The Annotated Alice

by Lewis Carroll

  Into a left-hand shoe;

  Or if a statement I aver

  Of which I am not sure,

  I think of that strange wanderer

  Upon the lonely moor.

  “Upon the Lonely Moor” was written for Tennyson’s son Lionel. Here is Carroll’s account of its origin, from an April 1862 entry in his diary. The entry was in a portion of the diary now missing, but Stuart Collingwood quotes it in his biography of Carroll.

  After luncheon I went to the Tennysons, and got Hallam and Lionel to sign their names in my album. Also I made a bargain with Lionel, that he was to give me some MS. of his verses, and I was to send him some of mine. It was a very difficult bargain to make; I almost despaired of it at first, he put in so many conditions—first, I was to play a game of chess with him; this, with much difficulty we reduced to twelve moves on each side; but this made little difference, as I checkmated him at the sixth move. Second, he was to be allowed to give me one blow on the head with a mallet (this he at last consented to give up). I forget if there were others, but it ended in my getting the verses, for which I have written out “The Lonely Moor” for him.

  “‘Sitting on a Gate’ is a parody,” Carroll said in a letter (see The Letters of Lewis Carroll, edited by Morton Cohen, Vol. 1, page 177), “though not as to style or metre—but its plot is borrowed from Wordsworth’s ‘Resolution and Independence,’ a poem that has always amused me a good deal (though it is by no means a comic poem) by the absurd way in which the poet goes on questioning the poor old leech-gatherer, making him tell his history over and over again, and never attending to what he says. Wordsworth ends with a moral—an example I have not followed.”

  Carroll surely identified himself with the song’s “aged aged man,” a man even further removed in age from Alice than was the White Knight. In “Isa’s Visit to Oxford,” Carroll calls himself “the Aged Aged Man,” abbreviating it throughout the diary as “the A.A.M.” Carroll was then fifty-eight. He often referred to himself in letters to child-friends as an aged, aged man.

  On the whole, Wordsworth’s poem is a fine poem, and I say this with awareness of the fact that a portion of it is included in The Stuffed Owl, that hilarious anthology of bad verse compiled by D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee.

  The opening lines of the White Knight’s song burlesque Wordsworth’s lines “I’ll tell you everything I know” and “I’ll give you all the help I can” from the original version of one of the poet’s less happy efforts called “The Thorn.” The line also reflects the title of the song, “I give thee all, I can no more,” to the tune of which the White Knight sings about the aged aged man. This song is Thomas Moore’s lyric, “My Heart and Lute,” which was set to music by the English composer Sir Henry Rowley Bishop. Carroll’s song follows the metrical pattern and rhyme scheme of Moore’s poem.

  “The character of the White Knight,” Carroll wrote in a letter, “was meant to suit the speaker in the poem.” That the speaker is Carroll himself is suggested by his thoughts on multiplying by ten in the third stanza of the earlier version. It is quite possible that Carroll regarded Moore’s love lyric as the song that he, the White Knight, would have liked to sing to Alice but dared not. The full text of Moore’s poem follows.

  I give thee all—I can no more—

  Though poor the off’ring be;

  My heart and lute are all the store

  That I can bring to thee.

  A lute whose gentle song reveals

  The soul of love full well;

  And, better far, a heart that feels

  Much more than lute could tell.

  Though love and song may fail, alas!

  To keep life’s clouds away,

  At least ’twill make them lighter pass

  Or gild them if they stay.

  And ev’n if Care, at moments, flings

  A discord o’er life’s happy strain,

  Let love but gently touch the strings,

  ’Twill all be sweet again!

  14. Bertrand Russell, in The ABC of Relativity, Chapter 3, applies these four lines to the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction hypothesis, an early attempt to account for the failure of the Michelson-Morley experiment to detect an influence of the earth’s motion on the speed of light. According to this hypothesis, objects shrink in the direction of their motion, but since all measuring rods are similarly shortened, they serve, like the White Knight’s fan, to prevent us from detecting any change in the length of objects. The same lines are quoted by Arthur Stanley Eddington in Chapter 2 of The Nature of the Physical World, but with a larger metaphorical meaning: the apparent habit nature has of forever concealing from us her basic structural plan.

  In Carroll’s earlier poem “Upon the Lonely Moor” (reprinted in Note 13), it is “one’s gaiters” that are painted green.

  15. The Oxford English Dictionary describes this oil as “an unguent for the hair, grandiloquently advertised in the early part of the nineteenth century, and represented by the makers (Rowland and Son) to consist of ingredients obtained from Macassar.” In the first canto, stanza 17, of Don Juan, Byron writes:

  In virtues nothing earthly could surpass her,

  Save thine “incomparable oil,” Macassar!

  The term “antimacassar,” for the piece of cloth put on the backs of chairs and sofas to prevent soiling of the fabric by hair oil, had its origin in the popularity of this oil.

  16. Limed twigs are twigs that have been smeared with birdlime (or any sticky substance) for the purpose of catching birds.

  17. “Hansom-cabs”: Covered carriages with two wheels and an elevated seat for the driver in the back. They were the taxicabs of Victorian England.

  18. The Menai Bridge, crossing the Menai Straits in North Wales, consisted of two enormous cast-iron tubes through which trains ran. As a child, Carroll had crossed the bridge on a long holiday trip with his family.

  19. It is an ancient superstition, reader Tim Healey tells me, that putting one’s right foot into a left shoe is an omen of bad luck. He quotes a passage from Samuel Butler’s Hudibras which speaks of Augustus Caesar making this mistake:

  Augustus, having by an oversight

  Put on his left shoe for his right,

  And like to have been slain that day

  By soldiers mutineering for pay.

  20. Physicist David Frisch calls my attention to the following lines—the last two lines of stanza 12 in Wordsworth’s poem before he revised them for a later printing:

  He answer’d me with pleasure and surprise

  And there was, while he spake, a fire about his eyes.

  21. The White Knight has returned to KB5, the square he occupied before capturing the Red Knight.

  Because knight moves are L-shaped, the White Knight’s move is the “turn in the road” to which he referred a few paragraphs earlier.

  This scene, in which Carroll clearly intends to describe how he hopes Alice will feel after she grows up and says good-bye, is one of the great poignant episodes of English literature. No one has written more eloquently about it than Donald Rackin in his essay “Love and Death in Carroll’s Alices” (in Soaring with the Dodo: Essays on Lewis Carroll’s Life and Art, edited by Edward Guiliano and James Kincaid): “The fleeting love that whispers through this scene is, therefore, complex and paradoxical: it is a love between a child all potential, freedom, flux, and growing up and a man all impotence, imprisonment, stasis, and falling down.”

  22. This is the spot where Carroll originally intended to place his episode about the Wasp in a Wig. Although Tenniel, in his letter to Carroll urging that the episode be omitted, called it a chapter, all evidence indicates it was to be a lengthy section in a chapter that even without it became the longest in the book. The complete episode, with my introduction and notes, is reprinted in this book.

  23. Alice has leaped the one remaining brook and is now on Q8, the last square of the queen’s file. For readers unfamiliar with chess it should be said that when a pawn reaches th
e last row of the chessboard it may become any piece the player desires. He usually chooses a queen, the most powerful of the chess pieces.

  Chapter IX

  Queen Alice

  “Well, this is grand!” said Alice. “I never expected I should be a Queen so soon—and I’ll tell you what it is, your Majesty,” she went on, in a severe tone (she was always rather fond of scolding herself), “it’ll never do for you to be lolling about on the grass like that! Queens have to be dignified, you know!”

  So she got up and walked about—rather stiffly just at first, as she was afraid that the crown might come off: but she comforted herself with the thought that there was nobody to see her, “and if I really am a Queen,” she said as she sat down again, “I shall be able to manage it quite well in time.”

  Everything was happening so oddly that she didn’t feel a bit surprised at finding the Red Queen and the White Queen sitting close to her, one on each side:1 she would have liked very much to ask them how they came there, but she feared it would not be quite civil. However, there would be no harm, she thought, in asking if the game was over. “Please, would you tell me—” she began, looking timidly at the Red Queen.

  “Speak when you’re spoken to!” the Queen sharply interrupted her.

  “But if everybody obeyed that rule,” said Alice, who was always ready for a little argument, “and if you only spoke when you were spoken to, and the other person always waited for you to begin, you see nobody would ever say anything, so that—”

  “Ridiculous!” cried the Queen. “Why, don’t you see, child—” here she broke off with a frown, and, after thinking for a minute, suddenly changed the subject of the conversation. “What do you mean by ‘If you really are a Queen’? What right have you to call yourself so? You ca’n’t be a Queen, you know, till you’ve passed the proper examination. And the sooner we begin it, the better.”

  “I only said ‘if’!” poor Alice pleaded in a piteous tone.

  The two Queens looked at each other, and the Red Queen remarked, with a little shudder, “She says she only said ‘if’—”

  “But she said a great deal more than that!” the White Queen moaned, wringing her hands. “Oh, ever so much more than that!”

  “So you did, you know,” the Red Queen said to Alice. “Always speak the truth—think before you speak—and write it down afterwards.”

  “I’m sure I didn’t mean—” Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen interrupted her impatiently.

  “That’s just what I complain of! You should have meant! What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning? Even a joke should have some meaning—and a child’s more important than a joke, I hope. You couldn’t deny that, even if you tried with both hands.”

  “I don’t deny things with my hands,” Alice objected.

  “Nobody said you did,” said the Red Queen. “I said you couldn’t if you tried.”

  “She’s in that state of mind,” said the White Queen, “that she wants to deny something—only she doesn’t know what to deny!”

  “A nasty, vicious temper,” the Red Queen remarked; and then there was an uncomfortable silence for a minute or two.

  The Red Queen broke the silence by saying, to the White Queen, “I invite you to Alice’s dinner-party this afternoon.”

  The White Queen smiled feebly, and said “And I invite you.”

  “I didn’t know I was to have a party at all,” said Alice; “but, if there is to be one, I think I ought to invite the guests.”

  “We gave you the opportunity of doing it,” the Red Queen remarked: “but I daresay you’ve not had many lessons in manners yet?”

  “Manners are not taught in lessons,” said Alice. “Lessons teach you to do sums, and things of that sort.”

  “Can you do Addition?” the White Queen asked. “What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?”

  “I don’t know,” said Alice. “I lost count.”

  “She ca’n’t do Addition,” the Red Queen interrupted. “Can you do Subtraction? Take nine from eight.”

  “Nine from eight I ca’n’t, you know,” Alice replied very readily: “but—”

  “She ca’n’t do Subtraction,” said the White Queen. “Can you do Division? Divide a loaf by a knife—what’s the answer to that?”

  “I suppose—” Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen answered for her. “Bread-and-butter, of course. Try another Subtraction sum. Take a bone from a dog: what remains?”

  Alice considered. “The bone wouldn’t remain, of course, if I took it—and the dog wouldn’t remain: it would come to bite me—and I’m sure I shouldn’t remain!”

  “Then you think nothing would remain?” said the Red Queen.

  “I think that’s the answer.”

  “Wrong, as usual,” said the Red Queen: “the dog’s temper would remain.”

  “But I don’t see how—”

  “Why, look here!” the Red Queen cried. “The dog would lose its temper, wouldn’t it?”

  “Perhaps it would,” Alice replied cautiously.

  “Then if the dog went away, its temper would remain!” the Queen exclaimed triumphantly.

  Alice said, as gravely as she could, “They might go different ways.” But she couldn’t help thinking to herself “What dreadful nonsense we are talking!”

  “She ca’n’t do sums a bit!” the Queens said together, with great emphasis.

  “Can you do sums?” Alice said, turning suddenly on the White Queen, for she didn’t like being found fault with so much.

  The Queen gasped and shut her eyes. “I can do Addition,” she said, “if you give me time—but I ca’n’t do Subtraction under any circumstances!”

  “Of course you know your ABC?” said the Red Queen.

  “To be sure I do,” said Alice.

  “So do I,” the White Queen whispered: “we’ll often say it over together, dear. And I’ll tell you a secret—I can read words of one letter! Isn’t that grand? However, don’t be discouraged. You’ll come to it in time.”

  Here the Red Queen began again. “Can you answer useful questions?” she said. “How is bread made?”

  “I know that!” Alice cried eagerly. “You take some flour—”

  “Where do you pick the flower?” the White Queen asked. “In a garden or in the hedges?”

  “Well, it isn’t picked at all,” Alice explained: “it’s ground—”

  “How many acres of ground?” said the White Queen. “You mustn’t leave out so many things.”

  “Fan her head!” the Red Queen anxiously interrupted. “She’ll be feverish after so much thinking.” So they set to work and fanned her with bunches of leaves, till she had to beg them to leave off, it blew her hair about so.

  “She’s all right again now,” said the Red Queen. “Do you know Languages? What’s the French for fiddle-de-dee?”

  “Fiddle-de-dee’s not English,” Alice replied gravely.

  “Who ever said it was?” said the Red Queen.

  Alice thought she saw a way out of the difficulty, this time. “If you’ll tell me what language ‘fiddle-de-dee’ is, I’ll tell you the French for it!” she exclaimed triumphantly.

  But the Red Queen drew herself up rather stiffly, and said “Queens never make bargains.”

  “I wish Queens never asked questions,” Alice thought to herself.

  “Don’t let us quarrel,” the White Queen said in an anxious tone. “What is the cause of lightning?”

  “The cause of lightning,” Alice said very decidedly, for she felt quite certain about this, “is the thunder—no, no!” she hastily corrected herself. “I meant the other way.”

  “It’s too late to correct it,” said the Red Queen: “when you’ve once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences.”2

  “Which reminds me—” the White Queen said, looking down and nervously clasping and unclasping her hands, “we had such a thunderstorm last Tuesday—I mean one
of the last set of Tuesdays, you know.”3

  Alice was puzzled. “In our country,” she remarked, “there’s only one day at a time.”

  The Red Queen said “That’s a poor thin way of doing things. Now here, we mostly have days and nights two or three at a time, and sometimes in the winter we take as many as five nights together—for warmth, you know.”

  “Are five nights warmer than one night, then?” Alice ventured to ask.

  “Five times as warm, of course.”

  “But they should be five times as cold, by the same rule—”

  “Just so!” cried the Red Queen. “Five times as warm, and five times as cold—just as I’m five times as rich as you are, and five times as clever!”4

  Alice sighed and gave it up. “It’s exactly like a riddle with no answer!” she thought.5

  “Humpty Dumpty saw it too,” the White Queen went on in a low voice, more as if she were talking to herself. “He came to the door with a corkscrew in his hand—”

  “What did he want?” said the Red Queen.

  “He said he would come in,” the White Queen went on, “because he was looking for a hippopotamus. Now, as it happened, there wasn’t such a thing in the house, that morning.”

  “Is there generally?” Alice asked in an astonished tone.

  “Well, only on Thursdays,” said the Queen.

  “I know what he came for,” said Alice: “he wanted to punish the fish, because—”6

  Here the White Queen began again. “It was such a thunderstorm, you ca’n’t think!” (“She never could, you know,” said the Red Queen.) “And part of the roof came off, and ever so much thunder got in—and it went rolling round the room in great lumps7—and knocking over the tables and things—till I was so frightened, I couldn’t remember my own name!”

  Alice thought to herself “I never should try to remember my name in the middle of an accident! Where would be the use of it?” but she did not say this aloud, for fear of hurting the poor Queen’s feelings.

  “Your Majesty must excuse her,” the Red Queen said to Alice, taking one of the White Queen’s hands in her own, and gently stroking it: “she means well, but she ca’n’t help saying foolish things, as a general rule.”