DURER’S KNIGHT
3. Carroll may be suggesting here that the knights, like Punch and Judy, are merely puppets moved by the hands of the invisible players of the game. Note that Tenniel, unlike modern illustrators in his scrupulous following of the text, shows the knights holding their clubs in traditional Punch-and-Judy fashion.
4. Many Carrollian scholars have surmised, and with good reason, that Carroll intended the White Knight to be a caricature of himself. Like the knight, Carroll had shaggy hair, mild blue eyes, a kind and gentle face. Like the knight, his mind seemed to function best when it saw things in topsy-turvy fashion. Like the knight, he was fond of curious gadgets and a “great hand at inventing things.” He was forever “thinking of a way” to do this or that a bit differently. Many of his inventions, like the knight’s blotting-paper pudding, were very clever but unlikely ever to be made (though some turned out to be not so useless when others reinvented them decades later).
Carroll’s inventions include a chess set for travelers, with holes to hold pegged pieces; a cardboard grill (he called it a Nyctograph) to assist one in writing in the dark; a postage-stamp case with two “pictorial surprises” (see Chapter 6, Note 5, of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland). His diary contains such entries as: “The idea occurred to me that a game might be made of letters, to be moved about on a chess-board till they form words” (Dec. 19, 1880); “Concocted a new ‘Proportional Representation’ scheme, far the best I have yet devised. . . . Also invented rules for testing Divisibility of a number by 17 and by 19. An inventive day!” (June 3, 1884); “Invented a substitute for gum, for fastening envelopes . . . , mounting small things in books, etc.—viz: paper with gum on both sides” (June 18, 1896); “Thought of a plan for simplifying money-orders, by making the sender fill up two duplicate papers, one of which he hands in to be transmitted by the postmaster—it contains a key-number, which the receiver has to supply in order to get the money. I think of suggesting this, and my plan for double postage on Sunday, to the Government” (Nov. 16, 1880).
Carroll’s rooms contained a variety of toys for the amusement of his child-guests: music boxes, dolls, windup animals (including a walking bear and one called “Bob the Bat,” which flew around the room), games, an “American orguinette” that played when you cranked a strip of punched paper through it. When he went on a journey, Stuart Collingwood tells us in his biography, “each separate article used to be carefully wrapped up in a piece of paper all to itself, so that his trunks contained nearly as much paper as of the more useful things.”
It is noteworthy also that, of all the characters Alice meets on her two dream adventures, only the White Knight seems to be genuinely fond of her and to offer her special assistance. He is almost alone in speaking to her with respect and courtesy, and we are told that Alice remembered him better than anyone else whom she met behind the mirror. His melancholy farewell may be Carroll’s farewell to Alice when she grew up (became a queen) and abandoned him. At any rate, we hear loudest in this sunset episode that “shadow of a sigh” that Carroll tells us in his prefatory poem will “tremble through the story.”
The role of White Knight was taken by Gary Cooper in Paramount’s 1933 film, Alice in Wonderland.
5. A deal box is a box made of fir or pine wood.
6. “I suggest that when the White Knight said that his horse’s anklets were to guard against the bites of sharks, the compositor in his first proof made the very easy substitution of an ‘n’ for an ‘h’, and set Carroll wondering what the bites of snarks were like . . . wondering until inevitably The Hunting of the Snark followed, which is the way such things get written.”
—A. A. Milne, Year In, Year Out (1952).
7. Janis Lull, in Lewis Carroll: A Celebration, argues that Carroll and Tenniel together loaded the steed with objects closely related to things mentioned or pictured elsewhere in the Alice books: the wooden sword and the umbrella are similar to the sword and umbrella owned by the Tweedle brothers; the watchman’s rattle looks like the rattle over which the brothers fought; the beehive recalls the elephant bees in Chapter 3; the mousetrap stands for the mouse in the first Alice book; the candlesticks allude to the candles that go off like fireworks at the end of Chapter 9; the spring bell suggests the two bells on the door in Chapter 9; the fire irons and bellows are like those in Alice’s living room below the mirror; the shark anklets could be identified with the sharks in Alice’s recitation in Chapter 10 of the previous book; the two brushes are related to the hairbrush with which Alice combs the White Queen’s hair in Chapter 5; the plum-cake dish is, of course, the one that the March Hare produces like magic from his small bag when the Lion and Unicorn are fighting for the crown; the carrots may be there as food for the March Hare; and the wine bottle, perhaps empty, suggests the nonexistent wine that the March Hare asked Alice to drink at the Mad Tea Party, as well as the real wine at the feast in Chapter 9.
“The Knight is a sort of property master,” Lull summarizes, “whose furniture both recapitulates what has gone before and anticipates what will come.”
For more inventions by Carroll’s White Knight, see Chapter 9 of my Visitors from Oz.
8. In Carroll’s day refined sugar was formed into conical chunks called sugar loaves. The term sugar loaf is commonly applied to cone-shaped hats and hills.
9. Is Carroll alluding to the proverb “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”?
10. In two-valued logic this would be called an example of the law of excluded middle: a statement is either true or false, with no third alternative. The law is the basis of a number of old nonsense rhymes: e.g., There was an old woman who lived on the hill, / And if she’s not gone, she is living there still.
11. In his diary (August 5, 1862) Carroll wrote: “After dinner Harcourt and I went to the Deanery to arrange about the river tomorrow, and stayed to play a game of ‘Ways and Means’ with the children.” I am told that Carroll’s relatives own a set of rules in Carroll’s handwriting, but no one seems to know if the game was invented by Carroll or by someone else.
12. To a student of logic and semantics all this is perfectly sensible. The song is “A-Sitting on a Gate”; it is called “Ways and Means”; the name of the song is “The Aged Aged Man”; and the name is called “Haddocks’ Eyes.” Carroll is distinguishing here among things, the names of things, and the names of names of things. “Haddocks’ Eyes,” the name of a name, belongs to what logicians now call a “metalanguage.” By adopting the convention of a hierarchy of metalanguages logicians manage to sidestep certain paradoxes that have plagued them since the time of the Greeks. For Earnest Nagel’s amusing translation of the White Knight’s remarks into symbolic notation, see his article “Symbolic Notation, Haddocks’ Eyes and the Dog-Walking Ordinance,” in Vol. 3 of James R. Newman’s anthology, The World of Mathematics (1956).
A less technical but equally sound and delightful analysis of this passage is included in Roger W. Holmes’ article, “The Philosopher’s Alice in Wonderland” (Antioch Review, Summer 1959). Professor Holmes (he was chairman of the philosophy department at Mount Holyoke College) thinks that Carroll was pulling our leg when he has the White Knight say that the song is “A-sitting on a Gate.” Clearly this cannot be the song itself, but only another name. “To be consistent,” Holmes concludes, “the White Knight, when he had said that the song is . . . , could only have burst into the song itself. Whether consistent or not, the White Knight is Lewis Carroll’s cherished gift to logicians.”
The White Knight’s song also exhibits a kind of hierarchy, like a mirror reflection of a mirror reflection of an object. Carroll’s eccentric White Knight, whom Alice couldn’t forget, is also unable to forget another eccentric with traits that suggest that he too may be a caricature of Carroll; perhaps Carroll’s vision of himself as a lonely, unloved old man.
13. The White Knight’s song is a revised, expanded version of this earlier poem by Carroll, which appeared anonymously in 1856 in a magazine called The Train.<
br />
Upon the Lonely Moor
I met an aged, aged man
Upon the lonely moor:
I knew I was a gentleman,
And he was but a boor.
So I stopped and roughly questioned him,
“Come, tell me how you live!”
But his words impressed my ear no more
Than if it were a sieve.
He said, “I look for soap-bubbles,
That lie among the wheat,
And bake them into mutton-pies,
And sell them in the street.
I sell them unto men,” he said,
“Who sail on stormy seas;
And that’s the way I get my bread—
A trifle, if you please.”
But I was thinking of a way
To multiply by ten,
And always, in the answer, get
The question back again.
I did not hear a word he said,
But kicked that old man calm,
And said, “Come, tell me how you live!”
And pinched him in the arm.
His accents mild took up the tale:
He said, “I go my ways,
And when I find a mountain-rill,
I set it in a blaze.
And thence they make a stuff they call
Rowland’s Macassar Oil;
But fourpence-halfpenny is all
They give me for my toil.”
But I was thinking of a plan
To paint one’s gaiters green,
So much the colour of the grass
That they could ne’er be seen.
I gave his ear a sudden box,
And questioned him again,
And tweaked his grey and reverend locks,
And put him into pain.
He said, “I hunt for haddocks’ eyes
Among the heather bright,
And work them into waistcoat-buttons
In the silent night.
And these I do not sell for gold,
Or coin of silver-mine,
But for a copper-halfpenny,
And that will purchase nine.
“I sometimes dig for buttered rolls,
Or set limed twigs for crabs;
I sometimes search the flowery knolls
For wheels of hansom cabs.
And that’s the way” (he gave a wink)
“I get my living here,
And very gladly will I drink
Your Honour’s health in beer.”
I heard him then, for I had just
Completed my design
To keep the Menai bridge from rust
By boiling it in wine.
I duly thanked him, ere I went,
For all his stories queer,
But chiefly for his kind intent
To drink my health in beer.
And now if e’er by chance I put
My fingers into glue,
Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot
Into a left-hand shoe;
Or if a statement I aver
Of which I am not sure,
I think of that strange wanderer
Upon the lonely moor.
“Upon the Lonely Moor” was written for Tennyson’s son Lionel. Here is Carroll’s account of its origin, from an April 1862 entry in his diary. The entry was in a portion of the diary now missing, but Stuart Collingwood quotes it in his biography of Carroll.
After luncheon I went to the Tennysons, and got Hallam and Lionel to sign their names in my album. Also I made a bargain with Lionel, that he was to give me some MS. of his verses, and I was to send him some of mine. It was a very difficult bargain to make; I almost despaired of it at first, he put in so many conditions—first, I was to play a game of chess with him; this, with much difficulty we reduced to twelve moves on each side; but this made little difference, as I checkmated him at the sixth move. Second, he was to be allowed to give me one blow on the head with a mallet (this he at last consented to give up). I forget if there were others, but it ended in my getting the verses, for which I have written out “The Lonely Moor” for him.
“ ‘Sitting on a Gate’ is a parody,” Carroll said in a letter (see The Letters of Lewis Carroll, edited by Morton Cohen, Vol. 1, page 177), “though not as to style or metre—but its plot is borrowed from Wordsworth’s ‘Resolution and Independence,’ a poem that has always amused me a good deal (though it is by no means a comic poem) by the absurd way in which the poet goes on questioning the poor old leech-gatherer, making him tell his history over and over again, and never attending to what he says. Wordsworth ends with a moral—an example I have not followed.”
Carroll surely identified himself with the song’s “aged aged man,” a man even further removed in age from Alice than was the White Knight. In “Isa’s Visit to Oxford,” Carroll calls himself “the Aged Aged Man,” abbreviating it throughout the diary as “the A.A.M.” Carroll was then fifty-eight. He often referred to himself in letters to child-friends as an aged, aged man.
On the whole, Wordsworth’s poem is a fine poem, and I say this with awareness of the fact that a portion of it is included in The Stuffed Owl, that hilarious anthology of bad verse compiled by D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee.
The opening lines of the White Knight’s song burlesque Wordsworth’s lines “I’ll tell you everything I know” and “I’ll give you all the help I can” from the original version of one of the poet’s less happy efforts called “The Thorn.” The line also reflects the title of the song, “I give thee all, I can no more,” to the tune of which the White Knight sings about the aged aged man. This song is Thomas Moore’s lyric, “My Heart and Lute,” which was set to music by the English composer Sir Henry Rowley Bishop. Carroll’s song follows the metrical pattern and rhyme scheme of Moore’s poem.
“The character of the White Knight,” Carroll wrote in a letter, “was meant to suit the speaker in the poem.” That the speaker is Carroll himself is suggested by his thoughts on multiplying by ten in the third stanza of the earlier version. It is quite possible that Carroll regarded Moore’s love lyric as the song that he, the White Knight, would have liked to sing to Alice but dared not. The full text of Moore’s poem follows.
I give thee all—I can no more—
Though poor the off’ring be;
My heart and lute are all the store
That I can bring to thee.
A lute whose gentle song reveals
The soul of love full well;
And, better far, a heart that feels
Much more than lute could tell.
Though love and song may fail, alas!
To keep life’s clouds away,
At least ’twill make them lighter pass
Or gild them if they stay.
And ev’n if Care, at moments, flings
A discord o’er life’s happy strain,
Let love but gently touch the strings,
’Twill all be sweet again!
14. Bertrand Russell, in The ABC of Relativity, Chapter 3, applies these four lines to the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction hypothesis, an early attempt to account for the failure of the Michelson-Morley experiment to detect an influence of the earth’s motion on the speed of light. According to this hypothesis, objects shrink in the direction of their motion, but since all measuring rods are similarly shortened, they serve, like the White Knight’s fan, to prevent us from detecting any change in the length of objects. The same lines are quoted by Arthur Stanley Eddington in Chapter 2 of The Nature of the Physical World, but with a larger metaphorical meaning: the apparent habit nature has of forever concealing from us her basic structural plan.
In Carroll’s earlier poem “Upon the Lonely Moor” (reprinted in Note 13), it is “one’s gaiters” that are painted green.
15. The Oxford English Dictionary describes this oil as “an unguent for the hair, grandiloquently advertised in the early part of the nineteenth century, and represented by the makers (Rowland and Son) to consist o
f ingredients obtained from Macassar.” In the first canto, stanza 17, of Don Juan, Byron writes:
In virtues nothing earthly could surpass her,
Save thine “incomparable oil,” Macassar!
The term “antimacassar,” for the piece of cloth put on the backs of chairs and sofas to prevent soiling of the fabric by hair oil, had its origin in the popularity of this oil.
16. Limed twigs are twigs that have been smeared with birdlime (or any sticky substance) for the purpose of catching birds.
17. “Hansom-cabs”: Covered carriages with two wheels and an elevated seat for the driver in the back. They were the taxicabs of Victorian England.
18. The Menai Bridge, crossing the Menai Straits in North Wales, consisted of two enormous cast-iron tubes through which trains ran. As a child, Carroll had crossed the bridge on a long holiday trip with his family.
19. It is an ancient superstition, reader Tim Healey tells me, that putting one’s right foot into a left shoe is an omen of bad luck. He quotes a passage from Samuel Butler’s Hudibras which speaks of Augustus Caesar making this mistake:
Augustus, having by an oversight
Put on his left shoe for his right,
And like to have been slain that day
By soldiers mutineering for pay.
20. Physicist David Frisch calls my attention to the following lines—the last two lines of stanza 12 in Wordsworth’s poem before he revised them for a later printing:
He answer’d me with pleasure and surprise
And there was, while he spake, a fire about his eyes.
21. The White Knight has returned to KB5, the square he occupied before capturing the Red Knight.
Because knight moves are L-shaped, the White Knight’s move is the “turn in the road” to which he referred a few paragraphs earlier.
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (The Annotated Books) Page 33