It is amusing to note that when his biography entered the Encyclopaedia Britannica it was inserted just before the entry on the Dodo. The individuals in this “queer-looking party” represent the participants in an episode entered in Carroll’s diary on June 17, 1862. Carroll took his sisters, Fanny and Elizabeth, and his Aunt Lucy Lutwidge (the “other curious creatures”?) on a boating expedition, along with the Reverend Duckworth and the three Liddell girls.
June 17 (Tu). Expedition to Nuneham. Duckworth (of Trinity) and Ina, Alice and Edith came with us. We set out about 12.30 and got to Nuneham about 2: dined there, then walked in the park and set off for home about 4.30. About a mile above Nuneham heavy rain came on, and after bearing it a short time I settled that we had better leave the boat and walk: three miles of this drenched us all pretty well. I went on first with the children, as they could walk much faster than Elizabeth, and took them to the only house I knew in Sandford, Mrs. Broughton’s, where Ranken lodges. I left them with her to get their clothes dried, and went off to find a vehicle, but none was to be had there, so on the others arriving, Duckworth and I walked on to Iffley, whence we sent them a fly.
In the original manuscript, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, a number of details appear relating to this experience that Carroll later deleted because he thought they would have little interest to anyone outside the circle of individuals involved. When the facsimile edition of the manuscript was published in 1886, Duckworth received a copy inscribed, “The Duck from the Dodo.”
CHAPTER III
A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale
They were indeed a queer-looking party that assembled on the bank—the birds with draggled feathers, the animals with their fur clinging close to them, and all dripping wet, cross, and uncomfortable.
The first question of course was, how to get dry again: they had a consultation about this, and after a few minutes it seemed quite natural to Alice to find herself talking familiarly with them, as if she had known them all her life. Indeed, she had quite a long argument with the Lory, who at last turned sulky, and would only say “I’m older than you, and must know better.” And this Alice would not allow, without knowing how old it was, and, as the Lory positively refused to tell its age, there was no more to be said.
At last the Mouse, who seemed to be a person of some authority among them, called out “Sit down, all of you, and listen to me! I’ll soon make you dry enough!” They all sat down at once, in a large ring, with the Mouse in the middle. Alice kept her eyes anxiously fixed on it, for she felt sure she would catch a bad cold if she did not get dry very soon.
“Ahem!” said the Mouse with an important air. “Are you all ready? This is the driest thing I know. Silence all round, if you please! ‘William the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by the pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who wanted leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria—’ ”1
“Ugh!” said the Lory, with a shiver.
“I beg your pardon!” said the Mouse, frowning, but very politely. “Did you speak?”
“Not I!” said the Lory, hastily.
“I thought you did,” said the Mouse. “I proceed. ‘Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him; and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable—’ ”
“Found what?” said the Duck.
“Found it,” the Mouse replied rather crossly: “of course you know what ‘it’ means.”
“I know what ‘it’ means well enough, when I find a thing,” said the Duck: “it’s generally a frog, or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?”
The Mouse did not notice this question, but hurriedly went on, “ ‘—found it advisable to go with Edgar Atheling to meet William and offer him the crown. William’s conduct at first was moderate. But the insolence of his Normans—’ How are you getting on now, my dear?” it continued, turning to Alice as it spoke.
“As wet as ever,” said Alice in a melancholy tone: “it doesn’t seem to dry me at all.”
“In that case,” said the Dodo solemnly, rising to its feet, “I move that the meeting adjourn, for the immediate adoption of more energetic remedies—”
“Speak English!” said the Eaglet. “I don’t know the meaning of half those long words, and, what’s more, I don’t believe you do either!” And the Eaglet bent down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly.
“What I was going to say,” said the Dodo in an offended tone, “was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.”2
“What is a Caucus-race?” said Alice; not that she much wanted to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that somebody ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
“Why,” said the Dodo, “the best way to explain it is to do it.” (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter-day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)
First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (“the exact shape doesn’t matter,” it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no “One, two, three, and away!” but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out “The race is over!” and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking “But who has won?”
This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it stood for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”
“But who is to give the prizes?” quite a chorus of voices asked.
“Why, she, of course,” said the Dodo, pointing to Alice with one finger; and the whole party at once crowded round her, calling out, in a confused way, “Prizes! Prizes!”
Alice had no idea what to do, and in despair she put her hand in her pocket, and pulled out a box of comfits3 (luckily the salt water had not got into it), and handed them round as prizes. There was exactly one a-piece, all round.
“But she must have a prize herself, you know,” said the Mouse.
“Of course,” the Dodo replied very gravely. “What else have you got in your pocket?” it went on, turning to Alice.
“Only a thimble,” said Alice sadly.
“Hand it over here,” said the Dodo.
Then they all crowded round her once more, while the Dodo solemnly presented the thimble, saying “We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble”; and, when it had finished this short speech, they all cheered.
Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could.
The next thing was to eat the comfits: this caused some noise and confusion, as the large birds complained that they could not taste theirs, and the small ones choked and had to be patted on the back. However, it was over at last, and they sat down again in a ring, and begged the Mouse to tell them something more.
“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:—4
5
“You are not attending!” said the Mouse to Alice, severely. “What are you thinking of?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Alice ve
ry 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!”6
“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.
“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 ca’n’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.
1. Roger Lancelyn Green, editor of Carroll’s diary, identifies this dusty passage as an actual quotation from Havilland Chepmell’s Short Course of History (1862), pages 143–44. Carroll was distantly related to the earls Edwin and Morcar, but Green thinks it unlikely that Carroll knew this. (See The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, Vol. 1, page 2.) Chepmell’s book was one of the lesson books studied by the Liddell children. Green elsewhere suggests that Carroll may have intended the Mouse to represent Miss Prickett, the children’s governess.
2. The term caucus originated in the United States in reference to a meeting of the leaders of a faction to decide on a candidate or policy. It was adopted in England with a slightly different meaning, referring to a system of highly disciplined party organization by committees. It was generally used by one party as an abusive term for the organization of an opposing party. Carroll may have intended his caucus-race to symbolize the fact that committee members generally do a lot of running around in circles, getting nowhere, and with everybody wanting a political plum. It has been suggested that he was influenced by the caucus of crows in Chapter 7 of Water Babies, a scene that Charles Kingsley obviously intended as barbed political satire, but the two scenes have little in common.
The caucus-race does not appear in the original manuscript, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. It replaces the following deleted passage, based on the episode cited in Note 10 of the previous chapter.
“I only meant to say,” said the Dodo in rather an offended tone, “that I know of a house near here, where we could get the young lady and the rest of the party dried, and then we could listen comfortably to the story which I think you were good enough to promise to tell us,” bowing gravely to the mouse.
The mouse made no objection to this, and the whole party moved along the river bank, (for the pool had by this time begun to flow out of the hall, and the edge of it was fringed with rushes and forget-me-nots,) in a slow procession, the Dodo leading the way. After a time the Dodo became impatient, and, leaving the Duck to bring up the rest of the party, moved on at a quicker pace with Alice, the Lory and the Eaglet, and soon brought them to a little cottage, and there they sat snugly by the fire, wrapped up in blankets, until the rest of the party had arrived, and they were all dry again.
The thimble, taken from Alice and then returned to her, may symbolize the way governments take taxes from the pockets of citizens, then return the money in the form of political projects. See “The Dodo and the Caucus-Race,” by Narda Lacey Schwartz, in Jabberwocky (Winter 1977), and “The Caucus-Race in Alice in Wonderland: A Very Drying Exercise,” by August Imholtz, Jr., in Jabberwocky (Autumn 1981). The running in the caucus-race, according to Alfreda Blanchard in Jabberwocky (Summer 1982), may signify the running of politicians for office.
In his drawing of this scene Tenniel was forced to put human hands under the Dodo’s small, degenerate wings. How else could it hold a thimble?
3. Comfits are hard sweetmeats made by preserving dried fruits or seeds with sugar and covering them with a thin coating of syrup.
4. The mouse’s tale is perhaps the best-known example in English of emblematic, or figured, verse: poems printed in such a way that they resemble something related to their subject matter. The affectation goes back to ancient Greece. Practitioners have included such distinguished bards as Robert Herrick, George Herbert, Stéphane Mallarmé, Dylan Thomas, E. E. Cummings, and the modern French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. For a spirited if not convincing defense of emblematic verse as a serious art form, see Charles Boultenhouse’s article, “Poems in the Shapes of Things,” in the Art News Annual (1959). Other examples of the form will be found in Portfolio magazine (Summer 1950), C. C. Bombaugh’s Gleanings for the Curious (1867, revised), William S. Walsh’s Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (1892), and Carolyn Wells’s A Whimsey Anthology (1906).
Tennyson once told Carroll that he had dreamed a lengthy poem about fairies, which began with very long lines, then the lines got shorter and shorter until the poem ended with fifty or sixty lines of two syllables each. (Tennyson thought highly of the poem in his sleep, but forgot it completely when he awoke.) The opinion has been expressed (The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, Vol. I, page 146) that this may have given Carroll the idea for his mouse’s tale.
In the original manuscript of the book, an entirely different poem appears as the tale; in a way a more appropriate one, for it fulfills the mouse’s promise to explain why he dislikes cats and dogs, whereas the tale as it appears here contains no reference to cats. The original tale, as Carroll hand-lettered it, reads as follows:
We lived beneath the mat,
Warm and snug and fat.
But one woe, and that
Was the cat!
To our joys a clog.
In our eyes a fog.
On our hearts a log
Was the dog!
When the cat’s away,
Then the mice will play.
But, alas! one day;
(So they say)
Came the dog and cat,
Hunting for a rat,
Crushed the mice all flat,
Each one as he sat,
Underneath the mat,
Warm and snug and fat.
Think of that!
The American logician and philosopher Charles Peirce was much interested in the visual analogue of poetic onomatopoeia. Among his unpublished papers there is a copy of Poe’s “The Raven,” written with a technique that Peirce called “art chirography,” the words formed so as to convey a visual impression of the poem’s ide
as. This is not as absurd as it seems. The technique is employed frequently today in the lettering of advertisements, book jackets, titles of magazine stories and articles, cinema and TV titles, and so on.
I did not know, until I read about it in Under the Quizzing Glass, by R. B. Shaberman and Denis Crutch, that Carroll once proposed an additional change in the poem’s final quatrain. It was among thirty-seven corrections that he listed in his copy of the 1866 edition of the book. The revised stanza would have been:
Said the mouse to the cur. “Such a trial, dear sir.
With no jury or judge, would be tedious and dry.”
“I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury,” said cunning old Fury:
“I’ll try the whole cause, and condemn you to die.”
Fury was the name of a fox terrier owned by Carroll’s child-friend Eveline Hull. Morton Cohen, in a note on page 358 of The Letters of Lewis Carroll (Oxford, 1979), speculates that the dog was named after the cur in the mouse’s tale. He quotes an entry from Carroll’s diary (omitted from the published version) telling how Fury developed hydrophobia and had to be shot, which was done in Carroll’s presence.
In 1989 two New Jersey teenage students at the Pennington School, Gary Graham and Jeffrey Maiden, made an unusual discovery. Carroll’s mouse poem has the structure of what is known as a “tail rhyme”—a rhyming couplet followed by a short unrhymed line. By lengthening the last line, Carroll turned his tail poem into a pattern which, if printed in traditional form as shown, resembles a mouse with a long tail! For details of the discovery, see “Tail in Tail(s): A Study Worthy of Alice’s Friends,” in the New York Times (May 1, 1991, p. A23).
In 1995 David and Maxine Schaefer, of Silver Spring, Maryland, privately published a small hardcover book titled The Tale of the Mouse’s Tail. Illustrated by Jonathan Dixon, this delightful volume reproduces all the different ways the mouse’s tale has been pictured in editions of Alice in Wonderland throughout the world.
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (The Annotated Books) Page 6