The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (The Annotated Books)

by Lewis Carroll

  “I thought it would,” said the Cat, and vanished again.

  Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it did not appear, and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in which the March Hare was said to live. “I’ve seen hatters before,” she said to herself: “the March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps, as this is May, it wo’n’t be raving mad—at least not so mad as it was in March.” As she said this, she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on a branch of a tree.10

  “Did you say ‘pig’, or ‘fig’?’ said the Cat.

  “I said ‘pig’,” replied Alice; “and I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy!”

  “All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

  “Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!”11

  She had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house of the March Hare: she thought it must be the right house, because the chimneys were shaped like ears and the roof was thatched with fur. It was so large a house, that she did not like to go nearer till she had nibbled some more of the left-hand bit of mushroom, and raised herself to about two feet high: even then she walked up towards it rather timidly, saying to herself “Suppose it should be raving mad after all! I almost wish I’d gone to see the Hatter instead!”

  1. Not until Chapter 9, when Alice and the Duchess meet again, are we told that Alice tried to keep her distance from the Duchess because she “was very ugly,” and because the Duchess kept prodding her shoulder with her “sharp little chin.” The sharp chin is mentioned two more times in this episode. The whereabouts of the Duke, if living, is left in mystery.

  The chin of Tenniel’s Duchess is not very little or sharp, but she is certainly ugly. It seems likely that he copied a painting attributed to the sixteenth-century Flemish artist Quentin Matsys (his name has variant spellings). The portrait is popularly regarded as one of the fourteenth-century duchess Margaret of Carinthia and Tyrol. She had the reputation of being the ugliest woman in history. (Her nickname, “Maultasche,” means “pocket-mouthed.”) Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel The Ugly Duchess is about her sad life. See also “A Portrait of the Ugliest Princess in History,” by W. A. Baillie-Grohman, Burlington Magazine (April 1921).

  On the other hand, there are numerous engravings and drawings almost identical with Matsys’s painting, including a drawing by Francesco Melzi, a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci. Part of the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace, it is said to be a copy of a lost original by da Vinci! For the confusing history of these pictures, which may have no connection whatever with Duchess Margaret, see Chapter 4 of Michael Hancher’s, The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books.

  QUENTIN MATSYS’S PAINTING OF THE

  “UGLY DUCHESS.”

  (National Gallery, London)

  2. The pepper in the soup and in the air suggests the peppery ill temper of the Duchess. Was it the custom in Victorian England for lower classes to put excessive pepper in their soup to mask the taste of slightly spoiled meat and vegetables?

  For Savile Clarke’s stage production of Alice, Carroll provided the following lines to be spoken by the cook while she stirs the soup: “There’s nothing like pepper, says I. . . . Not half enough yet. Nor a quarter enough.” The cook then recites, like a witch chanting a charm:

  Boil it so easily,

  Mix it so greasily,

  Stir it so sneezily,

  One! Two!! Three!!!

  “One for the Missus, two for the cat, and three for the baby,” the cook continues, striking the baby’s nose.

  I quote from Charles C. Lovett’s valuable book Alice on Stage: A History of the Early Theatrical Productions of Alice in Wonderland (Meckler, 1990). The lines appeared both in the stage production and in the script’s published version.

  3. “Grin like a Cheshire cat” was a common phrase in Carroll’s day. Its origin is not known. The two leading theories are: (1) A sign painter in Cheshire (the county, by the way, where Carroll was born) painted grinning lions on the signboards of inns in the area (see Notes and Queries, No. 130, April 24, 1852, page 402); (2) Cheshire cheeses were at one time molded in the shape of a grinning cat (see Notes and Queries, No. 55, Nov. 16, 1850, page 412). “This has a peculiar Carrollian appeal,” writes Dr. Phyllis Greenacre in her psychoanalytic study of Carroll, “as it provokes the fantasy that the cheesy cat may eat the rat that would eat the cheese.” The Cheshire Cat is not in the original manuscript, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.

  David Greene sent me this quotation from an 1808 letter of Charles Lamb: “I made a pun the other day, and palmed it upon Holcroft, who grinned like a Cheshire cat. Why do cats grin in Cheshire? Because it was once a county palatine and the cats cannot help laughing whenever they think of it, though I see no great joke in it.”

  Hans Haverman wrote to suggest that Carroll’s vanishing cat might derive from the waning of the moon—the moon has long been associated with lunacy—as it slowly turns into a fingernail crescent, resembling a grin, before it finally disappears.

  Did T. S. Eliot have the Cheshire Cat in mind when he concluded “Morning at the Window” with this couplet?

  An aimless smile that hovers in the air

  And vanishes along the level of the roofs.

  For more on the grin, see “The Cheshire-Cat and Its Origins,” by Ken Oultram, in Jabberwocky (Winter 1973).

  A 1989 pamphlet published in Japan, Lewis Carroll and His World—Cheshire Cat, by Katsuko Kasai, quotes the following lines from Thackeray’s novel Newcomes (1855): “That woman grins like a Cheshire cat. . . . Who was the naturalist who first discovered that peculiarity of the cats in Cheshire?” Kasai also quotes from Captain Gosse’s A Dictionary of the Buckish Slang, University Wit and Pickpocket Eloquence (1811): “He grins like a Cheshire cat; said of any one who shews his teeth and gums in laughing.” Other quotes and various theories about the phrase’s origin are discussed by Kasai. In a 1995 letter to me, Kasai makes an interesting conjecture. We know that Cheshire cheese was once sold in the shape of a grinning cat. One would tend to slice off the cheese at the cat’s tail end until finally only the grinning head would remain on the plate.

  Knight Letter, the official organ of The Lewis Carroll Society of North America, published Joel Birenbaum’s article (Summer 1992), “Have We Finally Found the Cheshire Cat?” Birenbaum reports on his tour of St. Peter’s Church, in Croft-on-Tees, where Carroll’s father was rector. On the chancel’s east wall he noticed a stone carving of a cat’s head, floating in the air a few feet above the floor. When he got on his knees for closer inspection and looked up, the cat’s mouth appeared as a broad grin. His discovery made the front page of the Chicago Tribune (July 13, 1992).

  Whoopi Goldberg was the Cheshire Cat in NBC’s undistinguished, boring television version of Alice in Wonderland that aired on February 28, 1999.

  4. The original of this burlesque is “Speak Gently,” a happily unremembered poem attributed by some authorities to one G. W. Langford and by other authorities to David Bates, a Philadelphia broker.

  John M. Shaw, in The Parodies of Lewis Carroll and their Originals (the catalog and notes of an exhibition at the Florida State University Library, December 1960) reports that he was unsuccessful in his search for Langford’s version; in fact he failed to find Langford himself. Shaw did find the poem on page 15 of The Eolian, a book of verse published by Bates in 1849. Shaw points out that Bates’s son, in a preface to his father’s Poetical Works (1870) states that his father had indeed written this widely quoted poem.

  Speak gently! It is better far

  To rule by love than fear;

  Speak gently; let no harsh words mar

  The good we might do here!


  Speak gently! Love doth whisper low

  The vows that true hearts bind;

  And gently Friendship’s accents flow;

  Affection’s voice is kind.

  Speak gently to the little child!

  Its love be sure to gain;

  Teach it in accents soft and mild;

  It may not long remain.

  Speak gently to the young, for they

  Will have enough to bear;

  Pass through this life as best they may,

  ’Tis full of anxious care!

  Speak gently to the aged one,

  Grieve not the care-worn heart;

  Whose sands of life are nearly run,

  Let such in peace depart!

  Speak gently, kindly, to the poor;

  Let no harsh tone be heard;

  They have enough they must endure,

  Without an unkind word!

  Speak gently to the erring; know

  They may have toiled in vain;

  Perchance unkindness made them so;

  Oh, win them back again!

  Speak gently! He who gave his life

  To bend man’s stubborn will,

  When elements were in fierce strife,

  Said to them, “Peace, be still.”

  Speak gently! ’tis a little thing

  Dropped in the heart’s deep well;

  The good, the joy, that it may bring,

  Eternity shall tell.

  The Langford family tradition is that George wrote the poem while visiting his birthplace in Ireland in 1845. All British printings of the poem prior to 1900 are either anonymous or credited to Langford. No known printing of the poem in England predates 1848.

  Bates’s case was strongly boosted by the discovery in 1986 that the poem, signed “D.B.,” appeared on the second page of the Philadelphia Inquirer, July 15, 1845. Unless an earlier printing can be found in a British or Irish newspaper, it seems highly improbable that Langford could have written it, although a capital mystery remains. How did his name become so firmly attached to the poem in England?

  For a detailed history of the controversy, see my essay “Speak Gently,” in Lewis Carroll Observed (Clarkson N. Potter, 1976), edited by Edward Guiliano, and reprinted with additions in my Order and Surprise.

  5. It was surely not without malice that Carroll turned a male baby into a pig, for he had a low opinion of little boys. In Sylvie and Bruno Concluded an unpleasant child named Uggug (“a hideous fat boy . . . with the expression of a prize-pig”) finally turns into a porcupine. Carroll now and then made an effort to be friendly with a little boy, but usually only when the lad had sisters that Carroll wanted to meet. In one of his concealed-rhyme letters (a letter that seems to be prose but on closer inspection turns out to be verse) he closed a P.S. with these lines:

  My best love to yourself,—to your Mother

  My kindest regards—to your small,

  Fat, impertinent, ignorant brother

  My hatred—I think that is all.

  (Letter 21, to Maggie Cunnynghame, in A Selection from the Letters of Lewis Carroll to His Child-friends, edited by Evelyn M. Hatch.)

  Tenniel’s picture of Alice holding the pig-baby appears, with the baby redrawn as a human one, on the front of the envelope holding the Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case. This was a cardboard case designed to hold postage stamps, invented by Carroll and sold by a firm in Oxford. When you slip the case out of its envelope, you find on the front of it the same picture except that the baby has become a pig, as in Tenniel’s original drawing. The back of the envelope and case provide a similar transformation from Tenniel’s picture of the grinning Cheshire Cat to the picture in which the cat has mostly faded away. Slipped into the case was a tiny booklet titled Eight or Nine Words about Letter Writing. This delightfully written essay by Carroll opens as follows:

  Some American writer has said “the snakes in this district may be divided into one species—the venomous.” The same principle applies here. Postage-Stamp-Cases may be divided into one species, the “Wonderland.” Imitations of it will soon appear, no doubt: but they cannot include the two Pictorial Surprises, which are copyright.

  You don’t see why I call them ‘Surprises’? Well, take the Case in your left hand, and regard it attentively. You see Alice nursing the Duchess’s Baby? (An entirely new combination, by the way: it doesn’t occur in the book.) Now, with your right thumb and forefinger, lay hold of the little book, and suddenly pull it out. The Baby has turned into a Pig! If that doesn’t surprise you, why, I suppose you wouldn’t be surprised if your own Mother-in-law suddenly turned into a Gyroscope!

  Frankie Morris, in Jabberwocky (Autumn 1985), suggests that the baby’s transformation into a pig may derive from a famous prank played on James I by the Countess of Buckingham. She arranged for His Majesty to witness the baptism of what he thought was an infant in arms but was actually a pig, an animal that James I particularly loathed.

  6. In The Nursery “Alice” Carroll calls attention to the Fox Glove showing in the background of Tenniel’s drawing for this scene (it can be seen also in the previous illustration). Foxes do not wear gloves, Carroll explains to his young readers. “The right word is ‘Folk’s-Gloves.’ Did you ever hear that Fairies used to be called ‘the good Folk’?”

  7. These remarks are among the most quoted passages in the Alice books. An echo is heard in Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road:

  “. . . we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.”

  “Where we going, man?”

  “I don’t know but we gotta go.”

  John Kemeny places Alice’s question, and the Cat’s famous answer, at the head of his chapter on science and values in A Philosopher Looks at Science, 1959. In fact each chapter of Kemeny’s book is preceded by an appropriate quote from Alice. The Cat’s answer expresses very precisely the eternal cleavage between science and ethics. As Kemeny makes clear, science cannot tell us where to go, but after this decision is made on other grounds, it can tell us the best way to get there.

  I am told there is a passage in the Talmud that says: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”

  8. The phrases “mad as a hatter” and “mad as a March hare” were common at the time Carroll wrote, and of course that was why he created the two characters. “Mad as a hatter” may have been a corruption of the earlier “mad as an adder” but more likely owes its origin to the fact that until recently hatters actually did go mad. The mercury used in curing felt (there are now laws against its use in most states and in parts of Europe) was a common cause of mercury poisoning. Victims developed a tremor called “hatter’s shakes,” which affected their eyes and limbs and addled their speech. In advanced stages they developed hallucinations and other psychotic symptoms.

  “Did the Mad Hatter Have Mercury Poisoning?” is the title of an article by H. A. Waldron in The British Medical Journal (December 24–31, 1983). Dr. Waldron argues that the Mad Hatter was not such a victim, but Dr. Selwyn Goodacre and two other physicians dispute this in the January 28, 1984, issue.

  Two British scientists, Anthony Holley and Paul Greenwood, reported (in Nature, June 7, 1984) on extensive observations that fail to support a folk belief that male hares go into a frenzy during the March rutting season. The main behavior of hares throughout their entire eight-month breeding period consists in males chasing females, then getting into boxing matches with them. March is no different from any other month. It was Erasmus who wrote “Mad as a marsh hare.” The scientists think “marsh” got corrupted to “March” in later decades.

  When Tenniel drew the March Hare he showed wisps of straw on the hare’s head. Carroll does not mention this, but at the time it was a symbol, both in art and on the stage, of madness. In The Nursery “Alice” Carroll writes, “That’s the March Hare with the long ears, and straws mixed up with his hair. The straws showed he was mad—I don’t know why.” For more on this, see Michael Hancher’s chapter on straw as a sign
of insanity in The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books. In Harry Furniss’s drawings of the Mad Gardener in Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno books you’ll see similar straw in the Gardener’s hair and clothing.

  The Hatter and the Hare appear at least twice in Finnegans Wake: “Hatters hares” (page 83, line 1, of the Viking revised edition, 1959), and “hitters hairs” (page 84, line 28).

  9. Compare the Cheshire Cat’s remarks with the following entry, of February 9, 1856, in Carroll’s diary:

  Query: when we are dreaming and, as often happens, have a dim consciousness of the fact and try to wake, do we not say and do things which in waking life would be insane? May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: “Sleep hath its own world,” and it is often as lifelike as the other.

  In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates and Theaetetus discuss this topic as follows:

  THEAETETUS: I certainly cannot undertake to argue that madmen or dreamers think truly, when they imagine, some of them that they are gods, and others that they can fly, and are flying in their sleep.

  SOCRATES: Do you see another question which can be raised about these phenomena, notably about dreaming and waking?

  THEAETETUS: What question?

  SOCRATES: A question which I think that you must often have heard persons ask: how can you determine whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

  THEAETETUS: Indeed, Socrates, I do not know how to prove the one any more than the other, for in both cases the facts precisely correspond; and there is no difficulty in supposing that during all this discussion we have been talking to one another in a dream; and when in a dream we seem to be narrating dreams, the resemblance of the two states is quite astonishing.

  SOCRATES: You see, then, that a doubt about the reality of sense is easily raised, since there may even be a doubt whether we are awake or in a dream. And as our time is equally divided between sleeping and waking, in either sphere of existence the soul contends that the thoughts which are present to our minds at the time are true; and during one half of our lives we affirm the truth of the one, and, during the other half, of the other; and are equally confident of both.