Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded

by David Day

  The Queen turns Alice over to the care of these two grotesque monsters. We first encounter the Gryphon, but the Queen appears more concerned that Alice be introduced to the Mock Turtle. And we find, in the original Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, that the Queen is given the second title of Marchioness of Mock Turtles.

  “I never saw one, or heard of one,” said Alice.

  “Come on, then,” said the Queen, “and he shall tell you his history.”

  As they walked off together, Alice heard the King say in a low voice, to the company generally, “You are all pardoned.” “Come, that’s a good thing!” she said to herself, for she had felt quite unhappy at the number of executions the Queen had ordered.

  They very soon came upon a Gryphon, lying fast asleep in the sun. (If you don’t know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.) “Up, lazy thing!” said the Queen, “and take this young lady to see the Mock Turtle, and to hear his history. I must go back and see after some executions I have ordered”; and she walked off, leaving Alice alone with the Gryphon. Alice did not quite like the look of the creature, but on the whole she thought it would be quite as safe to stay with it as to go after that savage Queen: so she waited.

  The Gryphon sat up and rubbed its eyes: then it watched the Queen till she was out of sight: then it chuckled. “What fun!” said the Gryphon, half to itself, half to Alice.

  “What is the fun?” said Alice.

  “Why, she,” said the Gryphon. “It’s all her fancy, that: they never executes nobody, you know. Come on!”

  The Mock Turtle is a composite creature with the shell and front flippers of a turtle and the head, hind hooves and tail of a calf. In Wonderland, the Mock Turtle exists because of a pseudo-logical joke: if turtle soup is made from turtles, then mock turtle soup must be made from mock turtles. Except mock turtle soup is actually made with veal, which explains why Tenniel’s illustration gives the creature a calf’s head, hooves and tail.

  As for the Mock Turtle’s real-life identity, Carroll himself confirmed that it was his friend and colleague the Reverend HENRY PARRY LIDDON (1829–1890). In this, Carroll again indulges his fondness for appallingly bad puns: a turtle is an animal with a lid on. In “The New Belfry of Christ Church,” Carroll makes use of this same pun. In reference to the rumour attributing the cubic design of the wooden belfry to Liddon, Carroll asks: “Was it a Professor who designed this box, which, whether with a lid on or not, equally offends the eye?”

  Henry Liddon was Lewis Carroll’s travelling companion when he visited Russia and the continent in 1867, his only voyage abroad. And as the biographer and disciple of Edward Bouverie Pusey (the Oxford Cheshire Cat), Liddon also appears in two of Carroll’s squibs. In “The New Method of Evaluation, as Applied to π,” Liddon and Pusey appear as geometric coordinates: “It was now necessary to investigate the locus of EBP [Edward Bouverie Pusey]: this was found to be a species of Catenary.… The locus of HPL [Henry Parry Liddon] will be found almost entirely to coincide with this.” In “The Blank Cheque,” Henry Liddon appears as a lad called Harry-Parry, of whom we are told “Harry’s very fond of Pussy”—Pusey—who is the “much-enduring parlour-cat.”

  Henry Liddon: Name was a gift to the pun-loving Carroll.

  “Everybody says ‘come on!’ here,” thought Alice, as she went slowly after it: “I never was so ordered about in all my life, never!”

  They had not gone far before they saw the Mock Turtle in the distance, sitting sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock, and, as they came nearer, Alice could hear him sighing as if his heart would break. She pitied him deeply. “What is his sorrow?” she asked the Gryphon, and the Gryphon answered, very nearly in the same words as before, “It’s all his fancy, that: he hasn’t got no sorrow, you know. Come on!”

  So they went up to the Mock Turtle, who looked at them with large eyes full of tears, but said nothing.

  “This here young lady,” said the Gryphon, “she wants for to know your history, she do.”

  “I’ll tell it her,” said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow tone. “Sit down, both of you, and don’t speak a word till I’ve finished.”

  So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to herself, “I don’t see how he can even finish, if he doesn’t begin.” But she waited patiently.

  The Rev. Liddon: Caricatured as “High Church” in Vanity Fair.

  For twenty years Liddon was the resident canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where by means of his charismatic and emotive oration he attracted a vast congregation of three to four thousand. His sermons were so emotive, he frequently moved his parishioners to tears. In Wonderland, however, the Mock Turtle seems capable of moving only himself to tears. It must have amused the stuttering Dodo Dodgson to portray the great orator Henry Parry Liddon as a literary trope—a creature that exists only as a figure of speech.

  PLATO’S TURTLE AND ARISTOTLE’S GRYPHON Lewis Carroll shared Plato’s addiction to puns. Translator Trevor J. Saunders observes that in Plato’s The Laws the dialogue is full of “elephantine punning and other kinds of word-play, usually impossible to reproduce in English.” Peter Heath, in his Philosopher’s Alice, directly links Plato to the mock turtle and the Gryphon passages of Wonderland, in which Carroll makes “what is probably the direst collection of bad puns and false etymologies since Plato’s Cratylus.”

  Furthermore, the mock turtle and the Gryphon of Wonderland are comparable to the guardians of Plato’s Republic. PLATO (427–347 BC) and ARISTOTLE (384–322 BC) were the masters of the two great schools of philosophy in Athens, the Academy and the Lyceum, respectively. Like the mock turtle and the Gryphon, they were in the employ of royalty: Plato in the court of Dion of Syracuse, Aristotle in the court of Alexander the Great of Macedonia.

  Given that Carroll himself outed the Oxford mock turtle as the Reverend Liddon with that “lid on” pun about the creature’s shell, we can be forgiven for searching for the philosophic mock turtle’s identity by means of an equally appalling pun. So let us suggest that the mock turtle is Plato because a turtle is an animal shaped both like a plate and an O.

  Taking another clue from the punning explanation by the mock turtle that the Old Turtle was called a tortoise because he “taught us,” we may also conclude that in Wonderland, “turtle” implies teacher or philosopher. Consequently, we have another possible Carrollian pun on the name of Aristotle: Aris-turtle—aris in Greek means “top,” “best” or “first,” thus “best teacher” or “first philosopher.” Certainly, there was competition between Plato and Aristotle over who was ranked the top philosopher.

  Also, the Gryphon’s lecturing style is similar to that of Aristotle who is believed to have walked as he lectured to his students. He lectured on the grounds of the Lyceum in Athens which became known as the Peripatetic school of philosophy. Furthermore, this (possibly mistaken) belief in Aristotle’s approach to teaching was consciously adopted by the Oxford Gryphon, John Ruskin, in his famous long outdoor walking-tour lectures.

  Plato and Aristotle: Turtle and tortoise.

  Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car, by William Blake, circa 1825.

  “Once,” said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, “I was a real Turtle.”

  These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only by an occasional exclamation of “Hjckrrh!” from the Gryphon, and the constant heavy sobbing of the Mock Turtle. Alice was very nearly getting up and saying, “Thank you, sir, for your interesting story,” but she could not help thinking there must be more to come, so she sat still and said nothing.

  “When we were little,” the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, “we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle—we used to call him Tortoise—”

  “Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?” Alice asked.

  “We called him Tortoise because he taught us,” said the Mock Turtle angrily. “Really you are very dull!”

  “You
ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question,” added the Gryphon; and then they both sat silent and looked at poor Alice, who felt ready to sink into the earth. At last the Gryphon said to the Mock Turtle, “Drive on, old fellow! Don’t be all day about it!” and he went on in these words:

  “Yes, we went to school in the sea, though you mayn’t believe it—”

  “I never said I didn’t!” interrupted Alice.

  The Gryphon too is an imaginary beast, found only in heraldry and literature—notably the underworlds of the Aeneid and The Divine Comedy. It is a monster with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. Its name is most commonly spelled griffin, but Carroll chose the spelling used by Lucius Apuleius, the Roman author of The Golden Ass. This may be because that book’s gryphon is directly linked to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Described as the “Hyperborean gryphon,” it is one of the creatures in the grand procession in Lucius’s account of the Mysteries of the Great Goddess. Furthermore, Lucius Apuleius was the author of a famous lost text entitled Liber ludicorum et gryphorum, a title usually translated as “The Book of Enigmas.”

  Certainly, the Gryphon is an enigma who is partnered with an even greater enigma in the form of the absurd logic-chopping monster that is the Mock Turtle. There is little doubt that the real-life Oxford Gryphon was JOHN RUSKIN (1819–1900), the greatest art critic and philosopher of art history of his time. The hugely popular author of The Stones of Venice was an honorary Fellow of Christ Church and the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford.

  Ruskin had been an undergraduate at Oxford’s Trinity College, where the griffin appears on the college’s coat of arms and main gate. Furthermore, a well-known passage in Ruskin’s Modern Painters favourably compares Gothic sculptures of “true” griffins, with the classically conceived “false” griffin sculptures of ancient Rome. Ruskin’s mentor as an undergraduate had been the future dean of Christ Church—and future father of Alice Liddell. Dean Henry Liddell and Ruskin remained lifelong friends and colleagues. For a time, Ruskin was Alice’s drawing teacher. As such, he also served as the model for Wonderland’s “old conger-eel” who “used to come once a week” to the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle’s school to teach “Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils” (drawing, sketching and painting in oils).

  John Ruskin: The great critic had been mentored by Alice’s father.

  “You did,” said the Mock Turtle.

  “Hold your tongue!” added the Gryphon, before Alice could speak again. The Mock Turtle went on.

  “We had the best of educations—in fact, we went to school every day—”

  “I’ve been to a day-school, too,” said Alice; “you needn’t be so proud as all that.”

  “With extras?” asked the Mock Turtle a little anxiously.

  “Yes,” said Alice, “we learned French and music.”

  “And washing?” said the Mock Turtle.

  “Certainly not!” said Alice indignantly.

  “Ah! Then yours wasn’t a really good school,” said the Mock Turtle in a tone of great relief. “Now at ours they had at the end of the bill, ‘French, music, and washing—extra.’ ”

  “You couldn’t have wanted it much,” said Alice; “living at the bottom of the sea.”

  “I couldn’t afford to learn it,” said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. “I only took the regular course.”

  “What was that?” inquired Alice.

  Like Carroll, Ruskin had an obsession with young girls. And like Carroll, he wrote a fairy tale (The King of the Golden River) for a twelve-year-old child. Five years later, that child, Euphemia (Effie) Gray, would become Ruskin’s wife. However, the marriage was not a success, and after another five years, it was annulled on the grounds of non-consummation. Shortly thereafter, in 1855, Effie married Ruskin’s protégé, the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais. Ruskin—again like Carroll—was to remain a virgin all his life.

  TWO PRIM MISSES Although many aspects of Wonderland are parodies of Plato’s Republic, the logician Charles Dodgson was a champion of Aristotle. If any single discipline dominated Dodgson’s life, it was Aristotelian, or syllogistic, logic—although it was often at odds with the more mystical aspects of Platonic thought.

  Dodgson’s Symbolic Logic was dedicated “to the memory of Aristotle.” And in the introduction to that book, he wrote: “Since Aristotle, logicians have tried to formulate those rules underlying arguments which, when followed, will ensure that only true conclusions are drawn from true premises. These are called the rules of true argument.” It is in the manipulation of these rules of true argument that Lewis Carroll has great sport in Wonderland.

  Aristotle’s first book, Categories, which established the rank and order of things as genus, species and attributes, was Dodgson’s logician’s bible. The philosopher’s second book, Prior Analytics—the first treatise ever written on formal logic—was his user’s handbook. Aristotle’s system of logic provided the standard model of logic right up until Carroll’s day, when new algebraic tools began to transform it.

  Syllogistic logic is based on the idea that the conclusion to a valid argument is reached by way of two or more premises, or statements of fact. Or, as a character in Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno explains to a young lady, a “Sillygism” is that in which “two prim Misses” produce a “Delusion.” In fact, Carroll’s description of a “Sillygism” goes a long way toward explaining one aspect of his humour. It is a trick Carroll used in all of his writings to confuse and amuse. The result inevitably was dialogues that sound sensible because they appear to be logically constructed. However, as Carroll wrote in his Curiosa Mathematica, “the validity of a Syllogism is quite independent of the truth of its Premisses.”

  When Carroll brings the grammar and vocabulary of formal logic into ordinary language, he actually does create a “delusion”—that is, something that in formal language is logically correct but in ordinary language is patently not true. The usual result is a statement both absurd and comic.

  “Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”

  “I never heard of ‘Uglification,’ ” Alice ventured to say. “What is it?”

  The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. “What! Never heard of uglifying!” it exclaimed. “You know what to beautify is, I suppose?”

  “Yes,” said Alice doubtfully: “it means—to—make—anything—prettier.”

  “Well, then,” the Gryphon went on, “if you don’t know what to uglify is, you are a simpleton.”

  Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about it, so she turned to the Mock Turtle, and said “What else had you to learn?”

  “Well, there was Mystery,” the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers, “—Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling—the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a week: he taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.”

  “What was that like?” said Alice.

  “Well, I can’t show it you myself,” the Mock Turtle said: “I’m too stiff. And the Gryphon never learnt it.”

  “Hadn’t time,” said the Gryphon: “I went to the Classics master, though. He was an old crab, he was.”

  “I never went to him,” the Mock Turtle said with a sigh. “He taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say.”

  In 1855—the same year Carroll first caught sight of Alice Liddell—the wealthy Irish La Touche family asked Ruskin to give drawing lessons to their ten-year-old daughter, Rose. Ruskin appears to have promptly fallen in love with Rose La Touche, but patiently waited until she was eighteen (and he was forty-seven) before making an unsuccessful proposal of marriage. Nonetheless, he remained infatuated, and after her early death at the age of twenty-seven, the bereft Ruskin spent years attempting to psychically communicate with her departed spirit.

  There ar
e other obscure puns here, one in Greek. When Alice first meets the Mock Turtle she hears him “sighing as if his heart would break.” She sympathetically asks: “What is his sorrow?” In reply, the Gryphon explains, “It’s all his fancy, that: he hasn’t got no sorrow, you know.”

  Here is a bilingual pun that also crosses over with the language of classical logic: it isn’t sorrow the Turtle hasn’t got but soro, the Greek for “a heap” and the root of sorites, a chain of syllogisms, the conclusion of each forming a premise of the next. In the formal language of logic, a heap is a quantity of similar things placed together. But the Mock Turtle has no heap; he has no quantity, no material existence, whatever.

  This explains the chapter’s title, “The Mock Turtle’s Story.” It is another of Carroll’s dire puns: the Mock Turtle’s story is no story at all. It is an “M.T.” story, or “empty” story. The Mock Turtle is a nonentity and a category without content. He is what logicians know as a “null class,” which explains why his classes were lessons that “lessen from day to day” until nothing remains.

  “So he did, so he did,” said the Gryphon, sighing in his turn; and both creatures hid their faces in their paws.

  “And how many hours a day did you do lessons?” said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.

  “Ten hours the first day,” said the Mock Turtle: “nine the next, and so on.”

  “What a curious plan!” exclaimed Alice.

  “That’s the reason they’re called lessons,” the Gryphon remarked: “because they lessen from day to day.”

  This was quite a new idea to Alice, and she thought it over a little before she made her next remark. “Then the eleventh day must have been a holiday?”

  “Of course it was,” said the Mock Turtle.