Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded

by David Day

  “Which would not be an advantage,” said Alice, who felt very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. “Just think of what work it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis—”

  “Talking of axes,” said the Duchess, “chop off her head!”

  Alice glanced rather anxiously at the cook, to see if she meant to take the hint; but the cook was busily stirring the soup, and seemed not to be listening, so she went on again: “Twenty-four hours, I think; or is it twelve? I—”

  “Oh, don’t bother me,” said the Duchess. “I never could abide figures!” And with that she began nursing her child again, singing a sort of lullaby to it as she did so, and giving it a violent shake at the end of every line:—

  Samuel Wilberforce: Oily and argumentative.

  The great kitchen was also the one part of the college that fell directly under the authority of the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce (the son of the anti-slavery Great Emancipator, William Wilberforce). The bishop was one of the most vociferous ecclesiastic orators of his time and became popularly known as Holy Terror Wilberforce. To political pundits and parliamentarians, on the other hand, he was known as Soapy Sam, after Benjamin Disraeli’s devastatingly erudite description of his debating style as “unctuous, oleaginous, saponaceous.” And as Soapy Sam, Bishop SAMUEL WILBERFORCE (1805–1873) was the perfect model for the logic-chopping, moralizing, argumentative Ugly Duchess. In 1860, Wilberforce took a leading role in a historic event in intellectual history, comparable to the confrontation between Galileo and the Pope over the nature of the universe. This was the famous Oxford evolution debate, in which the anti-evolution Wilberforce locked horns with the pro-evolution Thomas Henry Huxley.

  “Speak roughly to your little boy,

  And beat him when he sneezes:

  He only does it to annoy,

  Because he knows it teases.”

  CHORUS

  (in which the cook and the baby joined):—

  “Wow! wow! wow!”

  While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing the baby violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so, that Alice could hardly hear the words:—

  “I speak severely to my boy,

  I beat him when he sneezes;

  For he can thoroughly enjoy

  The pepper when he pleases!”

  CHORUS

  “Wow! wow! wow!”

  Two views of Richard Owen: Tried to stir up debate.

  The Duchess’s cook is based on one of the leading anatomists of the day, Sir RICHARD OWEN (1804–1892), who served as the bishop’s adviser. It was Owen who cooked up the anti-evolution arguments for Wilberforce. Much to Owen’s irritation, though, the bishop failed to comprehend and coherently argue Owen’s position on Darwin’s theories.

  “Here! You may nurse it a bit, if you like!” the Duchess said to Alice, flinging the baby at her as she spoke. “I must go and get ready to play croquet with the Queen,” and she hurried out of the room. The cook threw a frying-pan after her as she went out, but it just missed her.

  Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, “just like a star-fish,” thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it.

  As soon as she had made out the proper way of nursing it (which was to twist it up into a sort of knot, and then keep tight hold of its right ear and left foot, so as to prevent its undoing itself), she carried it out into the open air. “If I don’t take this child away with me,” thought Alice, “they’re sure to kill it in a day or two. Wouldn’t it be murder to leave it behind?” She said the last words out loud, and the little thing grunted in reply (it had left off sneezing by this time). “Don’t grunt,” said Alice; “that’s not at all a proper way of expressing yourself.”

  Famous as the anatomist who coined the word dinosaur, and later the founder of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, Owen was sufficiently celebrated to be caricatured regularly in the press. He appears not only in Wonderland but in another children’s classic of the time, Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies.

  Owen was an influential figure in the scientific establishment, but an extremely disagreeable character. In Darwin, Owen and Wilberforce had a common enemy; however, Owen was no friend of the bishop, and was as likely to be in dispute with Wilberforce as with Darwin. In his fantastic “Kitchen of Creation,” Carroll has the cook and the Duchess arguing about the contents of a mad biological soup.

  In this kitchen oracle, evolution has gone berserk. Fish-frog-footmen in livery seem to have just stepped out of the primordial ooze. A constantly shape-shifting baby appears to demonstrate survival of the fittest by preferring beatings to affection. Strangest of all, Alice’s attempts to nurse this child result in a reverse form of evolution: from a boy into a pig.

  This surreal transformation is a typical Carrollian riddle and charade. Carroll is playing a word-chain game that he himself invented (and later published in Vanity Fair) called Doublets. Two words of the same length are chosen, and the player must make one word evolve into another by means of link (or “missing link”) words created by changing a single letter to form each new link-word.

  In Vanity Fair, Carroll asked his readers to “Evolve MAN from APE,” then supplied the answer: APE-are-ere-err-ear-mar-MAN. Among the multitude of Doublet transformations were “Change FISH to BIRD,” “Save LION from LAMB,” “Crown TIGER with ROSES,” and “Change GRUB to MOTH.” The rules of Doublets are like those of genetics, by which one species evolves into another by one small change after the other in a chain of DNA molecules.

  Owen and Huxley as depicted in The Water-Babies.

  The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see what was the matter with it. There could be no doubt that it had a very turn-up nose, much more like a snout than a real nose: also its eyes were getting extremely small for a baby: altogether Alice did not like the look of the thing at all. “But perhaps it was only sobbing,” she thought, and looked into its eyes again, to see if there were any tears.

  No, there were no tears. “If you’re going to turn into a pig, my dear,” said Alice, seriously, “I’ll have nothing more to do with you. Mind now!” The poor little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible to say which), and they went on for some while in silence.

  Alice was just beginning to think to herself, “Now, what am I to do with this creature when I get it home?” when it grunted again, so violently, that she looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be no mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be quite absurd for her to carry it further.

  Carroll also gives the reader an obscure hint of the nature of his game when the Duchess chants her witch’s spell over the child that ends in “Wow! wow! wow!” This is a cryptic phonetic pun on the word Doublets: wow spelled out aloud is “Double-you oh double-you.” And with this she predicts the verbal evolution of boy into pig; that is, BOY-bog-big-PIG.

  Speaking in tongues: Detail from Consulting the Oracle, by John William Waterhouse, 1884.

  HE WAS THE BOMB The theosophical candidate for the Ugly Duchess is Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, aka PARACELSUS OF ZURICH (1493–1541), a Swiss physician, botanist, alchemist, astrologer and occultist. Paracelsus gained a reputation for being arrogant toward his colleagues, and some writers suggest that “Theophrastus Bombastus” is the source of the word bombastic to describe a pompous, pretentious, verbose and self-aggrandizing character. This certainly describes the Ugly Duchess, but perhaps it is best to allow Paracelsus to speak for himself:

  “I am Theophrastus, and greater than those whom you liken me; I am
Theophrastus, and in addition I am monarcha medicorum and I can prove to you what you cannot prove.… You are not learned or experienced enough to refute even one word of mine.… Let me tell you this: every little hair on my neck knows more than you and all your scribes, and my shoe buckles are more learned than your Galen and Avicenna, and my beard has more experience than all your high colleges.”

  Paracelsus: This is a copy of the portrait by Matsys, now lost.

  So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood. “If it had grown up,” she said to herself, “it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.” And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs, and was just saying to herself, “if one only knew the right way to change them—” when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.

  FACE OF THE DUCHESS The National Gallery, London contains the extremely grotesque An Old Woman (c. 1513), by the Flemish artist Quentin Matsys (1466–1530), that in the twentieth century has become widely known as “The Ugly Duchess” because it is believed to be John Tenniel’s model for his illustration of that Wonderland character. Although it has been frequently argued that the portrait is of Margaret Countess of Tyrol (1318–1369)—a.k.a. Margarete Maultasch, “the ugliest princess in history”—this is unlikely. To begin with, it was not a portrait drawn from life as it was painted a century and a half after Margaret’s death. Furthermore, chronicles written during the countess’s lifetime describe her as being beautiful.

  The Countess’s scandalous epithet “Maultasch” literally translates as “bag mouth” and carries the meaning “ugly whore.” This slander was spread by enemies who wished to usurp her lands, and used their influence to have her excommunicated as an immoral woman for divorcing her first husband. Over time the nickname and others like it resulted in folk tales about an ugly and deformed countess that were eventually recorded in Jacob Grimm’s German Sagas (1816).

  Nonetheless, although Matsys’s painting is not a portrait of the last Countess of Tyrol, there is a convincing case for claiming it as the inspiration for John Tenniel’s drawings of the Ugly Duchess. And strangely enough, another of this Flemish artist’s paintings is directly linked to our theosophical candidate for the Ugly Duchess. Quentin Matsys was commissioned to paint a portrait of his famous contemporary: the celebrated alchemical doctor Paracelsus of Zurich.

  An Old Woman: More Duchess than Countess.

  Alice’s first view of the Duchess’s kitchen is from its door, where she observes those two bizarre examples of evolution gone wrong: the Fish-Footman and the Frog-Footman. Their names are literal descriptions of the creatures: one is half fish and half man, the other is half frog and half man; both measure one foot in height.

  Carroll’s first hint is perhaps found in the initial exchange at the kitchen door: “The Fish-Footman began by producing from under his arm a great letter, nearly as large as himself, and this he handed over to the other.” This sounds perilously close to a restating of the rules of Doublets.

  The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.

  “Cheshire Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. “Come, it’s pleased so far,” thought Alice, and she went on. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

  “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

  “I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

  “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

  “—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.

  Not wishing to make the charade too obvious, Carroll has the Frog-Footman, when he twice says what the letter is about, “changing the order of the words a little” (rather than changing the letters). For, by passing “a great letter, nearly as large as himself,” the Fish-Footman could easily be verbally transformed into the Frog-Footman: FISH-fist-fiat-flat-flag-flog-FROG.

  “Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

  Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. “What sort of people live about here?”

  “In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”

  “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

  “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

  The power of Carroll’s word game is forcefully demonstrated with the sudden dramatic reappearance of the Cheshire Cat after Alice sets the pig free in the woods. Carroll’s game of Doublets goes some way toward explaining the Cheshire Cat’s ability to vanish and reappear from head to tail and back again. In fact, in his introduction to his collection of Doublets, Carroll provides his readers with exactly this example of changing Head into Tail.

  And so, in Wonderland, the appearance and disappearance of the Cheshire Cat is manifest in the word chain HEAD-heal-teal-tell-tall-TAIL. We can solve the conundrum of the cat’s slowly vanishing from tail to grin with the word chain TAIL-tall-tell-teal-team-tram-trim-grim-GRIN and his final reappearance from a grin to a floating head with GRIN-grim-trim-tram-team-teal-heal-HEAD.

  Still, cats at Oxford are not hard to find. Christ Church’s coat of arms is adorned with four guardian cat faces looking down on the gardens of academia. To differentiate the Christ Church colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, Oxford employs the abbreviation Ch.Ch. Consequently, Carroll and his colleagues commonly referred to themselves as Ch. Ch. men; meanwhile, the Ch.Ch. canons (as represented by the cat faces on the coat of arms) by tradition became known as the Ch.Ch. cats: the watchful moral guardians of the university.

  It is not a huge leap from “Ch.Ch. cat” to “Cheshire Cat,” but this still doesn’t tell us which Ch.Ch. canon is the definitive Cheshire Cat. Alice supplies us with a clue by rather formally addressing the cat as “Cheshire Puss.” Why the capital on Puss? Why Puss at all? Only one Ch.Ch. canon, as Alice observes, “would like the name,” because his name was Pusey.

  “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

  “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

  Alice didn’t think that proved it at all; however, she went on “And how do you know that you’re mad?”

  “To begin with,” said the Cat, “a dog’s not mad. You grant that?”

  “I suppose so,” said Alice.

  “Well, then,” the Cat went on, “you see, a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.”

  “I call it purring, not growling,” said Alice.

  “Call it what you like,” said the Cat. “Do you play croquet with the Queen to-day?”

  Edward Bouverie Pusey: Awarded Carroll a lifetime position at Christ Church.

  Christ Church’s coat of arms: The blue cats are leopards, representing the de la Pole Dukes of Suffolk. See this page for the full coat of arms.

  The Cheshire Cat was the Reverend Dr. EDWARD BOUVERIE PUSEY (1800–1882), Regius Professor of Hebrew and Lewis Carroll’s mentor and patron. Canon Pusey was the ecclesiastical and political focus of ultra-conservatism at Oxford. And just as the Cheshire Cat was the Duchess’s cat, so Pusey was nominally under the authority of Oxford’s Duchess, Bishop Wilberforce. Pusey and Wilberforce were the two most influential figures in the Anglican clergy at Oxford. As a friend of Carroll’s High Church father from their own student years at Christ Church, Canon Pusey awarded—through the old system of privilege and patronage—the y
oung Charles Dodgson a lifelong position at Christ Church before he’d achieved his bachelor’s degree.

  The Catenary and the Cat.

  In his pseudo-mathematical satire,“The New Method of Evaluation, as Applied to π,” wherein people take on geometric identities, Carroll investigates “the locus of EBP [Edward Bouverie Pusey]: this was found to be a species of Catenary, called the Patristic Catenary.” Today the term patristic catenary (meaning “chain of the fathers”) is obscure, but it was not so in Carroll’s time, when its Latin translation, catena patrum, referred to quotations from the church Fathers commenting on scripture. Canon Pusey was famously the greatest authority on the teachings of the Fathers of the church, and widely celebrated as the ultimate “patristic catenary.”

  Even more revealingly, in geometry, a catenary is a curve made by a chain suspended between two points at different levels, such as one finds in a suspension, or catenary, bridge. Not only has Carroll with this clue provided us with proof of the identity of Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat, but the shape of a catenary is almost perfectly described by Alice as “a grin without a cat!”

  “I should like it very much,” said Alice, “but I haven’t been invited yet.”

  “You’ll see me there,” said the Cat, and vanished.

  Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so used to queer things happening. While she was looking at the place where it had been, it suddenly appeared again.

  “By-the-bye, what became of the baby?” said the Cat. “I’d nearly forgotten to ask.”

  “It turned into a pig,” Alice quietly said, just as if it had come back in a natural way.