Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded

by David Day

  Caterpillar mark I: A drawing by Carroll from the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.

  “Repeat, ‘You are old, Father William,’ ” said the Caterpillar.

  Alice folded her hands, and began:—

  “You are old, Father William,” the young man said,

  “And your hair has become very white;

  And yet you incessantly stand on your head—

  Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

  “In my youth,” Father William replied to his son,

  “I feared it might injure the brain;

  But, now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,

  Why, I do it again and again.”

  “You are old,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before,

  And have grown most uncommonly fat;

  Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—

  Pray, what is the reason of that?”

  “In my youth,” said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,

  “I kept all my limbs very supple

  By the use of this ointment—one shilling the box—

  Allow me to sell you a couple?”

  “You are old,” said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak

  For anything tougher than suet;

  Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—

  Pray how did you manage to do it?”

  “In my youth,” said his father, “I took to the law,

  And argued each case with my wife;

  And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,

  Has lasted the rest of my life.”

  “You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly suppose

  That your eye was as steady as ever;

  Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—

  What made you so awfully clever?”

  “I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”

  Said his father; “don’t give yourself airs!

  Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?

  Be off, or I’ll kick you down stairs!”

  “That is not said right,” said the Caterpillar.

  “Not quite right, I’m afraid,” said Alice, timidly; “some of the words have got altered.”

  “It is wrong from beginning to end,” said the Caterpillar decidedly, and there was silence for some minutes.

  The Caterpillar was the first to speak.

  “What size do you want to be?” it asked.

  “Oh, I’m not particular as to size,” Alice hastily replied; “only one doesn’t like changing so often, you know.”

  “I don’t know,” said the Caterpillar.

  “You’ll get used to it in time,” says the Caterpillar. With some difficulty, Alice takes the Caterpillar’s advice. After three more rounds of what she considers provoking and frustrating questioning, Alice manages to remain calm enough to understand the Caterpillar’s cryptic advice. As the Caterpillar—who transforms one outward shape to another yet remains the same entity—knows, size and shape are an illusion to the essential self. Furthermore, Pythagoras’s reputed ability to communicate psychically with animals and people is mirrored by the Caterpillar, who reads Alice’s thoughts.

  In contrast to the spiritual Caterpillar, we have the spherical figure of Father William, in a poem recited by Alice. This preposterous character is easily recognizable as one of Carroll’s most frequently satirized colleagues: BENJAMIN JOWETT (1817–1893), the Oxford Regius Professor of Greek and the foremost translator of Plato in his time. Tenniel’s illustrations of Father William are very much caricatures of Jowett and appear to have been based on Carroll’s own photograph of the professor.

  Alice said nothing: she had never been so much contradicted in her life before, and she felt that she was losing her temper.

  “Are you content now?” said the Caterpillar.

  “Well, I should like to be a little larger, sir, if you wouldn’t mind,” said Alice: “three inches is such a wretched height to be.”

  “It is a very good height indeed!” said the Caterpillar angrily, rearing itself upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high).

  “But I’m not used to it!” pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And she thought of herself, “I wish the creatures wouldn’t be so easily offended!”

  “You’ll get used to it in time,” said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.

  This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again. In a minute or two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the grass, merely remarking as it went, “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.”

  “You Are Old, Father William” is a parody of the popular “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them,” a poem of the hopelessly moralizing sort frequently taught to “improve” schoolchildren’s minds. It was written by the poet laureate Robert Southey (1774–1843), who today is less remembered for his verse than for having written the first published version of “Goldilocks.”

  The poem and its lampoon begin similarly—“ ‘You are old, Father William,’ the young man cried,” goes Southey’s version—and have identical refrains: “ ‘In the days of my youth,’ Father William replied.” However, Southey’s didactic poem then embarks on a tiresome list of virtues, while Carroll’s entertains with a nonsense poem about an eccentric old man who “took to the law” and balanced an eel on his nose

  Benjamin Jowett was seen by conservatives like Carroll as a dangerously liberal and reform-minded figure who was allied with Dean Henry Liddell and Arthur Stanley. Entrenched conservative forces at Oxford blocked Jowett’s appointment as master of Balliol College in 1854, but in 1855, they were unable to prevent his appointment by Prime Minister Palmerston as Regius Professor of Greek. However, those same forces voted to withhold a reasonable salary for the professorship over the next decade. During this period, Jowett became a lightning rod for both pro-reform and anti-reform factions.

  In 1860, there were attempts to charge Jowett with heresy in three trials in three different courts. In a later squib, “The New Method of Evaluation, as Applied to π” (1865), one of several of his anti-Jowett satires disguised as mathematical theses, Carroll refers to these attempts to indict Jowett and suggests, “In an earlier age of mathematics J”—Jowett—“would probably have been referred to rectangular axes, and divided into two unequal parts.” Or as the Queen of Hearts might put it, “Off with his head!”

  “One side of what? The other side of what?” thought Alice to herself.

  “Of the mushroom,” said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud; and in another moment it was out of sight.

  Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to make out which were the two sides of it; and, as it was perfectly round, she found this a very difficult question. However, at last she stretched her arms round it as far as they would go, and broke off a bit of the edge with each hand.

  “And now which is which?” she said to herself, and nibbled a little of the right-hand bit to try the effect. The next moment she felt a violent blow underneath her chin: it had struck her foot!

  MUSHROOM π The Caterpillar’s mushroom is in itself a conundrum. Alice is informed that one side will make her larger and the other, shorter. Since the “perfectly round” mushroom has no immediately discernible sides, the Caterpillar’s advice is another piece of apparent nonsense that Alice earlier might have dismissed.

  Metaphorically and literally, the implication is that the mushroom is “food for thought” (which was, as we saw earlier, the title of another squib by Carroll). Consequently, Alice now perceives the Caterpillar’s advice as a puzzle, and seriously attempts to solve it.

  A clue to this puzzle of the mushroom may be found in a related satire. In the same year as the publication of Wonderl
and, Carroll published his political- mathematical squib “The New Method of Evaluation, as Applied to π,” with the introductory verse quotation “Little Jack Horner / Sat in a corner, / Eating a Christmas Pie.”

  In this pamphlet, Carroll states that the problem of evaluating π, rather than being a strictly arithmetic problem, “is in reality a dynamical problem,” and the Jack Horner rhyme is a reference to the mathematician William George Horner and his 1819 paper “A New Method of Solving Numerical Equations of All Orders, by Continuous Approximation.”

  Carroll’s own “New Method” was in fact a politically motivated attack on the aforementioned Benjamin Jowett, the professor of Greek. The “evaluation” for Jowett’s appropriate salary is estimated by testing a number of absurd calculations for the value of π. We don’t need to look far to see that “π” was very much on Carroll’s pun-obsessed mind. The pie/π pun in combination with the “perfectly round” shape of the mushroom inevitably suggested to his mathematician’s mind the statistician’s pie chart.

  The pie chart, or circle graph, was popularized by the Crimean war hero Florence Nightingale, who was a highly accomplished statistician. She is the subject of a Lewis Carroll poem, “The Path of Roses” (1856). And by circuitous coincidence, Miss Nightingale in her youth had had a distinguished suitor, one Benjamin Jowett—Carroll’s pie/π man.

  Squaring the circle was one of the great riddles of antiquity. Though long understood by serious mathematicians as an impossible challenge, it remained a popular pastime for amateur ones in the nineteenth century. Many of these, much to the irritation of Dodgson, continued to write to the popular press with their “discoveries.”

  In “Simple Facts about Circle-Squaring”—written in 1882 to warn off obsessed amateurs—Dodgson defined “Circle-Squarers” as “all who have attempted to give an exact value to the area of a circle, expressed in terms of the square of its radius.” As the area of a circle is equal to π2 units, a square of equal size would have to have a side length of the square root of π; consequently, the riddle of how to square the circle is essentially the same as finding an exact value for π.

  In the mid eighteenth century, mathematicians proved π was an “irrational” number; that is, an infinite non-repeatable decimal. By the publication of Wonderland, though, it had not yet been proved that π was also transcendental; that is, non-algebraic and consequently impossible to give an exact value to.

  “Simple Facts” was never published—and in any event would have proved to have been superfluous, for as the Carrollian mathematical scholar Francine Abeles has observed, in that same year, unknown to Dodgson, “Ferdinand Lindemann proved that π was transcendental, thereby settling the ancient Greek problem of squaring the circle. Since π is not algebraic, it is impossible to construct a square having area equal to that of a given circle (or a circle with area equal to that of a given square).”

  In Carroll’s “New Method of Evaluation, as Applied to π,” resolution is attempted by a number of real and imaginary functions, including the Horner’s method “by continuous approximation.” And indeed “by continuous approximation” seems a fairly good description of how Alice will eventually manage (bite by bite) to arrive at her desired height.

  Like Father William, Jowett was a wily orator who “took to the law” and managed to outwit his tormentors in court. Through the discovery of a legal error, Jowett was finally granted proper payment as the Regius Professor of Greek. Still, from the perspective of a conservative like the De Quincey Caterpillar—and Charles Dodgson—he was “wrong from beginning to end.”

  Unfortunately for Carroll and his conservative faction, Jowett had powerful pro-reform allies in government and was also one of Oxford’s best and most beloved tutors. Indeed, he was a kind of university-level Mr. Chips of his time. His students became lifelong friends and disciples. As testament to his popularity, a rhyme was recited at Balliol:

  First come I. My name is Jowett,

  There’s no knowledge but I know it.

  I am Master of this College.

  What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.

  Not only did Jowett win out in the end, he eventually was appointed the vice-chancellor of Oxford University. His funeral was one of the most impressive in Oxford’s history, with legions of former students in attendance, many of whom had subsequently attained positions of power throughout the empire.

  Benjamin Jowett: Seen as dangerously liberal.

  She was a good deal frightened by this very sudden change, but she felt that there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly: so she set to work at once to eat some of the other bit. Her chin was pressed so closely against her foot, that there was hardly room to open her mouth; but she did it at last, and managed to swallow a morsel of the left-hand bit.

  ***********

  “Come, my head’s free at last!” said Alice in a tone of delight, which changed into alarm in another moment, when she found that her shoulders were nowhere to be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a sea of green leaves that lay far below her.

  After Alice’s recitation of “Father William,” the Caterpillar once again engages her in a confusing discussion. This time it concerns Alice’s complaint that her constant fluctuations in size confuse her. She is particularly unhappy about being only three inches tall. The Caterpillar is irritated and dismissive. He is, after all, exactly three inches long himself.

  Yet the Caterpillar also ultimately provides Alice with a solution to her predicament when he explains that there is something very peculiar about the large mushroom upon which he is seated: “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.”

  “With bits” of the mushroom in hand, Alice finally has some control over her physical condition, but she has not yet learned how to use it to her advantage. She must learn to reflect on the Caterpillar’s teachings. She does not yet know what he means by “Keep your temper.”

  She still sees her identity tied to physical being: her name, or her species or the size of her body. Slowly, she learns something of the true identity of her immortal soul: she must learn more about her true self and how to use her power to control her own fate. This will take time and patience. After eating some mushroom, she shrinks to almost nothing, and then, after eating another piece, she grows rapidly and disproportionately. Her body seems to be left behind in the forest undergrowth, while her head on the stalk of a long neck soars up into the treetops. Alice’s mind is free at last and soars upward, independent of her body.

  “What can all that green stuff be?” said Alice. “And where have my shoulders got to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can’t see you?” She was moving them about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow, except a little shaking among the distant green leaves.

  As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was going to dive in among the leaves, which she found to be nothing but the tops of the trees under which she had been wandering, when a sharp hiss made her draw back in a hurry: a large pigeon had flown into her face, and was beating her violently with its wings.

  “Serpent!” screamed the Pigeon.

  “I’m not a serpent!” said Alice indignantly. “Let me alone!”

  She seems to be having an out-of-body experience, what the Eastern mystics commonly described as “astral travelling.” This form of meditation after the ingestion of mind-altering substances goes back to the beginnings of human civilization. It was certainly practised by the mystery cults of ancient Greece.

  Soaring among the treetops, Alice finds herself attacked and interrogated by an angry pigeon. She undergoes another crisis of identity, and cannot sufficiently defend or define herself. The pigeon accuses her of being a se
rpent after the eggs in its nest.

  Once again, Carroll is giving a mythological gloss to this encounter. This scene is a parody of the rites practised at the most ancient oracle in the Hellenic world: the sacred grove of Zeus at Dodona. Oxford scholars during Carroll’s student years were excited about the recent excavation of the site.

  “Serpent, I say again!” repeated the Pigeon, but in a more subdued tone, and added with a kind of sob, “I’ve tried every way, and nothing seems to suit them!”

  “I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about,” said Alice.

  “I’ve tried the roots of trees, and I’ve tried banks, and I’ve tried hedges,” the Pigeon went on, without attending to her; “but those serpents! There’s no pleasing them!”

  Alice was more and more puzzled, but she thought there was no use in saying anything more till the Pigeon had finished.

  “As if it wasn’t trouble enough hatching the eggs,” said the Pigeon; “but I must be on the look-out for serpents night and day! Why, I haven’t had a wink of sleep these three weeks!”

  “I’m very sorry you’ve been annoyed,” said Alice, who was beginning to see its meaning.

  According to Herodotus, the oracle of trees came into being when a black pigeon from Egypt gifted with a human voice came to nest in the tallest tree in Dodona, and commanded attending priests to build a temple to Zeus. The prophecies of the oracle were conveyed by the movements of both the sacred bird and the tree’s branches in the wind.