“Do you know, I was so angry, Kitty,” Alice went on, as soon as they were comfortably settled again, “when I saw all the mischief you had been doing, I was very nearly opening the window, and putting you out into the snow! And you’d have deserved it, you little mischievous darling! What have you got to say for yourself? Now don’t interrupt me!” she went on, holding up one finger. “I’m going to tell you all your faults. Number one: you squeaked twice while Dinah was washing your face this morning. Now you ca’n’t deny it, Kitty: I heard you! What’s that you say?” (pretending that the kitten was speaking). “Her paw went into your eye? Well, that’s your fault, for keeping your eyes open—if you’d shut them tight up, it wouldn’t have happened. Now don’t make any more excuses, but listen! Number two: you pulled Snowdrop2 away by the tail just as I had put down the saucer of milk before her! What, you were thirsty, were you? How do you know she wasn’t thirsty too? Now for number three: you unwound every bit of the worsted while I wasn’t looking!
“That’s three faults, Kitty, and you’ve not been punished for any of them yet. You know I’m saving up all your punishments for Wednesday week3—Suppose they had saved up all my punishments?” she went on, talking more to herself than the kitten. “What would they do at the end of a year? I should be sent to prison, I suppose, when the day came. Or—let me see—suppose each punishment was to be going without a dinner: then, when the miserable day came, I should have to go without fifty dinners at once! Well, I shouldn’t mind that much! I’d far rather go without them than eat them!
“Do you hear the snow against the window-panes, Kitty? How nice and soft it sounds! Just as if some one was kissing the window all over outside. I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says ‘Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.’ And when they wake up in the summer, Kitty, they dress themselves all in green, and dance about—whenever the wind blows—oh, that’s very pretty!” cried Alice, dropping the ball of worsted to clap her hands. “And I do so wish it was true! I’m sure the woods look sleepy in the autumn, when the leaves are getting brown.
“Kitty, can you play chess? Now, don’t smile, my dear, I’m asking it seriously. Because, when we were playing just now, you watched just as if you understood it: and when I said ‘Check!’ you purred! Well, it was a nice check, Kitty, and really I might have won, if it hadn’t been for that nasty Knight, that came wriggling4 down among my pieces. Kitty, dear, let’s pretend—” And here I wish I could tell you half the things Alice used to say, beginning with her favourite phrase “Let’s pretend.” She had had quite a long argument with her sister only the day before—all because Alice had begun with “Let’s pretend we’re kings and queens”; and her sister, who liked being very exact, had argued that they couldn’t, because there were only two of them, and Alice had been reduced at last to say “Well, you can be one of them, then, and I’ll be all the rest.” And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyæna, and you’re a bone!”
But this is taking us away from Alice’s speech to the kitten. “Let’s pretend that you’re the Red Queen, Kitty! Do you know, I think if you sat up and folded your arms, you’d look exactly like her. Now do try, there’s a dear!” And Alice got the Red Queen off the table, and set it up before the kitten as a model for it to imitate: however, the thing didn’t succeed, principally, Alice said, because the kitten wouldn’t fold its arms properly. So, to punish it, she held it up to the Looking-glass, that it might see how sulky it was, “—and if you’re not good directly,” she added, “I’ll put you through into Looking-glass House. How would you like that?
“Now, if you’ll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I’ll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there’s the room you can see through the glass—that’s just the same as our drawing-room, only the things go the other way.5 I can see all of it when I get upon a chair—all but the bit just behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see that bit! I want so much to know whether they’ve a fire in the winter: you never can tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room too—but that may be only pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire. Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way: I know that, because I’ve held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the other room.
“How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they’d give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn’t good to drink6—but oh, Kitty! now we come to the passage. You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty, how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through—” She was up on the chimney-piece7 while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.
In another moment Alice was through the glass,8 and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room. The very first thing she did was to look whether there was a fire in the fireplace, and she was quite pleased to find that there was a real one, blazing away as brightly as the one she had left behind. “So I shall be as warm here as I was in the old room,” thought Alice: “warmer, in fact, because there’ll be no one here to scold me away from the fire. Oh, what fun it’ll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and ca’n’t get at me!”
Then she began looking about, and noticed that what could be seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but that all the rest was as different as possible. For instance, the pictures on the wall next the fire seemed to be all alive, and the very clock on the chimney-piece (you know you can only see the back of it in the Looking-glass) had got the face of a little old man, and grinned at her.
“They don’t keep this room so tidy as the other,” Alice thought to herself, as she noticed several of the chessmen down in the hearth among the cinders; but in another moment, with a little “Oh!” of surprise, she was down on her hands and knees watching them. The chessmen were walking about, two and two!
“Here are the Red King and the Red Queen,” Alice said (in a whisper, for fear of frightening them), “and there are the White King and the White Queen sitting on the edge of the shovel—and here are two Castles walking arm in arm9—I don’t think they can hear me,” she went on, as she put her head closer down, “and I’m nearly sure they ca’n’t see me. I feel somehow as if I was getting invisible—”
Here something began squeaking on the table behind Alice, and made her turn her head just in time to see one of the White Pawns roll over and begin kicking: she watched it with great curiosity to see what would happen next.
“It is the voice of my child!” the White Queen cried out, as she rushed past the King, so violently that she knocked him over among the cinders. “My precious Lily! My imperial kitten!” and she began scrambling wildly up the side of the fender.
“Imperial fiddlestick!” said the King, rubbing his nose, which had been hurt by the fall. He had a right to be a little annoyed with the Queen, for he was covered with ashes from head to foot.
Alice was very anxious to be of use, and, as the poor little Lily was nearly screaming herself into a fit, she hastily picked up the Queen and set her on the table by the side of her noisy little daughter.
The Queen gasped, and sat down: the rapid journey through the air had quite taken away her breath, and for a minute or two she c
ould do nothing but hug the little Lily in silence. As soon as she had recovered her breath a little, she called out to the White King, who was sitting sulkily among the ashes, “Mind the volcano!”
“What volcano?” said the King, looking up anxiously into the fire, as if he thought that was the most likely place to find one.
“Blew—me—up,” panted the Queen, who was still a little out of breath. “Mind you come up—the regular way—don’t get blown up!”
Alice watched the White King as he slowly struggled up from bar to bar,10 till at last she said “Why, you’ll be hours and hours getting to the table, at that rate. I’d far better help you, hadn’t I?” But the King took no notice of the question: it was quite clear that he could neither hear her nor see her.
So Alice picked him up very gently, and lifted him across more slowly than she had lifted the Queen, that she mightn’t take his breath away; but, before she put him on the table, she thought she might as well dust him a little, he was so covered with ashes.
She said afterwards that she had never seen in all her life such a face as the King made, when he found himself held in the air by an invisible hand, and being dusted: he was far too much astonished to cry out, but his eyes and his mouth went on getting larger and larger, and rounder and rounder, till her hand shook so with laughing that she nearly let him drop upon the floor.
“Oh! please don’t make such faces, my dear!” she cried out, quite forgetting that the King couldn’t hear her. “You make me laugh so that I can hardly hold you! And don’t keep your mouth so wide open! All the ashes will get into it—there, now I think you’re tidy enough!” she added, as she smoothed his hair, and set him upon the table near the Queen.
The King immediately fell flat on his back,11 and lay perfectly still; and Alice was a little alarmed at what she had done, and went round the room to see if she could find any water to throw over him. However, she could find nothing but a bottle of ink, and when she got back with it she found he had recovered, and he and the Queen were talking together in a frightened whisper—so low, that Alice could hardly hear what they said.
The King was saying “I assure you, my dear, I turned cold to the very ends of my whiskers!”
To which the Queen replied “You haven’t got any whiskers.”12
“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never forget!”
“You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”
Alice looked on with great interest as the King took an enormous memorandum-book out of his pocket, and began writing. A sudden thought struck her, and she took hold of the end of the pencil, which came some way over his shoulder, and began writing for him.13
The poor King looked puzzled and unhappy, and struggled with the pencil for some time without saying anything; but Alice was too strong for him, and at last he panted out “My dear! I really must get a thinner pencil. I ca’n’t manage this one a bit: it writes all manner of things that I don’t intend—”
“What manner of things?” said the Queen, looking over the book (in which Alice had put “The White Knight is sliding down the poker. He balances very badly”.14 “That’s not a memorandum of your feelings!”
There was a book lying near Alice on the table, and while she sat watching the White King (for she was still a little anxious about him, and had the ink all ready to throw over him, in case he fainted again), she turned over the leaves, to find some part that she could read, “—for it’s all in some language I don’t know,” she said to herself.
It was like this.
She puzzled over this for some time, but at last a bright thought struck her. “Why, it’s a Looking-glass book, of course! And, if I hold it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again.”15
This was the poem that Alice read.
Jabberwocky16
’Twas brillig, and the slithy17 toves18
Did gyre19 and gimble20 in the wabe:
All mimsy21 were the borogoves,22
And the mome23 raths24 outgrabe.25
“Beware the Jabberwock,26 my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub27 bird, and shun
The frumious28 Bandersnatch!”29
He took his vorpal30 sword in hand:
Long time the manxome31 foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum32 tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish33 thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling34 through the tulgey wood,
And burbled35 as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!36
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing37 back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?38
Come to my arms, my beamish39 boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh!40 Callay!”
He chortled41 in his joy.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate—”42
“But oh!” thought Alice, suddenly jumping up, “if I don’t make haste, I shall have to go back through the Looking-glass, before I’ve seen what the rest of the house is like! Let’s have a look at the garden first!” She was out of the room in a moment, and ran down stairs—or, at least, it wasn’t exactly running, but a new invention for getting down stairs quickly and easily, as Alice said to herself. She just kept the tips of her fingers on the hand-rail, and floated gently down without even touching the stairs with her feet: then she floated on through the hall, and would have gone straight out at the door in the same way, if she hadn’t caught hold of the door-post. She was getting a little giddy with so much floating in the air, and was rather glad to find herself walking again in the natural way.
1. It was characteristic of Carroll, with his love of sharp contrast, to open his sequel on an indoor, midwinter scene. (The previous book opens out of doors on a warm May afternoon.) The wintry weather also harmonizes with the wintry symbols of age and approaching death that enter into his prefatory and terminal poems. The preparation for a bonfire and Alice’s remark “Do you know what tomorrow is, Kitty?” suggest that the date was November 4, the day before Guy Fawkes Day. (The holiday was annually celebrated at Christ Church with a huge bonfire in Peckwater Quadrangle.) This is supported by Alice’s statement to the White Queen (Chapter 5) that she is exactly seven and one half years old, for Alice Liddell’s birthday was May 4, and the previous trip to Wonderland occurred on May 4, when Alice presumably was exactly seven (see Note 6, Chapter 7 of the previous book). As Robert Mitchell says in a letter, May 4 and November 4, being six months apart, are two dates that could not be further separated.
This leaves open the question of whether the year is 1859 (when Alice actually was seven), 1860, 1861, or 1862 when Carroll told and wrote down the story of Alice’s first adventure. November 4, 1859, was a Friday. In 1860 it was Sunday, in 1861 Monday, and in 1862 Tuesday. The last date seems the most plausible in view of Alice’s remark to the kitten (in the next paragraph but one) that she is saving up her punishments until a week from Wednesday.
Mrs. Mavis Baitey, in her booklet Alice’s Adventures in Oxford (A Pitkin Pictorial Guide, 1980), argues that the day was March 10, 1863, the wedding day of the Prince of Wales. The occasion was celebrated at Oxford with bonfires and fireworks, and in his diary Carroll tells of taking Alice on an evening tour through the university: “It was deli
ghtful to see the thorough abandonment with which Alice enjoyed the whole thing.” However, Carroll’s diary for March 9 and 10 makes no mention of the snow Alice speaks of. However, Mrs. Baitey’s conjecture is supported by the fact that in England snow is very rare in early November and quite common in March.
2. Snowdrop was the name of a kitten belonging to one of Carroll’s early child-friends, Mary MacDonald. Mary was the daughter of Carroll’s good friend George MacDonald, the Scottish poet and novelist, and author of such well-known children’s fantasies as The Princess and the Goblin and At the Back of the North Wind. The MacDonald children were in part responsible for Carroll’s decision to publish Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. To test the story’s general appeal, he asked Mrs. MacDonald to read the manuscript to her children. The reception was enthusiastic. Greville, age six (who later recalled the occasion in his book George MacDonald and His Wife), declared that there ought to be sixty thousand copies of it.
Kitty and Snowdrop, the black and white kittens, reflect the chessboard’s black and white squares, and the red and white pieces of the book’s chess game.
3. “Wednesday week”: a week after the coming Wednesday.
4. “Wriggling” is a good description of how the knight moves across a chessboard.
5. The looking-glass theme seems to have been a late addition to the story. We have the word of Alice Liddell that a good part of the book was based on chess tales that Carroll told the Liddell girls at a time when they were learning excitedly how to play the game. It was not until 1868 that another Alice, Carroll’s distant cousin Alice Raikes, played a role in suggesting the mirror motif. This is how she told the story in the London Times, January 22, 1932:
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (The Annotated Books) Page 19