nobody with me!” cried Humpty Dumpty. “Did you think I didn’t know the answer to that? Ask another.”

  “Don’t you think you’d be safer down on the ground?” Alice went on, not with any idea of making another riddle, but simply in her good-natured anxiety for the queer creature. “That wall is so very narrow!”

  “What tremendously easy riddles you ask!” Humpty Dumpty growled out. “Of course I don’t think so! Why, if ever I did fall off—which there’s no chance of—but if I did—” Here he pursed up his lips, and looked so solemn and grand that Alice could hardly help laughing. “If I did fall,” he went on, “the King has promised me—ah, you may turn pale, if you like! You didn’t think I was going to say that, did you? The King has promised me—with his very own mouth—to—to—”

  “To send all his horses and all his men,” Alice interrupted, rather unwisely.

  “Now I declare that’s too bad!” Humpty Dumpty cried, breaking5 into a sudden passion. “You’ve been listening at doors—and behind trees—and down chimneys—or you couldn’t have known it!”

  “I haven’t, indeed!” Alice said very gently. “It’s in a book.”

  “Ah, well! They may write such things in a book,” Humpty Dumpty said in a calmer tone. “That’s what you call a History of England, that is. Now, take a good look at me! I’m one that has spoken to a King, I am: mayhap you’ll never see such another: and, to show you I’m not proud, you may shake hands with me!”6 And he grinned almost from ear to ear, as he leant forwards (and as nearly as possible fell off the wall in doing so) and offered Alice his hand. She watched him a little anxiously as she took it. “If he smiled much more the ends of his mouth might meet behind,” she thought: “and then I don’t know what would happen to his head! I’m afraid it would come off!”

  “Yes, all his horses and all his men,” Humpty Dumpty went on. “They’d pick me up again in a minute, they would! However, this conversation is going on a little too fast: let’s go back to the la
st remark but one.”

  “I’m afraid I ca’n’t quite remember it,” Alice said, very politely.

  “In that case we start afresh,” said Humpty Dumpty, “and it’s my turn to choose a subject—” (“He talks about it just as if it was a game!” thought Alice.) “So here’s a question for you. How old did you say you were?”

  Alice made a short calculation, and said “Seven years and six months.”

  “Wrong!” Humpty Dumpty exclaimed triumphantly. “You never said a word like it!”

  “I thought you meant ‘How old are you?’” Alice explained.

  “If I’d meant that, I’d have said it,” said Humpty Dumpty.

  Alice didn’t want to begin another argument, so she said nothing.

  “Seven years and six months!” Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully. “An uncomfortable sort of age. Now if you’d asked my advice, I’d have said ‘Leave off at seven’—but it’s too late now.”

  “I never ask advice about growing,” Alice said indignantly.

  “Too proud?” the other enquired.

  Alice felt even more indignant at this suggestion. “I mean,” she said, “that one ca’n’t help growing older.”

  “One ca’n’t, perhaps,” said Humpty Dumpty; “but two can. With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven.”7

  “What a beautiful belt you’ve got on!” Alice suddenly remarked. (They had had quite enough of the subject of age, she thought: and, if they really were to take turns in choosing subjects, it was her turn now.) “At least,” she corrected herself on second thoughts, “a beautiful cravat, I should have said—no, a belt, I mean—I beg your pardon!” she added in dismay, for Humpty Dumpty looked thoroughly offended, and she began to wish she hadn’t chosen that subject. “If only I knew,” she thought to herself, “which was neck and which was waist!”