Dr. Selwyn Goodacre noticed that the dormouse is sexless at the tea party, but is revealed as male in Chapter 11.
A British correspondent, J. Little, sent me the stamp shown below which pictures the British dormouse as an endangered species. The stamp was issued in January 1998.
3. Both Carroll and Tenniel apparently forgot that a milk jug was also on the table. We know this because later on in the tea party the Dormouse upsets it.
4. In Under the Quizzing Glass, R. B. Shaberman and Denis Crutch point out that no one would tell a Victorian little girl that her hair was too long, but the remark would apply to Carroll. In Isa Bowman’s The Story of Lewis Carroll (J. M. Dent, 1899), the actress and former child-friend recalls: “Lewis Carroll was a man of medium height. When I knew him his hair was silvery-grey, rather longer than it was the fashion to wear, and his eyes were a deep blue.”
5. The Mad Hatter’s famous unanswered riddle was the object of much parlor speculation in Carroll’s time. His own answer (given in a new preface that he wrote for the 1896 edition) is as follows:
Enquiries have been so often addressed to me, as to whether any answer to the Hatter’s Riddle can be imagined, that I may as well put on record here what seems to me to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz: “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!” This, however, is merely an afterthought; the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all.
Other answers have been proposed, notably by Sam Loyd the American puzzle genius, in his posthumous Cyclopedia of Puzzles (1914), page 114. In keeping with Carroll’s alliterative style Loyd offers as his best solution: because the notes for which they are noted are not noted for being musical notes. Other Loyd suggestions: because Poe wrote on both; bills and tales are among their characteristics; because they both stand on their legs, conceal their steels (steals), and ought to be made to shut up.
In 1989 England’s Lewis Carroll Society announced a contest for new answers, to be published eventually in the society’s newsletter, Bandersnatch.
Aldous Huxley, writing on “Ravens and Writing Desks” (Vanity Fair, September 1928), supplies two nonsense answers: because there’s a b in both, and because there’s an n in neither. James Michie sent a similar answer: because each begins with e. Huxley defends the view that such metaphysical questions as: Does God exist? Do we have free will? Why is there suffering? are as meaningless as the Mad Hatter’s question—“nonsensical riddles, questions not about reality but about words.”
“Both have quills dipped in ink” was suggested by reader David B. Jodrey, Jr. Cyril Pearson, in his undated Twentieth Century Standard Puzzle Book, suggests, “Because it slopes with a flap.”
Denis Crutch (Jabberwocky, Winter 1976) reported an astonishing discovery. In the 1896 edition of Alice, Carroll wrote a new preface in which he gave what he considered the best answer to the riddle: “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front.” Note the spelling of “never” as “nevar.” Carroll clearly intended to spell “raven” backwards. The word was corrected to “never” in all later printings, perhaps by an editor who fancied he had caught a printer’s error. Because Carroll died soon after this “correction” destroyed the ingenuity of his answer, the original spelling was never restored. Whether Carroll was aware of the damage done to his clever answer is not known.
In 1991 The Spectator, in England, asked for answers to the Hatter’s riddle as its competition No. 1683. The winners, listed on July 6, are as follows:
Because without them both Brave New World could not have been written.
(Roy Davenport)
Because one has flapping fits and the other fitting flaps.
(Peter Veale)
Because one is good for writing books and the other better for biting rooks.
(George Simmers)
Because a writing-desk is a rest for pens and a raven is a pest for wrens.
(Tony Weston)
Because “raven” contains five letters, which you might equally well expect to find in a writing-desk.
(Roger Baresel)
Because they are both used to carri-on de-composition.
(Noel Petty)
Because they both tend to present unkind bills.
(M.R. Macintyre)
Because they both have a flap in oak.
(J. Tebbutt)
Here are two more answers by Francis Huxley, author of The Raven and the Writing Desk (1976):
Because it bodes ill for owed bills.
Because they each contain a river—Neva and Esk.
6. Alice’s remark that the day is the fourth, coupled with the previous chapter’s revelation that the month is May, establishes the date of Alice’s underground adventure as May 4. May 4, 1852, was Alice Liddell’s birthday. She was ten in 1862, the year Carroll first told and recorded the story, but her age in the story is almost certainly seven (see Chapter 1, Note 1, of Through the Looking-Glass). On the last page of the hand-lettered manuscript, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, which Carroll gave to Alice, he pasted a photograph of her that he had taken in 1859, when she was seven.
In his book The White Knight, A. L. Taylor reports that on May 4, 1862, there was exactly two days’ difference between the lunar and calendar months. This, Taylor argues, suggests that the Mad Hatter’s watch ran on lunar time and accounts for his remark that his watch is “two days wrong.” If Wonderland is near the earth’s center, Taylor points out, the position of the sun would be useless for time-telling, whereas phases of the moon remain unambiguous. The conjecture is also supported by the close connection of “lunar” with “lunacy,” but it is hard to believe that Carroll had all this in mind.
7. An even funnier watch is the Outlandish Watch owned by the German professor in Chapter 23 of Sylvie and Bruno. Setting its hands back in time has the result of setting events themselves back to the time indicated by the hands; an interesting anticipation of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. But that is not all. Pressing a “reversal peg” on the Outlandish Watch starts events moving backward; a kind of looking-glass reversal of time’s linear dimension.
One is reminded also of an earlier piece by Carroll in which he proves that a stopped clock is more accurate than one that loses a minute a day. The first clock is exactly right twice every twenty-four hours, whereas the other clock is exactly right only once in two years. “You might go on to ask,” Carroll adds, “ ‘How am I to know when eight o’clock does come? My clock will not tell me.’ Be patient: you know that when eight o’clock comes your clock is right; very good; then your rule is this: keep your eyes fixed on the clock and the very moment it is right it will be eight o’clock.”
8. The Hatter’s song parodies the first verse of Jane Taylor’s well-known poem, “The Star.”
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
When the blazing sun is gone,
When he nothing shines upon,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.
Then the traveller in the dark
Thanks you for your tiny spark:
He could not see which way to go,
If you did not twinkle so.
In the dark blue sky you keep,
And often through my curtains peep,
For you never shut your eye
Till the sun is in the sky.
As your bright and tiny spark
Lights the traveller in the dark,
Though I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
Carroll’s burlesque may contain what professional comics call an “inside joke.” Bartholomew Price, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Oxford and a good friend of Carroll’s, was known among his students by the nickname “The Bat.” His lectures no doubt had a
way of soaring high above the heads of his listeners.
Carroll’s parody may also owe something to an incident that Helmut Gernsheim recounts in Lewis Carroll: Photographer (Chanticleer, 1949):
At Christ Church the usually staid don relaxed in the company of little visitors to his large suite of rooms—a veritable children’s paradise. There was a wonderful array of dolls and toys, a distorting mirror, a clockwork bear, and a flying bat made by him. This latter was the cause of much embarrassment when, on a hot summer afternoon, after circling the room several times, it suddenly flew out of the window and landed on a tea-tray which a college servant was just carrying across Tom Quad. Startled by this strange apparition, he dropped the tray with a great clatter.
9. “Murdering the time”: Mangling the song’s meter.
10. This was written before five-o’clock tea had become the general custom in England. It was intended to refer to the fact that the Liddells sometimes served tea at six o’clock, the children’s suppertime. Arthur Stanley Eddington, as well as less distinguished writers on relativity theory, have compared the Mad Tea Party, where it is always six o’clock, with that portion of De Sitter’s model of the cosmos in which time stands eternally still. (See Chapter 10 of Eddington’s Space Time and Gravitation.)
11. The three little sisters are the three Liddell sisters. Elsie is L.C. (Lorina Charlotte), Tillie refers to Edith’s family nickname Matilda, and Lacie is an anagram of Alice.
This is the second time that Carroll has punned on the word “Liddell.” His first play with the sound similarity of “Liddell” and “little” is in the first stanza of his prefatory poem where “little” is used three times to refer to the “cruel Three” of the next stanza. We know how “Liddell” was pronounced because in Carroll’s day the students at Oxford composed the following couplet:
I am the Dean and this is Mrs. Liddell.
She plays the first, and I the second fiddle.
For some reason Tenniel did not draw the three sisters. Peter Newell’s picture of them at the bottom of the well is on page 90 of my More Annotated Alice.
12. Treacle is British for “molasses.” Vivien Greene (wife of novelist Graham Greene), who lives in Oxford, was the first to inform me—later Mrs. Henry A. Morss, Jr., of Massachusetts, sent similar information—that what was called a “treacle well” actually existed in Carroll’s time in Binsey, near Oxford. Treacle originally referred to medicinal compounds given for snakebites, poisons and various diseases. Wells believed to contain water of medicinal value were sometimes called “treacle wells.” This adds of course to the meaning of the Dormouse’s remark, a few lines later, that the sisters were “very ill.”
Mavis Batey, in Alice’s Adventures in Oxford (A Pitkin Pictorial Guide, 1980), tells the eighth-century legend of the Binsey well. It seems that God struck King Algar blind because he pursued the princess Frideswide with the intent to marry her. Her prayer to Saint Margaret for mercy on the king was answered by the appearance of a well at Binsey with miraculous waters that cured Algar’s blindness. Saint Frideswide returned to Oxford, where she supposedly founded a nunnery at the spot where Christ Church now stands. The treacle well was a popular healing spot throughout the Middle Ages.
An amusing instance of the earlier meaning of treacle is provided by a famous “Curious Bible” printed in 1568 and known as the Treacle Bible. (Curious Bible is a generic term for Bibles that contain peculiar printer’s errors or strange choices of words made by an editor. In the King James Bible, Jeremiah 8:22 begins: “Is there no balm in Gilead . . . ?” In the Treacle Bible it reads: “Is there not treacle at Gilead?”
In the Latin Chapel of Christ Church Cathedral, a stained-glass window (reproduced in color in Mrs. Batey’s booklet) depicts a group of ailing persons on their way to the Binsey treacle well.
13. Henry Holiday, who illustrated Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark, recalled in a letter asking Carroll why all the names of the ship’s crew members begin with B. Carroll replied, “Why not?”
Note that it is the March Hare, not the Dormouse, who answers Alice’s question. As Selwyn Goodacre has pointed out, “his own name begins with an M as well, and he wanted to be part of the story.”
Selwyn Goodacre also called my attention to the fact that because “molasses” begins with m, it was appropriate that the girls “draw” treacle from the well.
14. “Much of a muchness” is still a colloquial British phrase meaning that two or more things are very much alike, or have the same value; or it may refer to any sort of all-pervading sameness in a situation.
15. I am indebted to Roger Green for the surprising information that Victorian children actually had dormice as pets, keeping them in old teapots filled with grass or hay.
16. A scene based on the Mad Tea Party was one of the earliest to be constructed for a rapidly developing new technology called “virtual reality.” A person puts on a helmet with goggles that provide each eye with a video screen connected to a computer program. The subject also wears headphones, and a special suit and gloves fitted with fiber-optic sensors that tell the computer how one’s body and hands are moving, and how those motions alter the visual scene. One is thus able to see and move about in a three-dimensional artificial “space.” A person can take the role of Alice, or any of the other characters at the Mad Tea Party, and, as the technology improves, should even be able to interact with the characters. See “On the Road to the Global Village,” by Karen Wright (Scientific American, March 1990), and “Artificial Reality,” by G. Pascal Zachary (Wall Street Journal, January 23, 1990, page 1).
CHAPTER VIII
The Queen’s Croquet-Ground
Alarge rose-tree stood near the entrance of the garden: the roses growing on it were white, but there were three gardeners at it, busily painting them red. Alice thought this a very curious thing, and she went nearer to watch them, and, just as she came up to them, she heard one of them say “Look out now, Five! Don’t go splashing paint over me like that!”
“I couldn’t help it,” said Five, in a sulky tone. “Seven jogged my elbow.”
On which Seven looked up and said “That’s right, Five! Always lay the blame on others!”
“You’d better not talk!” said Five. “I heard the Queen say only yesterday you deserved to be beheaded.”
“What for?” said the one who had spoken first.
“That’s none of your business, Two!” said Seven.
“Yes, it is his business!” said Five. “And I’ll tell him—it was for bringing the cook tulip-roots instead of onions.”1
Seven flung down his brush, and had just begun “Well, of all the unjust things—” when his eye chanced to fall upon Alice, as she stood watching them, and he checked himself suddenly: the others looked round also, and all of them bowed low.
“Would you tell me, please,” said Alice, a little timidly, “why you are painting those roses?”
Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began, in a low voice, “Why, the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a red rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake; and, if the Queen was to find it out, we should all have our heads cut off, you know. So you see, Miss, we’re doing our best, afore she comes, to—” At this moment, Five, who had been anxiously looking across the garden, called out “The Queen! The Queen!” and the three gardeners instantly threw themselves flat upon their faces. There was a sound of many footsteps, and Alice looked round, eager to see the Queen.
First came ten soldiers carrying clubs: these were all shaped like the three gardeners, oblong and flat, with their hands and feet at the corners: next the ten courtiers: these were ornamented all over with diamonds, and walked two and two, as the soldiers did. After these came the royal children: there were ten of them, and the little dears came jumping merrily along, hand in hand, in couples: they were all ornamented with hearts.2 Next came the guests, mostly Kings and Queens, and among them Alice recognized the White Rabbit: it was talking in a hurrie
d nervous manner, smiling at everything that was said, and went by without noticing her. Then followed the Knave of Hearts, carrying the King’s crown on a crimson velvet cushion; and, last of all this grand procession, came THE KING AND THE QUEEN OF HEARTS.3
Alice was rather doubtful whether she ought not to lie down on her face like the three gardeners, but she could not remember ever having heard of such a rule at processions; “and besides, what would be the use of a procession,” thought she, “if people had all to lie down on their faces, so that they couldn’t see it?” So she stood where she was, and waited.
When the procession came opposite to Alice, they all stopped and looked at her, and the Queen said, severely, “Who is this?” She said it to the Knave of Hearts, who only bowed and smiled in reply.
“Idiot!” said the Queen, tossing her head impatiently; and, turning to Alice, she went on: “What’s your name, child?”
“My name is Alice, so please your Majesty,” said Alice very politely; but she added, to herself, “Why, they’re only a pack of cards, after all. I needn’t be afraid of them!”
“And who are these?” said the Queen, pointing to the three gardeners who were lying round the rose-tree; for, you see, as they were lying on their faces, and the pattern on their backs was the same as the rest of the pack, she could not tell whether they were gardeners, or soldiers, or courtiers, or three of her own children.
“How should I know?” said Alice, surprised at her own courage. “It’s no business of mine.”
The Queen turned crimson with fury,4 and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, began screaming “Off with her head! Off with—”
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (The Annotated Books) Page 12