“I read it in a book,” said Alice. “But I had some poetry repeated to me much easier than that, by—Tweedledee, I think it was.”
“As to poetry, you know,” said Humpty Dumpty, stretching out one of his great hands, “I can repeat poetry as well as other folk, if it comes to that—”
“Oh, it needn’t come to that!” Alice hastily said, hoping to keep him from beginning.
“The piece I’m going to repeat,” he went on without noticing her remark, “was written entirely for your amusement.”
Alice felt that in that case she really ought to listen to it; so she sat down, and said “Thank you” rather sadly.
“In winter, when the fields are white,
I sing this song for your delight—15
only I don’t sing it,” he added, as an explanation.
“I see you don’t,” said Alice.
“If you can see whether I’m singing or not, you’ve sharper eyes than most,” Humpty Dumpty remarked severely. Alice was silent.
“In spring, when woods are getting green,
I’ll try and tell you what I mean:”
“Thank you very much,” said Alice.
“In summer, when the days are long,
Perhaps you’ll understand the song:
In autumn, when the leaves are brown,
Take pen and ink, and write it down.”
“I will, if I can remember it so long,” said Alice.
“You needn’t go on making remarks like that,” Humpty Dumpty said: “they’re not sensible, and they put me out.”
“I sent a message to the fish:
I told them ‘This is what I wish.’
The little fishes of the sea,
They sent an answer back to me.
The little fishes’ answer was
‘We cannot do it, Sir, because—’ ”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,” said Alice.
“It gets easier further on,” Humpty Dumpty replied.
“I sent to them again to say
‘It will be better to obey.’
The fishes answered, with a grin,
‘Why, what a temper you are in!’
I told them once, I told them twice:
They would not listen to advice.
I took a kettle large and new,
Fit for the deed I had to do.
My heart went hop, my heart went thump:
I filled the kettle at the pump.
Then some one came to me and said
‘The little fishes are in bed.’
I said to him, I said it plain,
‘Then you must wake them up again.’
I said it very loud and clear:
I went and shouted in his ear.”
Humpty Dumpty raised his voice almost to a scream as he repeated this verse, and Alice thought, with a shudder, “I wouldn’t have been the messenger for anything!”
“But he was very stiff and proud:
He said ‘You needn’t shout so loud!’16
And he was very proud and stiff:
He said ‘I’d go and wake them, if—’
I took a corkscrew from the shelf:
I went to wake them up myself.
And when I found the door was locked,
I pulled and pushed and kicked and knocked.
And when I found the door was shut,
I tried to turn the handle, but—”17
There was a long pause.
“Is that all?” Alice timidly asked.
“That’s all,” said Humpty Dumpty. “Good-bye.”
This was rather sudden, Alice thought: but, after such a very strong hint that she ought to be going, she felt that it would hardly be civil to stay. So she got up, and held out her hand. “Good-bye, till we meet again!” she said as cheerfully as she could.
“I shouldn’t know you again if we did meet,” Humpty Dumpty replied in a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake:18 “you’re so exactly like other people.”
“The face is what one goes by, generally,” Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone.
“That’s just what I complain of,” said Humpty Dumpty. “Your face is the same as everybody has—the two eyes, so—” (marking their places in the air with his thumb) “nose in the middle, mouth under. It’s always the same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance—or the mouth at the top—that would be some help.”
“It wouldn’t look nice,” Alice objected. But Humpty Dumpty only shut his eyes, and said “Wait till you’ve tried.”
Alice waited a minute to see if he would speak again, but, as he never opened his eyes or took any further notice of her, she said “Good-bye!” once more, and, getting no answer to this, she quietly walked away: but she couldn’t help saying to herself, as she went, “Of all the unsatisfactory—” (she repeated this aloud, as it was a great comfort to have such a long word to say) “of all the unsatisfactory people I ever met—” She never finished the sentence, for at this moment a heavy crash shook the forest from end to end.19
1. Neither Tenniel nor Newell, Everett Bleiler points out in a letter, show Humpty sitting with his legs crossed, a position which would make his perch more precarious.
2. Michael Hancher, in his book on Tenniel’s art, calls attention to a subtlety in Tenniel’s picture of Humpty that shows how extremely narrow the top of the wall is. At the right of the drawing you can see the wall in cross section. It is topped by an almost pointed coping!
3. The Humpty Dumpty episode, like the episodes about the Jack of Hearts, the Tweedle twins, and the Lion and the Unicorn, elaborates on the incidents related in a familiar nursery rhyme. Another and quite different elaboration will be found in L. Frank Baum’s first book for children, Mother Goose in Prose (1897). In recent years Mr. Dumpty has been editing a children’s magazine (Humpty Dumpty’s Magazine, published by Parents Institute). I had the privilege of working under him for eight years, as chronicler of the adventures of his son, Humpty Dumpty, Junior. A high point in Paramount’s film version of Alice was the portrayal of Humpty by W. C. Fields.
4. Peter Alexander, in his excellent paper “Logic and the Humor of Lewis Carroll” (Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical Society, Vol. 6, May 1951, pages 551–66), calls attention to a Carrollian inversion here that is easily overlooked. In real life proper names seldom have a meaning other than the fact that they denote an individual object, whereas other words have general, universal meanings. In Humpty Dumpty’s realm, the reverse is true. Ordinary words mean whatever Humpty wants them to mean, whereas proper names like “Alice” and “Humpty Dumpty” are supposed to have general significance. Mr. Alexander’s thesis, with which one must heartily concur, is that Carroll’s humor is strongly colored by his interest in formal logic.
5. Molly Martin calls attention, in a letter, to the word “breaking,” anticipating Humpty’s fall.
6. These remarks of Humpty (note also his frequent use of the word “proud” in the rest of his conversation with Alice) reveal the pride that goeth before his fall.
7. As others have noted, this is the subtlest, grimmest, easiest-to-miss quip in the Alice books. No wonder that Alice, quick to catch an implication, changes the subject.
8. Humpty Dumpty is a philologist and philosopher skilled primarily in linguistic matters. Perhaps Carroll is suggesting here that such types, exceedingly plentiful both then and now in the Oxford area, are seldom gifted mathematically.
9. In “Humpty Dumpty and Heresy; Or, the Case of the Curate’s Egg,” in the Western Humanities Review (Spring 1968), Wilbur Gaffney argues that Humpty’s definition of glory may have been influenced by a passage in a book by that egotistical British egghead, philosopher Thomas Hobbes:
Sudden glory, is the passion which maketh those grimaces called LAUGHTER; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them [such as, obviously, coming out with a nice knock-down argument]; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing
in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves. And it is incident most to them, that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves; who are forced to keep themselves in their own favour, by observing the imperfections of others.
Janis Lull, in Lewis Carroll: A Celebration, observes that the White Knight declares his “knock-down” dispute with the Red Knight in Chapter 8 a “glorious victory.”
Remove the l from glory, Carroll observes at the end of the sixth knot in A Tangled Tale, and you get gory. An adjective describing the end of a knockdown argument?
10. In his article “The Stage and the Spirit of Reverence,” Carroll put it this way: “no word has a meaning inseparably attached to it; a word means what the speaker intends by it, and what the hearer understands by it, and that is all. . . . This thought may serve to lessen the horror of some of the language used by the lower classes, which, it is a comfort to remember, is often a mere collection of unmeaning sounds, so far as speaker and hearer are concerned.”
11. Lewis Carroll was fully aware of the profundity in Humpty Dumpty’s whimsical discourse on semantics. Humpty takes the point of view known in the Middle Ages as nominalism; the view that universal terms do not refer to objective existences but are nothing more than flatus vocis, verbal utterances. The view was skillfully defended by William of Occam and is now held by almost all contemporary logical empiricists.
Even in logic and mathematics, where terms are usually more precise than in other subject matters, enormous confusion often results from a failure to realize that words mean “neither more nor less” than what they are intended to mean. In Carroll’s time a lively controversy in formal logic concerned the “existential import” of Aristotle’s four basic propositions. Do the universal statements “All A is B” and “No A is B” imply that A is a set that actually contains members? Is it implied in the particular statements “Some A is B” and “Some A is not B”?
Carroll answers these questions at some length on page 165 of his Symbolic Logic. The passage is worth quoting, for it is straight from the broad mouth of Humpty Dumpty.
The writers, and editors, of the Logical text-books which run in the ordinary grooves—to whom I shall hereafter refer by the (I hope inoffensive) title “The Logicians”—take, on this subject, what seems to me to be a more humble position than is at all necessary. They speak of the Copula of a Proposition “with bated breath”; almost as if it were a living, conscious Entity, capable of declaring for itself what it chose to mean, and that we, poor human creatures, had nothing to do but to ascertain what was its sovereign will and pleasure, and submit to it.
In opposition to this view, I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorised in attaching any meaning he likes to any word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book. “Let it be understood that by the word ‘black’ I shall always mean ‘white’, and that by the word ‘white’ I shall always mean ‘black’,” I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I may think it.
And so, with regard to the question whether a Proposition is or is not to be understood as asserting the existence of its Subject, I maintain that every writer may adopt his own rule, provided of course that it is consistent with itself and with the accepted facts of Logic.
Let us consider certain views that may logically be held, and thus settle which of them may conveniently be held; after which I shall hold myself free to declare which of them I intend to hold.
The view adopted by Carroll (that both “all” and “some” imply existence but that “no” leaves the question open) did not finally win out. In modern logic only the “some” propositions are taken to imply that a class is not a null class. This does not, of course, invalidate the nominalistic attitude of Carroll and his egg. The current point of view was adopted solely because logicians believed it to be the most useful.
When logicians shifted their interest from the class logic of Aristotle to the propositional or truth-value calculus, another furious and funny debate (though mostly among nonlogicians) raged over the meaning of “material implication.” Most of the confusion sprang from a failure to realize that “implies” in the statement “A implies B” has a restricted meaning peculiar to the calculus and does not refer to any causal relation between A and B. A similar confusion still persists in regard to the multivalued logics in which terms such as and, not, and implies have no common-sense or intuitive meaning; in fact, they have no meaning whatever other than that which is exactly defined by the matrix tables, which generate these “connective” terms. Once this is fully understood, most of the mystery surrounding these queer logics evaporates.
In mathematics equal amounts of energy have been dissipated in useless argumentation over the “meaning” of such phrases as “imaginary number,” “transfinite number,” and so on; useless because such words mean precisely what they are defined to mean; no more, no less.
On the other hand, if we wish to communicate accurately we are under a kind of moral obligation to avoid Humpty’s practice of giving private meanings to commonly used words. “May we . . . make our words mean whatever we choose them to mean?” asks Roger W. Holmes in his article, “The Philosopher’s Alice in Wonderland,” (Antioch Review, Summer 1959). “One thinks of a Soviet delegate using ‘democracy’ in a UN debate. May we pay our words extra, or is this the stuff that propaganda is made of? Do we have an obligation to past usage? In one sense words are our masters, or communication would be impossible. In another we are the masters; otherwise there could be no poetry.”
12. Portmanteau word will be found in many modern dictionaries. It has become a common phrase for words that are packed, like a suitcase, with more than one meaning. In English literature, the great master of the portmanteau word is, of course, James Joyce. Finnegans Wake (like the Alice books, a dream) contains them by the tens of thousands. This includes those ten hundred-letter thunderclaps that symbolize, among other things, the mighty fall from his ladder of Tim Finnegan, the Irish hod carrier. Humpty Dumpty himself is packed up in the seventh thunderclap:
Bothallchoractorschumminaroundgansumuminarumdrumstrumt
ruminahumptadumpwaultopoofoolooderamaunsturnup!
References to Humpty abound in Finnegans Wake, from a mention on the first page to a mention on the last.
13. Readers may not be as quick as Alice to catch Humpty’s word play. “Wabe” is the beginning of “way before” and “way behind.” Alice appropriately adds “way beyond.”
14. “From home,” spoken with a dropped h, produces the “mome” sound.
15. Neil Phelps sent me a possible inspiration for Humpty’s song, a poem called “Summer Days” by a forgotten Victorian poet, Wathen Mark Wilks Call (1817–1870). The poem is anonymous in many Victorian anthologies. The following version is from Everyman’s Book of Victorian Verse (1982), edited by J. R. Watson:
In summer, when the days were long,
We walked, two friends, in field and wood,
Our heart was light, our step was strong,
And life lay round us, fair as good,
In summer, when the days were long.
We strayed from morn till evening came,
We gathered flowers, and wove us crowns,
We walked mid poppies red as flame,
Or sat upon the yellow downs,
And always wished our life the same.
In summer, when the days were long,
We leapt the hedgerow, crossed the brook;
And still her voice flowed forth in song,
Or else she read some graceful book,
In summer, when the days were long.
And then we sat beneath the trees,
With shadows lessening in the noon;
And in the sunlight and the breeze.
We revelled, many a glorious June,
While larks were singing o’er the leas.
In summer, when the days were long,
We plucked wild strawberries, ripe and
red,
Or feasted, with no grace but song,
On golden nectar, snow-white bread,
In summer, when the days were long.
We loved, and yet we knew it not,
For loving seemed like breathing then,
We found a heaven in every spot,
Saw angels, too, in all good men,
And dreamt of gods in grove and grot.
In summer, when the days are long,
Alone I wander, muse alone;
I see her not, but that old song,
Under the fragrant wind is blown,
In summer, when the days are long.
Alone I wander in the wood,
But one fair spirit hears my sighs;
And half I see the crimson hood,
The radiant hair, the calm glad eyes,
That charmed me in life’s summer mood.
In summer, when the days are long,
I love her as I loved of old;
My heart is light, my step is strong,
For love brings back those hours of gold,
In summer, when the days are long.
16. In his book on Tenniel, Michael Hancher calls attention to how closely Tenniel’s illustration for these lines resembles a gigantic gooseberry in his Punch cartoon of July 15, 1871.
THE GIGANTIC GOOSEBERRY
G. G. “HERE’S A PRECIOUS GO, FROGGY! I THOUGHT BIG GOOSEBERRIES AND SHOWERS O’ FROGS UD HAVE A HOLIDAY THIS ‘SILLY SEASON,’ ANYHOW. BUT THE PRECIOUS TICHBORNE CASE HAVE BEEN ADJOURNED, AND WE’LL HAVE TO BE ON DUTY AGAIN.”
TENNIEL. “THE GIGANTIC GOOSEBERRY. FROM PUNCH. 15 JULY 1871
17. “This has to be the worst poem in the Alice books,” writes Richard Kelly, in Lewis Carroll (Twayne, 1977). “The language is flat and prosaic, the frustrated story line is without interest, the couplets are uninspired and fail to surprise or delight, and there are almost no true elements of nonsense present, other than in the unstated wish of the narrator and the lack of a conclusion to the work.”
Beverly Lyon Clark, in her contribution to Soaring with the Dodo (Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 1982), edited by Edward Guiliano and James Kincaid, calls attention to how the abrupt endings of the poem’s lines are echoed in Humpty’s abrupt “Good-bye” to Alice, and Alice’s unfinished comment in the chapter’s last paragraph: “Of all the unsatisfactory people I ever met—”
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