Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded

by David Day

  Also in the Myth of Er, a high priest called the Interpreter takes charge and gathers all the creature-souls together. This is similar to the Dodo marshalling the Wonderland creatures in order to conduct a strange sort of race—perhaps emblematic of their previous life cycle (for each runs at his own pace and finishes whenever he wishes). And in the end, there are no losers, for everybody wins and all are allotted a prize.

  Compare this to the scene in the Myth of Er: “The souls, as soon as they came, were required to go before Lachesis. An Interpreter first marshalled them in order; and then, having taken from the lap of Lachesis a number of lots…[said:] Souls of a day, here shall begin a new round of earthly life.… You shall choose your own destiny.”

  As we have already seen in the prologue poem, Carroll has informed us of Alice’s identity as Secunda, the fatal sister also known as Lachesis the Measurer or “She who allots.” And this is confirmed as Alice allots the prizes in the form of comfits (candied fruits) “exactly one a-piece all round.” In the Myth of Er, the Interpreter “scattered the lots among them all” and “each took up the lot which fell at his feet.” And with these lottery tokens, each comes forward to choose its next life.

  But what is this Mouse complaining about? It is only by identifying this much-aggrieved rodent that we can uncover the issues involved. Certainly, the meaning would have eluded Alice Liddell and her sisters, which is perhaps just as well, as the story essentially amounts to an attack on her father as dean of Christ Church and on his authority as head of the university.

  The Mouse’s story is an allusion to the Aesop’s fable “Belling the Cat” (and likewise “The Mice in Council” by La Fontaine). Yet it is primarily meant as a political satire about the 1857 campaign by Christ Church students (lecturers and tutors) against the authority of the dean and the canons. The mice-and-cats metaphor for the students (mice) and the canons (cats) is a long-standing one: the Christ Church coat of arms displays four leopard faces, representing the canons of the college.

  Carroll and other political pamphleteers at Christ Church often adapted the fable. Indeed, in a long poem in the pamphlet entitled “The Elections to the Hebdomadal Council” (1866), Carroll employs the fable as the basis for a continuation of the same long-running conservative student attempts to gain a place against the liberal reforms of Dean Liddell and his allies among the Canons. It reads:

  “And here I must relate a little fable

  I heard last Saturday at our high table:—

  The cats, it seems, were masters of the house,

  And held their own against the rat and mouse:

  Of course the others couldn’t stand it long,

  So held a caucus (not, in their case, wrong).”

  In this chapter, the Mouse is no longer the Liddell family governess, Miss Mary Prickett, but THOMAS JONES PROUT (1823–1909), the tenacious leader of the conservative faculty and students against the near-absolute authority of the liberal dean and the canons. Charles Dodgson also took an active part in the campaign. And like the Dodo, Dodgson came to the aide of the Mouse Prout and held caucus meetings of rebellious conservative tutors (mice) in his college rooms.

  “The Mice in Council,” illustrated by Gustave Doré.

  Although there is no obvious connection between the Mary Prickett Mouse and the Thomas Prout Mouse, by coincidence Miss Prickett was born in the village of Binsey, just north of Oxford, and Thomas Prout was later the curate of that same town, which was home to St. Margaret’s Well, the “treacle-well” alluded to by the Dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

  After the Caucus-race and the allotting of prizes, Alice reminds the Mouse that he has promised to tell his story of why he hates “C and D.” All the creatures on the riverbank gather round, and the Mouse begins with what he describes will be “a long and a sad tale.” This leads to a typical Carrollian extended pun whereupon Alice looks down at the Mouse’s long tail and observes: “It is a long tail, certainly,…but why do you call it sad?”

  Thomas Jones Prout: This photograph was, of course, taken by his conservative ally.

  The original “tale/tail” in Carroll’s handwriting.

  With this pun, Alice combines the two homonyms and imaginatively creates the now famous Mouse’s tale of a tail. This figured, or chirographic, poem is printed in a way that visually conveys its subject. Once again, the original Under Ground manuscript employs, in handwritten form, the same visual tale/tail idea and structure. However, it is a different poem entirely. In Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, Alice’s “idea of the tale was something like this:”

  This original Under Ground tale/tail poem is more appropriate for a child reader as it attempts to give an explanation for the Mouse’s hatred of C and D that would make sense to a child. The Wonderland version explains only D: a vengeful dog named Fury “in the house” (Christ Church was always referred to as “The House” by its residents) who obscurely threatens to take legal action against the Mouse in a rigged court. It makes no mention of the cat. The story is never completed, and Alice manages to offend the Mouse and all the other birds and animals by injudiciously reintroducing stories about her affection for Dinah the cat (and Fury the dog).

  “You promised to tell me your history, you know,” said Alice, “and why it is you hate—C and D,” she added in a whisper, half afraid that it would be offended again.

  “Mine is a long and a sad tale!” said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing.

  “It is a long tail, certainly,” said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse’s tail; “but why do you call it sad?” And she kept on puzzling about it while the Mouse was speaking, so that her idea of the tale was something like this:—

  Arthur Stanley: The cat was a liberal canon.

  The C, or cats, the Mouse hates are the canons of Christ Church, and the D, or dog, is the dean (and Alice Liddell’s father), HENRY GEORGE LIDDELL (1811–1898). The cat most feared by the mice appears to be Dinah. Dinah was the name of the real Deanery cat belonging to the Liddell sisters, but the fictional creature is also a reference to the dean’s closest friend and confidant, ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY (1815–1881).

  “You are not attending!” said the Mouse to Alice severely. “What are you thinking of?”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Alice very humbly: “you had got to the fifth bend, I think?”

  “I had not!” cried the Mouse, sharply and very angrily.

  “A knot!” said Alice, always ready to make herself useful, and looking anxiously about her. “Oh, do let me help to undo it!”

  “I shall do nothing of the sort,” said the Mouse, getting up and walking away. “You insult me by talking such nonsense!”

  “I didn’t mean it!” pleaded poor Alice. “But you’re so easily offended, you know!”

  The Mouse only growled in reply.

  “Please come back and finish your story!” Alice called after it. And the others all joined in chorus, “Yes, please do!” but the Mouse only shook its head impatiently, and walked a little quicker.

  Stanley was a liberal canon of Christ Church and a frequent target of Carroll’s satirical squibs. He had been secretary to the 1851 royal commission of inquiry into the state of education at Oxford and Cambridge, and gave the impetus to all the liberal educational reforms that the heavily conservative faculty of Christ Church so strenuously wished to resist.

  Educated at the Rugby School, and later its master, Stanley was widely believed to be the model for George Arthur in Thomas Hughes’s novel Tom Brown’s School Days (1857). A leading liberal theologian of his time, Stanley married the sister of Lord Elgin, then viceroy of India (and earlier governor general of Canada). He was a royal favourite and was chosen to accompany the Prince of Wales on his tour of the Middle East. He eventually became dean of Westminster Abbey and delivered sermons at the funerals of Thomas Carlyle and Benjamin Disraeli.

  Like the dog in the Mouse’s tale, the dean—with the help of Stanley and the other canons—was initially able
to suppress the tutors’ revolt and maintain authority. However, the tenacious Prout fought on, and nearly a decade later, through an alliance with the undergraduates, finally succeeded in winning more power for the predominantly conservative faculty and thereby slowing the pace of the Dean’s liberal agenda at the university. Thomas Prout came to be known as “the man who slew the canons.”

  “What a pity it wouldn’t stay!” sighed the Lory, as soon as it was quite out of sight. And an old Crab took the opportunity of saying to her daughter “Ah, my dear! Let this be a lesson to you never to lose your temper!” “Hold your tongue, Ma!” said the young Crab, a little snappishly. “You’re enough to try the patience of an oyster!”

  “I wish I had our Dinah here, I know I do!” said Alice aloud, addressing nobody in particular. “She’d soon fetch it back!”

  “And who is Dinah, if I might venture to ask the question?” said the Lory.

  Alice replied eagerly, for she was always ready to talk about her pet: “Dinah’s our cat. And she’s such a capital one for catching mice you can’t think! And oh, I wish you could see her after the birds! Why, she’ll eat a little bird as soon as look at it!”

  This speech caused a remarkable sensation among the party. Some of the birds hurried off at once: one old Magpie began wrapping itself up very carefully, remarking “I really must be getting home; the night-air doesn’t suit my throat!” and a Canary called out in a trembling voice to its children, “Come away, my dears! It’s high time you were all in bed!” On various pretexts they all moved off, and Alice was soon left alone.

  “I wish I hadn’t mentioned Dinah!” she said to herself in a melancholy tone. “Nobody seems to like her, down here, and I’m sure she’s the best cat in the world! Oh, my dear Dinah! I wonder if I shall ever see you any more!” And here poor Alice began to cry again, for she felt very lonely and low-spirited. In a little while, however, she again heard a little pattering of footsteps in the distance, and she looked up eagerly, half hoping that the Mouse had changed his mind, and was coming back to finish his story.

  However, Prout the Mouse and Dodgson the Dodo proved to be among the last to gain life-long residency in “The House” through the old system of ecclesiastic privilege and favour. Under that system, no teaching or compulsory academic requirement was attached to the guarantee of a life-long salary with free college apartments, board and common-room membership. Dodgson was in residence for forty-seven years, while Prout the Mouse—despite the efforts of the dog—remained ensconced in a comfortable residency for sixty-seven years, “warm & snug & fat—Think of that!”

  Chapter 4: The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill

  “It was much pleasanter at home,” thought poor Alice, “when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits.”

  A TEMPLE TO SCIENCE Alice again encounters the White Rabbit—but a White Rabbit who is no longer timid and does not flee from her. Formerly a magician’s foil, the White Rabbit now seems to have assumed the authority of a magician himself. He doesn’t live in a hole like a wild rabbit or in a hat like a magician’s pet. He lives in a proper house with a brass plaque on the door. It reads: “W. RABBIT.” This is the timid rabbit’s double who has assumed an entirely different temperament.

  The White Rabbit orders Alice around as if she were his housemaid—or perhaps a magician’s assistant. He commands her to retrieve a couple of his magician’s props: his white gloves and his fan. In fact, this whole scene and Alice’s actions once she enters the house suggest Carroll has adopted the motif of the sorcerer’s apprentice.

  THE RABBIT SENDS IN A LITTLE BILL.

  It was the White Rabbit, trotting slowly back again, and looking anxiously about as it went, as if it had lost something; and she heard it muttering to itself, “The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers! She’ll get me executed, as sure as ferrets are ferrets! Where can I have dropped them, I wonder?” Alice guessed in a moment that it was looking for the fan and the pair of white kid gloves, and she very good-naturedly began hunting about for them, but they were nowhere to be seen—everything seemed to have changed since her swim in the pool, and the great hall, with the glass table and the little door, had vanished completely.

  Very soon the Rabbit noticed Alice, as she went hunting about, and called out to her in an angry tone, “Why, Mary Ann, what are you doing out here? Run home this moment, and fetch me a pair of gloves and a fan! Quick, now!” And Alice was so much frightened that she ran off at once in the direction it pointed to, without trying to explain the mistake it had made.

  Carroll knew Goethe’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

  That tale was originally recorded in a collection entitled Philopseudes (Lover of Lies) by the second-century Greek author Lucian of Samosata. It was adapted by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1797 into what became one of his most famous ballads, “Der Zauberlehrling,” or “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” It was widely known throughout Europe during the nineteenth century, and Carroll’s library included both Goethe’s poem and Lucian’s tale. Today, the story is best known in its adaption in the Disney film Fantasia.

  In this tale, the apprentice is told to do chores in the sorcerer’s house. Once alone, he decides to experiment with his master’s wands and spells. The results nearly wreck the house. The moral, of course, is that you shouldn’t meddle with things you don’t understand.

  “He took me for his housemaid,” she said to herself as she ran. “How surprised he’ll be when he finds out who I am! But I’d better take him his fan and gloves—that is, if I can find them.” As she said this, she came upon a neat little house, on the door of which was a bright brass plate with the name “W. RABBIT” engraved upon it. She went in without knocking, and hurried upstairs, in great fear lest she should meet the real Mary Ann, and be turned out of the house before she had found the fan and gloves.

  “How queer it seems,” Alice said to herself, “to be going messages for a rabbit! I suppose Dinah’ll be sending me on messages next!” And she began fancying the sort of thing that would happen: “ ‘Miss Alice! Come here directly, and get ready for your walk!’ ‘Coming in a minute, nurse! But I’ve got to watch this mouse-hole till Dinah comes back, and see that the mouse doesn’t get out.’ Only I don’t think,” Alice went on, “that they’d let Dinah stop in the house if it began ordering people about like that!”

  Alice enters the White Rabbit’s house on her errand to retrieve the gloves and fan, but then spots a little bottle next to a looking glass on the table. Like the apprentice, she decides to experiment without really understanding what she is doing—again with disastrous results. Once she drinks from the bottle, she grows so rapidly that she discovers her head pressing against the ceiling. In a couple more minutes she fills the entire room, and her every move threatens to wreck the house.

  Throughout the episode, a very surprised Alice finds herself following the White Rabbit’s orders, and fearing him when he commands her, even when she is “a thousand times as large as the Rabbit.” She appears to have lost her identity and her place in the world as she contemplates the absurd idea of taking orders from her cat.

  There is a clue to what is going on in Alice’s search for her place in the natural order of things. As we have established the real-life identity of the White Rabbit as the Liddell family physician and Oxford’s Regius Professor of Medicine Dr. Henry Wentworth Acland, it is reasonable to assume that the above-ground White Rabbit’s house might be the newly constructed Oxford University Museum of Natural History—which was the target of at least two of Lewis Carroll’s satirical political pamphlets.

  Dr. Acland was the curator of the new museum, a pet project of his that was all about establishing the natural order of all life forms. An enthusiastic amateur naturalist, Acland oversaw the museum’s construction and the assemblage of its collection from 1855 to 1860. The building was Oxford University’s remarkable new neo-Gothic temple to science.

  In 185
8, in the partially completed museum galleries, Dr. Acland gave a public lecture advocating the study of natural history as a means to understanding the designs of “the Supreme Master-Worker.” Sidestepping the hot topic of evolution, Acland took the view that the study of nature was the study of “the Second Book of God.”

  Some hutch: The Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

  By this time she had found her way into a tidy little room with a table in the window, and on it (as she had hoped) a fan and two or three pairs of tiny white kid gloves: she took up the fan and a pair of the gloves, and was just going to leave the room, when her eye fell upon a little bottle that stood near the looking-glass. There was no label this time with the words “DRINK ME,” but nevertheless she uncorked it and put it to her lips. “I know something interesting is sure to happen,” she said to herself, “whenever I eat or drink anything; so I’ll just see what this bottle does. I do hope it’ll make me grow large again, for really I’m quite tired of being such a tiny little thing!”

  It did so indeed, and much sooner than she had expected: before she had drunk half the bottle, she found her head pressing against the ceiling, and had to stoop to save her neck from being broken. She hastily put down the bottle, saying to herself “That’s quite enough—I hope I shan’t grow any more—As it is, I can’t get out at the door—I do wish I hadn’t drunk quite so much!”