Alice’s Right Foot, Esq.
Hearthrug,
near the Fender,1
(with Alice’s love).
Oh dear, what nonsense I’m talking!”
Just at this moment her head struck against the roof of the hall: in fact she was now rather more than nine feet high, and she at once took up the little golden key and hurried off to the garden door.
Poor Alice! It was as much as she could do, lying down on one side, to look through into the garden with one eye; but to get through was more hopeless than ever: she sat down and began to cry again.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Alice, “a great girl like you,” (she might well say this), “to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!” But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep, and reaching half down the hall.
After a time she heard a little pattering of feet in the distance, and she hastily dried her eyes to see what was coming. It was the White Rabbit returning, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid-gloves in one hand and a large fan in the other: he came trotting along in a great hurry, muttering to himself, as he came, “Oh! The Duchess, the Duchess! Oh! Wo’n’t she be savage if I’ve kept her waiting!” Alice felt so desperate that she was ready to ask help of any one: so, when the Rabbit came near her, she began, in a low, timid voice, “If you please, Sir—” The Rabbit started violently, dropped the white kid-gloves and the fan, and scurried away into the darkness as hard as he could go.2
Alice took up the fan and gloves, and, as the hall was very hot, she kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking. “Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” And she began thinking over all the children she knew that were of the same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of them.
“I’m sure I’m not Ada,” she said, “for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn’t go in ringlets at all; and I’m sure I ca’n’t be Mabel,3 for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh, she knows such a very little! Besides, she’s she, and I’m I, and—oh dear, how puzzling it all is! I’ll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!4 However, the Multiplication-Table doesn’t signify: let’s try Geography. London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome, and Rome—no, that’s all wrong, I’m certain! I must have been changed for Mabel! I’ll try and say ‘How doth the little—’,” and she crossed her hands on her lap, as if she were saying lessons, and began to repeat it, but her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words did not come the same as they used to do:—5
“How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
“How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!”
“I’m sure those are not the right words,” said poor Alice, and her eyes filled with tears again as she went on, “I must be Mabel after all, and I shall have to go and live in that poky little house, and have next to no toys to play with, and oh, ever so many lessons to learn! No, I’ve made up my mind about it: if I’m Mabel, I’ll stay down here! It’ll be no use their putting their heads down and saying ‘Come up again, dear!’ I shall only look up and say ‘Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else’—but, oh dear!” cried Alice, with a sudden burst of tears, “I do wish they would put their heads down! I am so very tired of being all alone here!”
As she said this she looked down at her hands, and was surprised to see that she had put on one of the Rabbit’s little white kid-gloves while she was talking. “How can I have done that?” she thought. “I must be growing small again.” She got up and went to the table to measure herself by it, and found that, as nearly as she could guess, she was now about two feet high, and was going on shrinking rapidly: she soon found out that the cause of this was the fan she was holding, and she dropped it hastily, just in time to save herself from shrinking away altogether.
“That was a narrow escape!” said Alice, a good deal frightened at the sudden change, but very glad to find herself still in existence.6 “And now for the garden!” And she ran with all speed back to the little door; but, alas! the little door was shut again, and the little golden key was lying on the glass table as before, “and things are worse than ever,” thought the poor child, “for I never was so small as this before, never! And I declare it’s too bad, that it is!”
As she said these words her foot slipped, and in another moment, splash! she was up to her chin in salt-water. Her first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, “and in that case I can go back by railway,” she said to herself. (Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the general conclusion that, wherever you go to on the English coast, you find a number of bathing-machines7 in the sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging-houses, and behind them a railway station.) However, she soon made out that she was in the pool of tears which she had wept when she was nine feet high.
“I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer to-day.”
Just then she heard something splashing about in the pool a little way off, and she swam nearer to make out what it was: at first she thought it must be a walrus or hippopotamus, but then she remembered how small she was now, and she soon made out that it was only a mouse, that had slipped in like herself.
“Would it be of any use, now,” thought Alice, “to speak to this mouse? Everything is so out-of-the-way down here, that I should think very likely it can talk: at any rate, there’s no harm in trying.” So she began: “O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O Mouse!” (Alice thought this must be the right way of speaking to a mouse: she had never done such a thing before, but she remembered having seen, in her brother’s Latin Grammar,8 “A mouse—of a mouse—to a mouse—a mouse—O mouse!”) The mouse looked at her rather inquisitively, and seemed to her to wink with one of its little eyes, but it said nothing.
“Perhaps it doesn’t understand English,” thought Alice. “I daresay it’s a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror.” (For, with all her knowledge of history, Alice had no very clear notion how long ago anything had happened.) So she began again: “Où est ma chatte?” which was the first sentence in her French lesson-book.9 The Mouse gave a sudden leap out of the water, and seemed to quiver all over with fright. “Oh, I beg your pardon!” cried Alice hastily, afraid that she had hurt the poor animal’s feelings. “I quite forgot you didn’t like cats.”
“Not like cats!” cried the Mouse in a shrill, passionate voice. “Would you like cats, if you were me?”
“Well, perhaps not,” said Alice in a soothing tone: “don’t be angry about it. And yet I wish I could show you our cat Dinah. I think you’d take a fancy to cats, if you could only see her. She is such a dear quiet thing,” Alice went on, half to herself, as she swam lazily about in the pool, “and she sits purring so nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her face—and she is such a nice soft thing to nurse—and she’s such a capital one for catching mice—oh, I beg your pardon!” cried Alice again, for this time the Mouse
was bristling all over, and she felt certain it must be really offended. “We wo’n’t talk about her any more, if you’d rather not.”
“We, indeed!” cried the Mouse, who was trembling down to the end of its tail. “As if I would talk on such a subject! Our family always hated cats: nasty, low, vulgar things! Don’t let me hear the name again!”
“I wo’n’t indeed!” said Alice, in a great hurry to change the subject of conversation. “Are you—are you fond—of—of dogs?” The Mouse did not answer, so Alice went on eagerly: “There is such a nice little dog, near our house, I should like to show you! A little bright-eyed terrier, you know, with oh, such long curly brown hair! And it’ll fetch things when you throw them, and it’ll sit up and beg for its dinner, and all sorts of things—I ca’n’t remember half of them—and it belongs to a farmer, you know, and he says it’s so useful, it’s worth a hundred pounds! He says it kills all the rats and—oh dear!” cried Alice in a sorrowful tone. “I’m afraid I’ve offended it again!” For the Mouse was swimming away from her as hard as it could go, and making quite a commotion in the pool as it went.
So she called softly after it, “Mouse dear! Do come back again, and we wo’n’t talk about cats, or dogs either, if you don’t like them!” When the Mouse heard this, it turned round and swam slowly back to her: its face was quite pale (with passion, Alice thought), and it said, in a low trembling voice, “Let us get to the shore, and then I’ll tell you my history, and you’ll understand why it is I hate cats and dogs.”
It was high time to go, for the pool was getting quite crowded with the birds and animals that had fallen into it: there was a Duck and a Dodo, a Lory and an Eaglet, and several other curious creatures.10 Alice led the way, and the whole party swam to the shore.
1. A fender is a low metal frame or screen, sometimes ornamental, between the hearthrug and an open fireplace.
Selwyn Goodacre suspects that when Alice addresses her right foot as “Esquire,” Carroll may have intended a subtle English/French joke. The French word for “foot” is pied. Its gender is masculine regardless of the owner’s sex.
2. In his article “Alice on the Stage” (cited in the first note on the book’s prefatory poem) Carroll wrote:
And the White Rabbit, what of him? Was he framed on the “Alice” lines, or meant as a contrast? As a contrast, distinctly. For her “youth,” “audacity,” “vigour,” and “swift directness of purpose,” read “elderly,” “timid,” “feeble,” and “nervously shilly-shallying,” and you will get something of what I meant him to be. I think the White Rabbit should wear spectacles. I am sure his voice should quaver, and his knees quiver, and his whole air suggest a total inability to say “Bo” to a goose!
In Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the original manuscript, the rabbit drops a nosegay instead of a fan. Alice’s subsequent shrinking is the result of smelling these flowers.
3. In his original story, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the names are Gertrude and Florence; these were cousins of Alice Liddell.
4. The simplest explanation of why Alice will never get to 20 is this: the multiplication table traditionally stops with the twelves, so if you continue this nonsense progression—4 times 5 is 12, 4 times 6 is 13, 4 times 7 is 14, and so on—you end with 4 times 12 (the highest she can go) is 19—just one short of 20.
A. L. Taylor, in his book The White Knight, advances an interesting but more complicated theory. Four times 5 actually is 12 in a number system using a base of 18. Four times 6 is 13 in a system with a base of 21. If we continue this progression, always increasing the base by 3, our products keep increasing by one until we reach 20, where for the first time the scheme breaks down. Four times 13 is not 20 (in a number system with a base of 42), but “1” followed by whatever symbol is adopted for “10.”
For another interpretation of Alice’s arithmetic, see “Multiplication in Changing Bases: A Note on Lewis Carroll,” by Francine Abeles, in Historia Mathematica, Vol. 3 (1976), pages 183–84.
5. Most of the poems in the two Alice books are parodies of poems or popular songs that were well known to Carroll’s contemporary readers. With few exceptions the originals have now been forgotten, their titles kept alive only by the fact that Carroll chose to poke fun at them. Because much of the wit of a burlesque is missed if one is not familiar with what is being caricatured, all the originals will be reprinted in this edition. Here we have a skillful parody of the best-known poem of Isaac Watts (1674–1748), English theologian and writer of such well-known hymns as “O God, our help in ages past.” Watts’s poem, “Against Idleness and Mischief” (from his Divine Songs for Children, 1715), is reprinted below in its entirety.
How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!
How skillfully she builds her cell!
How neat she spreads the wax!
And labours hard to store it well
With the sweet food she makes.
In works of labour or of skill,
I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
In books, or work, or healthful play,
Let my first years be passed,
That I may give for every day
Some good account at last.
Carroll has chosen the lazy, slow-moving crocodile as a creature far removed from the rapid-flying, ever-busy bee.
6. Alice’s earlier expansions have been cited by cosmologists to illustrate aspects of the expanding-universe theory. Her narrow escape in this passage calls to mind a diminishing-universe theory once advanced in Carrollian jest by the eminent mathematician Sir Edmund Whittaker. Perhaps the total amount of matter in the universe is continually growing smaller, and eventually the entire universe will fade away into nothing at all. “This would have the recommendation,” Whittaker said, “of supplying a very simple picture of the final destiny of the universe.” (Eddington’s Principle in the Philosophy of Science, a lecture by Whittaker published in 1951 by Cambridge University Press.) A similar vanish would occur if the universe has enough matter to stop expanding and go the other way toward a Big Crunch.
7. Bathing machines were small individual locker rooms on wheels. They were drawn into the sea by horses to the depth desired by the bather, who then emerged modestly through a door facing the sea. A huge umbrella in back of the machine concealed the bather from public view. On the beach the machines were of course used for privacy in dressing and undressing. This quaint Victorian contraption was invented about 1750 by Benjamin Beale, a Quaker who lived at Margate, and was first used on the Margate beach. The machines were later introduced at Weymouth by Ralph Allen, the original of Mr. Allworthy in Fielding’s Tom Jones. In Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771), a letter of Matt Bramble’s describes a bathing machine at Scarborough. (See Notes and Queries, August 13, 1904, Series 10, Vol. 2, pages 130–31.)
The second “fit” of Carroll’s great nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark (subtitled: An Agony in Eight Fits) tells us that a fondness for bathing machines is one of the “five unmistakable marks” by which a genuine snark can be recognized.
The fourth is its fondness for bathing-machines,
Which it constantly carries about,
And believes that they add to the beauty of scenes—
A sentiment open to doubt.
8. In his article “In Search of Alice’s Brother’s Latin Grammar,” in Jabberwocky (Spring 1975), Selwyn Goodacre argues that the book may have been The Comic Latin Grammar (1840). It was anonymously written by Percival Leigh, a writer for Punch, with illustrations by Punch cartoonist John Leech. Carroll owned a first edition.
Only one noun in the book is declined in full: musa, the Latin word for “muse.” Goodacre suggests that Alice, “looking over her brother’s shoulder at his Latin Grammar, mistook musa for mus,” the Latin word for “mouse.” Further comments on t
his speculation appear in Jabberwocky (Spring 1977). Everett Bleiler notes that Alice’s declining omits the ablative form.
9. Hugh O’Brien, writing on “The French Lesson Book” in Notes and Queries (December 1963), identified the book as La Bagatelle: Intended to introduce children of three or four years old to some knowledge of the French language (1804).
10. In two of Tenniel’s illustrations for the next chapter, you will see the head of an ape. It has been suggested that Tenniel intended his ape to be a caricature of Charles Darwin. This seems unlikely. The face of Tenniel’s ape, in his second picture, exactly duplicates that of an ape in his political cartoon in Punch (October 11, 1856), where the ape represents “King Bomba,” the nickname for Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies.
The flightless dodo became extinct about 1681. Charles Lovett informed me that the Oxford University Museum, which Carroll often visited with the Liddell children, contained (and still does) the remains of a dodo, and a famous painting of the bird by John Savory. The dodo was native to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Dutch sailors and colonists killed the “disgusting birds,” as they called them, for food, and their eggs (just one to a nest) were eaten by the farm animals of the early settlers. The dodo is one of the earliest examples of an animal species totally exterminated by the human species. See “The Dodo in the Caucus Race,” by Stephen Jay Gould, in Natural History (November 1996).
Carroll’s Dodo was intended as a caricature of himself—his stammer is said to have made him pronounce his name “Dodo-Dodgson.” The Duck is the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, who often accompanied Carroll on boating expeditions with the Liddell sisters. The Lory, an Australian parrot, is Lorina, who was the eldest of the sisters (this explains why, in the second paragraph of the next chapter, she says to Alice, “I’m older than you, and must know better”). Edith Liddell is the Eaglet.
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (The Annotated Books) Page 5