The Annotated Alice

by Lewis Carroll

  Carroll left no record of his own final opinion of the episode or the poem it contained. He did, however, carefully preserve the galleys, and it seems likely that he intended to do something with them someday. It was Carroll himself, remember, who decided to publish his first version of Alice in Wonderland, the manuscript he had hand-lettered and illustrated for Alice Liddell. Many of his early poems, printed in obscure periodicals or not published at all, found their way eventually into his books. Even if Carroll had no specific plans for making use of the Wasp episode or its poem, it is hard to believe he would not have been pleased to know it would find eventual publication.

  After Carroll’s death in 1898 the galleys were bought by an unknown person and—for the present at least—we know little about who owned them until Sotheby’s put them up for auction. They are not listed in the 1898 catalogs of Carroll’s effects, apparently because they were included in a miscellaneous lot of unidentified items. “The property of a gentleman” is how Sotheby’s labeled them in its catalog. Sotheby’s does not disclose the identities of vendors who desire to remain anonymous, but they tell me that the galleys had been passed on to the vendor by an older member of his family.

  The galleys were bought by John Fleming, a Manhattan rare book dealer, for Norman Armour, Jr., also of New York City. It was Mr. Armour’s gracious consent to permit publication of these galleys that makes this book possible. What more need be said in the way of thanks?

  Facsimile of Tenniel’s letter to Dodgson, with a transcription.

  My dear Dodgson.

  I think that when the jump occurs in the Railway scene you might very well make Alice lay hold of the Goat’s beard as being the object nearest to her hand—instead of the old lady’s hair. The jerk would naturally throw them together.

  Don’t think me brutal, but I am bound to say that the ‘wasp’ chapter doesn’t interest me in the least, & I can’t see my way to a picture. If you want to shorten the book, I can’t help thinking—with all submission—that there is your opportunity.

  In an agony of haste

  Yours sincerely

  J. Tenniel.

  Portsdown Road

  June 1, 1870

  Introduction

  Before the Wasp episode came to light, most students of Carroll assumed that the lost episode was adjacent to, at least not far from, the railway carriage scene. This was because Tenniel, in his letter of complaint, seemed to link the two incidents. In Chapter 3, where Alice leaps the first brook and the train jumps over the second, Alice encounters a variety of insects, including bees the size of elephants. Was it not appropriate that she would meet a wasp in this region of the chessboard?

  That Carroll did not intend Alice to come upon the Wasp so early in the chess game is evident at once from the numbers on the galleys, and from what Alice thought when the Wasp told her how his ringlets used to wave. “A curious idea came into Alice’s head. Almost every one she had met had repeated poetry to her, and she thought she would try if the Wasp couldn’t do it too.” The first person to recite poetry to Alice is Tweedledee, and the second is Humpty Dumpty. The lost episode, therefore, had to occur later than Chapter 6.

  The incomplete first line of the galleys leaves no doubt that Sotheby’s catalog correctly indicates where Carroll had intended the Wasp episode to go. (The spot is shown by the arrow in the reproduction of page 183 of the first edition of Through the Looking-Glass, here printed on page 292.) Alice has just waved her final farewell to the White Knight, then gone down the hill to leap the last brook and become a Queen. “A very few steps brought her to the edge of the brook.” Instead of a period there was a comma. The sentence continued as at the top of the first galley: “and she was just going to spring over, when she heard a deep sigh, which seemed to come from the wood behind her.”

  Both Tenniel and Collingwood called the episode a “chapter,” but there are difficulties with this view. The galleys give no indication that they are anything but an excerpt from Chapter 8, and it seems unlikely that Carroll would have wanted his second Alice book to have thirteen chapters when the first book had twelve. It is Morton Cohen’s belief that Tenniel, writing “in an agony of haste,” used the word “chapter” when he meant episode. Collingwood’s remarks are easily explained as elaborations of how he interpreted Tenniel’s letters. (There must have been at least one other Tenniel letter available to him, because the remark of Tenniel’s that he quotes about a wasp in a wig being “beyond the appliances of art” does not appear in the letter he reproduces in facsimile.)

  One might argue that had the Wasp episode belonged to the White Knight chapter, the chapter would have been uncommonly long, and would not Tenniel have written that the episode should be removed to “shorten the chapter” rather than “shorten the book”? On the other hand, the fact that the chapter was too long may have been another reason why Carroll was willing to excise the episode. Unfortunately no other galleys for the book are known to have survived, so we are forced to rely on indirect evidence for deciding which view is correct.

  Edward Guiliano favors the view that Tenniel had “episode” in mind. He supports the arguments already presented, and also feels that the incidents of the episode would have added thematic unity to the White Knight chapter. After conversing with the White Knight, an upper-class gentleman still in his vigor, Alice meets a lower-class worker in his declining years.* She waves good-bye to the White Knight with a handkerchief; the Wasp has a handkerchief around his face. The White Knight talks about bees and honey; the Wasp thinks Alice is a bee and asks her if she has any honey. Even the pun about the comb, Guiliano believes, is not quite so feeble in the context of the chapter as originally planned. These and other incidents in the Wasp episode link it to the White Knight chapter in ways that suggest it was not intended to stand alone.

  Was the Wasp episode worth preserving? It was, of course, eminently worth saving for historical reasons, but that is not what I mean. Does it have intrinsic merit? Tenniel said it did not interest him in the least, and many who have recently read the episode agree that it is not (in Collingwood’s words) “up to the level of the rest of the book.” Peter Heath feels that one reason the episode lacks the vivacity of other parts of the book is that it repeats so many themes that occur elsewhere. Alice had a previous conversation with an unhappy insect, the Gnat, in Chapter 3. In the chapter following the Wasp episode Alice converses with another elderly lower-class male, the Frog. The Wasp’s criticisms of Alice’s face are reminiscent of Humpty Dumpty’s criticisms. Alice’s attempts to repair the Wasp’s disheveled appearance parallel her attempts to remedy the untidyness of the White Queen in Chapter 5. There are other echoes of familiar themes that Professor Heath has noted. “It’s as if Carroll’s inventiveness was flagging a bit,” he writes in a letter, “and the momentum of the narrative had temporarily been lost.”

  All this may be true, but I am convinced that if the episode is read carefully, then reread several times on later occasions, its merit will steadily become more apparent. First of all it is unmistakably Carrollian in its general tone, its humor, its wordplay, and its nonsense. The Wasp’s remark “Let it stop there!” and his observation that Alice’s eyes are so close together (compared with his own, of course) that she could have done as well with one eye instead of two are both pure Carroll. The wordplay may not be up to Carroll’s best, but we must remember that he frequently had a book set in type long before he began to work in earnest on revisions. If the Wasp episode was removed from the book before Carroll began to polish the galleys, that would explain why the writing seems cruder at times than elsewhere in the book.

  Two features of the episode impress me as having special interest: the extraordinary skill with which Carroll, in just a few pages of dialogue, brings out the personality of a waspish but somehow lovable old man, and Alice’s unfailing gentleness toward him.

  Although Alice is usually kind and respectful toward the curious creatures she meets in her two dreams, no matter how unp
leasant the creatures are, this is not always the case. In the pool of tears she twice offends the Mouse, by telling him that her cat chases mice and that a neighbor’s dog likes to kill rats. A short time later, after the Caucus-race, she forgets herself again and insults the assembled birds by remarking on how much her cat likes to eat birds. And remember Alice’s sharp kick that sends Bill, the Lizard, out the chimney? (“There goes Bill!”)

  In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice (now six months older) is not quite so thoughtless, but there is no episode in the book in which she treats a disagreeable creature with such remarkable patience. In no other episode, in either book, does her character come through so vividly as that of an intelligent, polite, considerate little girl. It is an episode in which extreme youth confronts extreme age. Although the Wasp is constantly critical of Alice, not once does she cease to sympathize with him.

  Need I spell it out? We are told how much Alice, the white pawn, longs to become a Queen. We know how easily she could have leaped the final brook to occupy the last row of the chessboard. Yet Alice does not make the move when she hears the sigh of distress behind her. When the Wasp responds crossly to her kind remarks, she excuses his ill-temper with the understanding that it is his pain that makes him cross. After she has helped him around the tree to a warmer side, his response is “Can’t you leave a body alone?” Unoffended, Alice offers to read to him from the wasp newspaper at his feet.

  Although the Wasp continues to criticize, when Alice leaves him she is “quite pleased that she had gone back and given a few minutes to making the poor old creature comfortable.” Carroll surely must have wanted to show Alice performing a final deed of charity that would justify her approaching coronation, a reward that Carroll, a pious Christian and patriotic Englishman, would have regarded as a crown of righteousness. Alice comes through as such an admirable, appealing little girl that Professor Guiliano discovered to his surprise that reading the episode altered a bit his response to the entire book.

  The old man, with his waspish temper and his aching bones, is also, of course, a genuine insect. Female wasps (queens and workers) prey on other insects, such as caterpillars, spiders, and flies, which they first paralyze by stinging them. With their strong mandibles they remove the victim’s head, legs, and wings; then the body is chewed to a pulp to give as food to their larvae. It may not be accidental that Carroll’s insect belongs to a social structure that includes fierce, powerful queens, like the queens of chess and many former queens of England.

  In contrast, male wasps (drones) do not sting. In some species the male, if you seize him in your hand, will try to frighten you into dropping him by going through all the movements of stinging. (John Burroughs likened this bluffing to a soldier in battle who tries to frighten the enemy by firing blank cartridges.) Male wasps, like Carroll’s Wasp, although they look formidable, resemble the kings of chess. They are amiable, harmless creatures.

  Except for a few hibernating queens, wasps are summer insects and do not survive the winter. During the hot months they work furiously to provide for their offspring; then they stiffen and die with the approach of autumn’s cold winds. This is how Oliver Goldsmith phrases it in his marvelous, now-forgotten History of the Earth and Animated Nature:

  While the summer heats continue, they [wasps] are bold, voracious, and enterprising; but as the sun withdraws, it seems to rob them of their courage and activity. In proportion as the cold increases, they are seen to become more domestic; they seldom leave the nest, they make but short adventures from home, they flutter about in the noon-day heats, and soon after return chilled and feeble…As the cold increases they no longer find sufficient warmth in their nests, which grow hateful to them, and they fly to seek it in the corners of houses, and places that receive an artificial heat. But the winter is still insupportable; and, before the new year begins, they wither and die.

  Like so many elderly people, the Wasp has happy memories of a childhood when his tresses waved. In five stanzas of doggerel he tells Alice about his terrible mistake of allowing friends to persuade him to shave his head for a wig. All his subsequent unhappiness is blamed on this foolish indiscretion. He knows his present appearance is ridiculous. His wig does not fit. He fails to keep it neat. He resents being laughed at. The Wasp is Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “last leaf,” enduring the community’s ridicule as he clings “to the old forsaken bough.”

  Although the Wasp pretends not to want Alice to help him in any way, his spirits are lifted by her visit and the opportunity to tell his sad tale. Indeed, before Alice leaves he has become animated and talkative. When she finally says good-bye he responds with “Thank ye.” It is the only thanks Alice gets from anyone she meets on the mirror’s other side.

  The fashion of wearing wigs reached absurd heights in France and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During Queen Anne’s reign almost every upper-class man and woman in England wore a wig, and one could instantly tell a man’s profession by the kind of wig he sported. Some male wigs hung below the shoulders to cover both back and chest. The craze began to fade under Queen Victoria. In Carroll’s time it had all but vanished, except for the ceremonial wigs of judges and barristers, the wigs of actors, and the wearing of wigs to conceal baldness. The Wasp’s wig is clearly a mark of his advanced age even though he started wearing it when young.

  Why a yellow wig? If the Wasp’s ringlets were yellow it would be natural for him to substitute a yellow wig, but Carroll seems to emphasize the color for other reasons. He calls it “bright yellow.” And when Alice first meets the Wasp his wig is covered by a yellow handkerchief tied around his head and face.

  Both Alice books contain inside jokes about persons the real Alice, Alice Liddell, knew. It is possible, I suppose, that Carroll’s Wasp pokes fun at someone, perhaps an elderly tradesman in the area, who sported an unkempt yellow wig that resembled seaweed.

  Another theory has to do with the yellow color of many wasps in England. The American term yellow-jackets, for a large class of social insects that were (and are) called hornets, may have been in Carroll’s mind. The term had spread to England, and numerous varieties of British wasps have bright yellow stripes circling their black bodies. Wasp antennae are composed of tiny joints that also could be called ringlets. A young wasp’s antennae would certainly wave, curl, and crinkle, as the poem has it. If cut off, perhaps they would not grow again.

  There may have been wasps in Oxford, familiar to Carroll and Alice Liddell, with black heads circled by a yellow stripe that would look for all the world like a yellow handkerchief tied around the insect’s face. Even aside from a yellow stripe, a wasp’s face does resemble a human face done up in a handkerchief, the knot’s ends sticking up from the top of the head like two antennae.* Professor Heath recalls having had just such thoughts himself when he was a child in England.

  A third theory is that the Wasp, with his yellow handkerchief above a yellow wig, parallels Alice after she becomes a queen—the gold crown on top of her flaxen hair.

  A fourth theory (of course these theories are not mutually exclusive) is that Carroll chose yellow because of its long association in literature and common speech with autumn and old age. Yellow is the complexion of the elderly, especially if they suffer from jaundice. It is the color of fall leaves, of ripe corn, of paper “yellowed with age.” “Sorrow, thought, and great distress,” wrote Chaucer (in Romance of the Rose), “made her full yellow.”

  Shakespeare frequently used yellow as a symbol of age. Professor Cohen reports that Carroll, at least twice in his letters, quotes the following remark from Macbeth: “My way of life is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf.” These lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 are particularly apt:

  That time of year thou mayst in me behold

  When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

  Upon those boughs which shake against the cold…

  Through the Looking-Glass opens and closes with poems that speak of winter and death. The dream itself prob
ably occurs in November, while Alice sits in front of a blazing fire and snow is “kissing” the windowpanes. “Autumn frosts have slain July” is how Carroll puts it in his terminal poem, recalling that sunny July 4 boating trip on the Isis when he first told Alice the story of her trip to Wonderland.

  Although Carroll was not yet forty when he wrote his second Alice book, he was twenty years older than Alice Liddell, the child-friend he adored above any other. In the book’s prefatory poem he speaks of himself and Alice as “half a life asunder.” He reminds Alice that it will not be long until the “bitter tidings” summon her to “unwelcome bed,” and he likens himself to an older child fretting at the approach of the final bedtime.

  Carroll scholars believe that Carroll intended his White Knight—that awkward, inventive gentleman with the mild blue eyes and kindly smile who treated Alice with such uncharacteristic courtesy for someone behind the mirror—to be a parody of himself. Is it possible that Carroll regarded his Wasp as a parody of himself forty years later? Professor Cohen has convinced me that it is not possible. Carroll prided himself on being a Victorian gentleman. Under no circumstances would he have associated himself with a lower-class drone. Nonetheless, it seems to me that Carroll could not have written this episode without being acutely aware of the fact that the chasm of age between Alice and the Wasp resembled the chasm that separated Alice Liddell from the middle-aged teller of the story.

  I am persuaded that Carroll, perhaps not consciously, spoke through his Wasp like a ventriloquist talking through a dummy when he has the Wasp exclaim—in a way that seems strangely out of place in the dialogue—“Worrity, worrity! There never was such a child!”