“May I give you a slice?” she said, taking up the knife and fork, and looking from one Queen to the other.
“Certainly not,” the Red Queen said, very decidedly: “it isn’t etiquette to cut any one you’ve been introduced to.14 Remove the joint!” And the waiters carried it off, and brought a large plum-pudding in its place.
“I wo’n’t be introduced to the pudding, please,” Alice said rather hastily, “or we shall get no dinner at all. May I give you some?”
But the Red Queen looked sulky, and growled “Pudding—Alice: Alice—Pudding. Remove the pudding!”, and the waiters took it away so quickly that Alice couldn’t return its bow.
However, she didn’t see why the Red Queen should be the only one to give orders; so, as an experiment, she called out “Waiter! Bring back the pudding!” and there it was again in a moment, like a conjuring-trick. It was so large that she couldn’t help feeling a little shy with it, as she had been with the mutton: however, she conquered her shyness by a great effort, and cut a slice and handed it to the Red Queen.
“What impertinence!” said the Pudding. “I wonder how you’d like it, if I were to cut a slice out of you, you creature!”15
It spoke in a thick, suety sort of voice, and Alice hadn’t a word to say in reply: she could only sit and look at it and gasp.
“Make a remark,” said the Red Queen: “it’s ridiculous to leave all the conversation to the pudding!”
“Do you know, I’ve had such a quantity of poetry repeated to me to-day,” Alice began, a little frightened at finding that, the moment she opened her lips, there was dead silence, and all eyes were fixed upon her; “and it’s a very curious thing, I think—every poem was about fishes in some way. Do you know why they’re so fond of fishes, all about here?”
She spoke to the Red Queen, whose answer was a little wide of the mark. “As to fishes,” she said, very slowly and solemnly, putting her mouth close to Alice’s ear, “her White Majesty knows a lovely riddle—all in poetry—all about fishes. Shall she repeat it?”
“Her Red Majesty’s very kind to mention it,” the White Queen murmured into Alice’s other ear, in a voice like the cooing of a pigeon. “It would be such a treat! May I?”
“Please do,” Alice said very politely.
The White Queen laughed with delight, and stroked Alice’s cheek. Then she began:
“ ‘First, the fish must be caught.’
That is easy: a baby, I think, could have caught it.
‘Next, the fish must be bought.’
That is easy: a penny, I think, would have bought it.
‘Now cook me the fish!’
That is easy, and will not take more than a minute.
‘Let it lie in a dish!’
That is easy, because it already is in it.
‘Bring it here! Let me sup!’
It is easy to set such a dish on the table.
‘Take the dish-cover up!’
Ah, that is so hard that I fear I’m unable!
For it holds it like glue—
Holds the lid to the dish, while it lies in the middle:
Which is easiest to do,
Un-dish-cover the fish, or dishcover the riddle?”16
“Take a minute to think about it, and then guess,” said the Red Queen. “Meanwhile, we’ll drink your health—Queen Alice’s health!” she screamed at the top of her voice, and all the guests began drinking it directly, and very queerly they managed it: some of them put their glasses upon their heads like extinguishers,17 and drank all that trickled down their faces—others upset the decanters, and drank the wine as it ran off the edges of the table—and three of them (who looked like kangaroos) scrambled into the dish of roast mutton, and began eagerly lapping up the gravy, “just like pigs in a trough!” thought Alice.
“You ought to return thanks in a neat speech,” the Red Queen said, frowning at Alice as she spoke.
“We must support you, you know,” the White Queen whispered, as Alice got up to do it, very obediently, but a little frightened.
“Thank you very much,” she whispered in reply, “but I can do quite well without.”
“That wouldn’t be at all the thing,” the Red Queen said very decidedly: so Alice tried to submit to it with a good grace.
(“And they did push so!” she said afterwards, when she was telling her sister the history of the feast. “You would have thought they wanted to squeeze me flat!”)
In fact it was rather difficult for her to keep in her place while she made her speech: the two Queens pushed her so, one on each side, that they nearly lifted her up into the air. “I rise to return thanks—” Alice began: and she really did rise as she spoke, several inches; but she got hold of the edge of the table, and managed to pull herself down again.
“Take care of yourself!” screamed the White Queen, seizing Alice’s hair with both her hands. “Something’s going to happen!”
And then (as Alice afterwards described it) all sorts of things happened in a moment. The candles all grew up to the ceiling, looking something like a bed of rushes with fireworks at the top. As to the bottles, they each took a pair of plates, which they hastily fitted on as wings, and so, with forks for legs, went fluttering about in all directions: “and very like birds they look,” Alice thought to herself, as well as she could in the dreadful confusion that was beginning.
At this moment she heard a hoarse laugh at her side, and turned to see what was the matter with the White Queen; but, instead of the Queen, there was the leg of mutton sitting in the chair. “Here I am!” cried a voice from the soup-tureen, and Alice turned again, just in time to see the Queen’s broad good-natured face grinning at her for a moment over the edge of the tureen, before she disappeared into the soup.18
There was not a moment to be lost. Already several of the guests were lying down in the dishes, and the soup-ladle was walking up the table towards Alice’s chair, and beckoning to her impatiently to get out of its way.
“I ca’n’t stand this any longer!” she cried, as she jumped up and seized the tablecloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests, and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor.
“And as for you,” she went on, turning fiercely upon the Red Queen, whom she considered as the cause of all the mischief—but the Queen was no longer at her side—she had suddenly dwindled down to the size of a little doll, and was now on the table, merrily running round and round after her own shawl, which was trailing behind her.
At any other time, Alice would have felt surprised at this, but she was far too much excited to be surprised at anything now. “As for you,” she repeated, catching hold of the little creature in the very act of jumping over a bottle which had just lighted upon the table, “I’ll shake you into a kitten, that I will!”19
1. The Red Queen has just moved to the King’s square so that Alice now has a queen on each side of her. The White King is placed in check by this move, but neither side seems to notice it.
Ivor Davies, writing on “Looking-Glass Chess” in The Anglo-Welsh Review (Autumn 1970), has an explanation of why no one notices that the White King has been placed in check by the Red Queen’s move to the King’s square. One of the chess books in Carroll’s library was The Art of Chess-Play (1846) by George Walker. The book’s Law 20 states: “When you give check, you must apprize your adversary by saying aloud ‘check’; or he need not notice it, but may move as though check were not given.”
“The Red Queen did not say ‘Check,’ ” comments Davies. “Her silence was entirely logical because, at the moment of her arrival at King one, she said to Alice . . . ‘Speak when you’re spoken to!’ Since no one had spoken to her she would have been breaking her own rule had she said ‘check.’ ”
Another informative paper on the book’s chess game is “Alice in Fairyland” by A. S. M. Dickins, in Jabberwocky (Winter 1976). A world expert on “fairy chess,” Dickins analyzes Carroll’s game as a mélange of fairy chess rules. He cal
ls attention to Walker’s Law 14, which, incredibly, allows a player to make a series of consecutive moves in one turn provided the opponent doesn’t object!
2. Is the Red Queen, as conjectured by Selwyn Goodacre and several other correspondents, alluding to the fact that no move in chess can be taken back? Once it is made “you must take the consequences.” Modern chess rules are even more strict. If a piece is merely touched, it must be moved.
3. Carroll was particularly fond of Tuesdays. “Spent the day in London,” he wrote in his diary on Tuesday, April 10, 1877. “It was (like so many Tuesdays in my life) a very enjoyable day.” The joy on this occasion was his meeting of a modest little girl “who is about the most gloriously beautiful child (both face and figure) that I ever saw. One would like to do 100 photographs of her.”
4. It is easy to miss the Red Queen’s implication here that rich and clever are opposites, like warm and cold.
5. “riddle with no answer”: such as the Mad Hatter’s unanswered riddle about the raven and the writing desk.
6. Alice is recalling Humpty’s song (Chapter 6) in which he tells of taking a corkscrew and going to wake up the fish to punish them for not obeying him.
Alice may not have been interrupted in her remark. She may simply be recalling Humpty’s poem in Chapter 6 with its inconclusive couplet:
The little fishes’ answer was
“We cannot do it, Sir, because—”
7. Molly Martin speculates in a letter that when the White Queen remembers a time when the roof came off and thunder rolled around the room, this might refer to the lid of a chess box being removed and the pieces rattling around in the box as a player starts removing them or dumping them on the table.
8. “papers”: papers around which locks of hair are wound for curling.
9. An obvious burlesque of the familiar nursery rhyme, “Hush-a-by baby, on the tree top . . .”
10. As Michael Hancher points out in his book, cited so often in previous notes, the Romanesque doorway in Tenniel’s picture of this scene is identical with a doorway he drew for the title page of the bound volume of Punch, July–December, 1853. Hancher also reproduces the illustration as Tenniel originally drew it, showing Alice with a crinoline skirt that resembles the lower part of chess queens, in keeping with her crown, which is identical with the crowns of the chess pieces.
Carroll, who is on record as saying “I hate crinoline fashion,” objected to five pictures by Tenniel that showed Alice in a crinoline skirt after she became a queen. Tenniel complied with Carroll’s request by redrawing all five pictures. His original sketches for the five are reproduced in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Justin Schiller and Selwyn Goodacre (privately printed, 1990).
The same Norman-arched doorway, Charles Lovett tells me, with its characteristic zigzag pattern, was drawn by Tenniel in his first commissioned book illustrations, the second series of the Book of British Ballads. The arch appears in the background of a scene accompanying a ballad called “King Estmere.”
In her booklet Alice’s Adventures in Oxford (1980) Mavis Batey says that the door is “clearly the door of her [Alice’s] father’s Chapter House”—the house where the business of Christ Church’s cathedral is conducted.
TENNIEL‘S ORIGINAL DRAWING
11. The Frog has a frog in his throat.
12. Victorian Cockneys had a habit of exchanging initial ws for vs and vs for ws. “Wexes” is how Mr. Pickwick’s servant Sam Weller pronounces “vexes” in Pickwick Papers.
13. This is a parody of Sir Walter Scott’s song, “Bonny Dundee,” from his play The Doom of Devorgoil.
Bonny Dundee
To the Lords of Convention ’twas Claver’se who spoke,
’Ere the King’s crown shall fall there are crowns to be broke;
So let each Cavalier who loves honour and me,
Come follow the bonnet of Bonny Dundee.
“Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can,
Come saddle your horses, and call up your men;
Come open the West Port, and let me gang free,
And it’s room for the bonnets of Bonny Dundee!”
Dundee he is mounted; he rides up the street,
The bells are rung backward, the drums they are beat;
But the Provost, douce man, said, “Just e’en let him be,
The Gude Town is weel quit of that Deil of Dundee.”
Come fill up my cup, &c.
As he rode down the sanctified bends of the Bow,
Ilk carline was flyting and shaking her pow;
But the young plants of grace they look’d couthie and slee,
Thinking, “Luck to thy bonnet, thou Bonny Dundee!”
Come fill up my cup, &c.
With sour-featured Whigs the Grassmarket was cramm’d
As if half the West had set tryst to be hang’d;
There was spite in each look, there was fear in each e’e,
As they watch’d for the bonnets of Bonny Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, &c.
These cowls of Kilmarnock had spits and had spears,
And lang-hafted gullies to kill Cavaliers;
But they shrunk to close-heads, and the causeway was free,
At the toss of the bonnet of Bonny Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, &c.
He spurr’d to the foot of the proud Castle rock,
And with the gay Gordon he gallantly spoke;
“Let Mons Meg and her marrows speak twa words or three,
For the love of the bonnet of Bonny Dundee.”
Come fill up my cup, &c.
The Gordon demands of him which way he goes—
“Where’er shall direct me the shade of Montrose!
Your Grace in short space shall hear tidings of me,
Or that low lies the bonnet of Bonny Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, &c.
“There are hills beyond Pentland, and lands beyond Forth,
If there’s lords in the Lowlands, there’s chiefs in the North;
There are wild Duniewassals, three thousand times three,
Will cry hoigh! for the bonnet of Bonny Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, &c.
“There’s brass on the target of barken’d bull-hide;
There’s steel in the scabbard that dangles beside;
The brass shall be burnish’d, the steel shall flash free,
At a toss of the bonnet of Bonny Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, &c.
“Away to the hills, to the caves, to the rocks—
Ere I own an usurper, I’ll couch with the fox;
And tremble, false Whigs, in the midst of your glee,
You have not seen the last of my bonnet and me!”
Come fill up my cup, &c.
He waved his proud hand, and the trumpets were blown,
The kettle-drums clash’d, and the horsemen rode on,
Till on Ravelston’s cliffs and on Clermiston’s lee,
Died away the wild war-notes of Bonny Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can,
Come saddle the horses and call up the men,
Come open your gates, and let me gae free,
For it’s up with the bonnets of Bonny Dundee!
14. No Victorian reader would miss the pun. To cut is to ignore someone you know. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable distinguishes four kinds of cuts: the cut direct (staring at an acquaintance and pretending not to know him or her); the cut indirect (pretending not to see someone); the cut sublime (admiring something, such as the top of a building, until an acquaintance has walked by); and the cut informal (stooping to adjust a shoelace).
15. Roger Green thought Alice’s dialogue with the pudding might have been suggested to Carroll by a cartoon in Punch (January 19, 1861) showing a plum pudding standing up in its dish and saying to a diner, “Allow me to disagree with you.” Michael Hancher reproduces the Punch cartoon in his book on Tenniel, and points out the reappearance of the
pudding, its legs in the air, at the lower left corner of the chapter’s last Tenniel illustration.
16. The answer: an oyster. The Lewis Carroll Handbook (1962) reveals (p. 95) that a four-stanza answer to the White Queen’s riddle, in the same meter as the riddle, appeared in the English periodical Fun, October 30, 1878, p. 175. The answer had been previously submitted to Carroll, who polished up the meter for the anonymous author. The answer’s final stanza, as quoted in the Handbook, is:
Get an oyster-knife strong,
Insert it ’twixt cover and dish in the middle;
Then you shall before long
Un-dish-cover the OYSTERS—dish-cover the riddle!
17. The reference is to candle extinguishers, small hollow cones used for snuffing out candles to prevent the smoke fumes from circulating around the room.
18. The White Queen has moved away from Alice to QR6; an illegal move in an orthodox chess game because it does not take the White King out of check.
19. This is Alice’s capture of the Red Queen. It results in a legitimate checkmate of the Red King, who has slept throughout the entire chess problem without moving. Alice’s victory gives a faint moral to the story, for the white pieces are good and gentle characters in contrast to the fierce vindictive temperaments of the red pieces. The checkmate ends the dream but leaves open the question of whether the dream was Alice’s or the Red King’s.
CHAPTER X1
Shaking
She took her off the table as she spoke, and shook her backwards and forwards with all her might.
The Red Queen made no resistance whatever: only her face grew very small, and her eyes got large and green: and still, as Alice went on shaking her, she kept on growing shorter—and fatter—and softer—and rounder—and—
1. The American writer and critic Everett Bleiler, in a front-page article “Alice Through the Zodiac” (Book World, August 3, 1997), makes a curious conjecture. Because Carroll stretched his second Alice book to twelve chapters by making this and the next chapter extremely short, is it possible he had the twelve zodiac signs in mind? For example, the Tweedle twins may allude to Gemini, the Lion to Leo, the Sheep to Aries, the Goat to Capricorn, the White Knight to Sagittarius, Humpty to Libra, and so on. Striking though these correlations are, few Carrollians have taken Bleiler’s conjecture seriously. They point out that Carroll had no interest in astrology and that he wanted his second Alice book to have the same number of chapters as the first.
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