CHAPTER XI
Waking
—it really was a kitten, after all.1
1. Rose Franklin, one of Carroll’s child-friends, recalled in a memoir that Carroll had said to her, “I cannot decide what to make the Red Queen turn into.” Rose replied: “She looks so cross, please turn her into the Black Kitten.”
“That will do splendidly,” Carroll is reported to have said, “and the White Queen shall be the White Kitten.”
Recall that in Chapter 1, before she fell asleep, Alice said to the black kitten, “Let’s pretend that you’re the Red Queen.”
CHAPTER XII
Which Dreamed It?
“Your Red Majesty shouldn’t purr so loud,” Alice said, rubbing her eyes, and addressing the kitten, respectfully, yet with some severity. “You woke me out of oh! such a nice dream! And you’ve been along with me, Kitty—all through the Looking-glass world. Did you know it, dear?”
It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them, they always purr. “If they would only purr for ‘yes,’ and mew for ‘no,’ or any rule of that sort,” she had said, “so that one could keep up a conversation! But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?”1
On this occasion the kitten only purred: and it was impossible to guess whether it meant ‘yes’ or ‘no.’
So Alice hunted among the chessmen on the table till she had found the Red Queen: then she went down on her knees on the hearth-rug, and put the kitten and the Queen to look at each other. “Now, Kitty!” she cried, clapping her hands triumphantly. “Confess that was what you turned into!”
(“But it wouldn’t look at it,” she said, when she was explaining the thing afterwards to her sister: “it turned away its head, and pretended not to see it: but it looked a little ashamed of itself, so I think it must have been the Red Queen.”)
“Sit up a little more stiffly, dear!” Alice cried with a merry laugh. “And curtsey while you’re thinking what to—what to purr. It saves time, remember!” And she caught it up and gave it one little kiss, “just in honour of its having been a Red Queen.”
“Snowdrop, my pet!” she went on, looking over her shoulder at the White Kitten, which was still patiently undergoing its toilet, “when will Dinah have finished with your White Majesty, I wonder? That must be the reason you were so untidy in my dream.—Dinah! Do you know that you’re scrubbing a White Queen? Really, it’s most disrespectful of you!
“And what did Dinah turn to, I wonder?” she prattled on, as she settled comfortably down, with one elbow on the rug, and her chin in her hand, to watch the kittens. “Tell me, Dinah, did you turn to Humpty Dumpty?2 I think you did—however, you’d better not mention it to your friends just yet, for I’m not sure.
“By the way, Kitty, if only you’d been really with me in my dream, there was one thing you would have enjoyed—I had such a quantity of poetry said to me, all about fishes!3 Tomorrow morning you shall have a real treat. All the time you’re eating your breakfast, I’ll repeat ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ to you; and then you can make believe it’s oysters, dear!
“Now, Kitty, let’s consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should not go on licking your paw like that—as if Dinah hadn’t washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course—but then I was part of his dream, too! Was it the Red King, Kitty? You were his wife, my dear, so you ought to know—Oh, Kitty, do help to settle it! I’m sure your paw can wait!” But the provoking kitten only began on the other paw, and pretended it hadn’t heard the question.
Which do you think it was?
1. Alice’s point is fundamental in information theory, Gerald Weinberg says in a letter. There is no one-value logic—no way to record or transmit information without at least a binary distinction between yes and no, or true and false. In computers the distinction is handled by the on-off switches of their circuitry.
2. Why did Alice think Humpty was Dinah? Ellis Hillman, writing on “Dinah, the Cheshire Cat, and Humpty Dumpty,” in Jabberwocky (Winter 1977), offers an ingenious theory. “I’m one that has spoken to a King, I am,” Humpty said to Alice. As we know from the old proverb that Alice quoted in Chapter 8 of the previous book, a cat may look at a king.
Fred Madden, in his article cited in Chapter 3, Notes 11 and 18, points out that when the initials of Humpty Dumpty are reversed, they become D. H., the first and last letters of “Dinah.”
3. The term queer fish, meaning someone considered odd, was current in Carroll’s day. In stressing fish in this book, was Carroll thinking of all the odd fish it contained? Or that there is something “fishy” about his nonsense? Coincidentally, fish is slang in the United States for a mediocre chess player.
A boat, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—
Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear—
Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.
Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.
Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?1
1. In this terminal poem, one of Carroll’s best, he recalls that July 4 boating expedition up the Thames on which he first told the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to the three Liddell girls. The poem echoes the themes of winter and death that run through the prefatory poem of Through the Looking-Glass. It is the song of the White Knight, remembering Alice as she was before she turned away, with tearless and eager eyes, to run down the hill and leap the last brook into womanhood. The poem is an acrostic, the initial letters of the lines spelling Alice’s full name.
Matthew Hodgart wrote from England to suggest that in this stanza of his acrostic poem Carroll was consciously echoing the sentiments of that anonymous canon, well known in England at the time:
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream;
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
Ralph Lutts, a correspondent who makes the same suggestion, points out that “merrily” in the canon links to the “merry crew” in the prefatory poem of the first Alice book.
The real world and the “eerie” state of dreaming alternate throughout Carroll’s two Sylvie and Bruno books. “Either I’ve been dreaming about Sylvie,” he says to himself in Chapter 2 of the first book, “and this is reality. Or else I’ve been with Sylvie, and this is the dream! Is Life itself a dream, I wonder?”
The prefatory poem of Sylvie and Bruno, an acrostic on the name of Isa Bowman, conveys the same theme:
Is all our Life, then, but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time’s dark resistless stream?
Bowed to the earth with bitter woe,
Or laughing at some raree-show,
We flutter idly to and fro.
Man’s little Day in haste we spend,
And, from its merry noontide, send
No glance to meet the silent end.
Morris Glazer wonders in a letter if Carroll intended “Alice” to begin the poem’s middle line, thus putting her at the center of the poem as she was central in his life.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
THE WASP IN A WIG
Preface
In 1974 the Londo
n auctioneering firm of Sotheby Parke Bernet and Company listed, inconspicuously, the following item in their June 3 catalog:
Dodgson (C.L.) “Lewis Carroll.” Galley proofs for a suppressed portion of “Through the Looking-Glass,” slip 64–67 and portions of 63 and 68, with autograph revisions in black ink and note in the author’s purple ink that the extensive passage is to be omitted.
The present portion contains an incident in which Alice meets a bad-tempered wasp, incorporating a poem of five stanzas, beginning “When I was young, my ringlets waved.” It was to have appeared following “A very few steps brought her to the edge of the brook” on page 183 of the first edition. The proofs were bought at the sale of the author’s furniture, personal effects, and library, Oxford, 1898, and are apparently unrecorded and unpublished.
The word “apparently” in the last sentence was an understatement. Not only had the suppressed portion not been published, but Carroll experts did not even know it had been set in type, let alone preserved. The discovery that it still existed was an event of major significance to Carrollians—indeed, to all students of English literature. Now, more than one hundred years after Through the Looking-Glass was first set in type, the long-lost episode receives its first major publication.
Until 1974 nothing was known about the missing portion beyond what Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, a nephew of Lewis Carroll, had said about it in his 1898 biography of his uncle, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll. Collingwood wrote:
The story, as originally written, contained thirteen chapters, but the published book consisted of twelve only. The omitted chapter introduced a wasp, in the character of a judge or barrister, I suppose, since Mr. Tenniel wrote that “a wasp in a wig is altogether beyond the appliances of art.” Apart from difficulties of illustration, the “wasp” chapter was not considered to be up to the level of the rest of the book, and this was probably the principal reason of its being left out.
These remarks were followed by a facsimile of a letter, dated June 1, 1870, that John Tenniel had sent to Carroll. (The letter is here reproduced on pages 281–83.) In Tenniel’s sketch for the railway carriage scene, Alice sits opposite a goat and a man dressed in white paper while the Guard observes Alice through opera glasses. In his final drawing Tenniel gave the man in the paper hat the face of Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister he so often caricatured in Punch.
Carroll accepted both of Tenniel’s suggestions. The “old lady,” presumably a character in the original version of Chapter 3, vanished from the chapter and from Tenniel’s illustration, and the Wasp vanished from the book. In The Annotated Alice my note on this ends: “Alas, nothing of the missing chapter has survived.” Collingwood himself had not read the episode. We know this because he assumed, mistakenly as it turned out, that if the Wasp wore a wig he must have been a judge or lawyer.
Carroll left no record of his own final opinion of the episode or the poem it contained. He did, however, carefully preserve the galleys, and it seems likely that he intended to do something with them someday. It was Carroll himself, remember, who decided to publish his first version of Alice in Wonderland, the manuscript he had hand-lettered and illustrated for Alice Liddell. Many of his early poems, printed in obscure periodicals or not published at all, found their way eventually into his books. Even if Carroll had no specific plans for making use of the Wasp episode or its poem, it is hard to believe he would not have been pleased to know it would find eventual publication.
After Carroll’s death in 1898 the galleys were bought by an unknown person and—for the present at least—we know little about who owned them until Sotheby’s put them up for auction. They are not listed in the 1898 catalogs of Carroll’s effects, apparently because they were included in a miscellaneous lot of unidentified items. “The property of a gentleman” is how Sotheby’s labeled them in its catalog. Sotheby’s does not disclose the identities of vendors who desire to remain anonymous, but they tell me that the galleys had been passed on to the vendor by an older member of his family.
The galleys were bought by John Fleming, a Manhattan rare book dealer, for Norman Armour, Jr., also of New York City. It was Mr. Armour’s gracious consent to permit publication of these galleys that makes this book possible. What more need be said in the way of thanks?
Facsimile of Tenniel’s letter to Dodgson, with a transcription.
My dear Dodgson.
I think that when the jump occurs in the Railway scene you might very well make Alice lay hold of the Goat’s beard as being the object nearest to her hand—instead of the old lady’s hair. The jerk would naturally throw them together.
Don’t think me brutal, but I am bound to say that the ‘wasp’ chapter doesn’t interest me in the least, & I can’t see my way to a picture. If you want to shorten the book, I can’t help thinking—with all submission—that there is your opportunity.
In an agony of haste
Yours sincerely
J. Tenniel.
Portsdown Road.
June 1, 1870
INTRODUCTION
Before the Wasp episode came to light, most students of Carroll assumed that the lost episode was adjacent to, at least not far from, the railway carriage scene. This was because Tenniel, in his letter of complaint, seemed to link the two incidents. In Chapter 3, where Alice leaps the first brook and the train jumps over the second, Alice encounters a variety of insects, including bees the size of elephants. Was it not appropriate that she would meet a wasp in this region of the chessboard?
That Carroll did not intend Alice to come upon the Wasp so early in the chess game is evident at once from the numbers on the galleys, and from what Alice thought when the Wasp told her how his ringlets used to wave. “A curious idea came into Alice’s head. Almost every one she had met had repeated poetry to her, and she thought she would try if the Wasp couldn’t do it too.” The first person to recite poetry to Alice is Tweedledee, and the second is Humpty Dumpty. The lost episode, therefore, had to occur later than Chapter 6.
The incomplete first line of the galleys leaves no doubt that Sotheby’s catalog correctly indicates where Carroll had intended the Wasp episode to go. (The spot is shown by the arrow in the reproduction of page 183 of the first edition of Through the Looking-Glass, here printed on page 292.) Alice has just waved her final farewell to the White Knight, then gone down the hill to leap the last brook and become a Queen. “A very few steps brought her to the edge of the brook.” Instead of a period there was a comma. The sentence continued as at the top of the first galley: “and she was just going to spring over, when she heard a deep sigh, which seemed to come from the wood behind her.”
Both Tenniel and Collingwood called the episode a “chapter,” but there are difficulties with this view. The galleys give no indication that they are anything but an excerpt from Chapter 8, and it seems unlikely that Carroll would have wanted his second Alice book to have thirteen chapters when the first book had twelve. It is Morton Cohen’s belief that Tenniel, writing “in an agony of haste,” used the word “chapter” when he meant episode. Collingwood’s remarks are easily explained as elaborations of how he interpreted Tenniel’s letters. (There must have been at least one other Tenniel letter available to him, because the remark of Tenniel’s that he quotes about a wasp in a wig being “beyond the appliances of art” does not appear in the letter he reproduces in facsimile.)
One might argue that had the Wasp episode belonged to the White Knight chapter, the chapter would have been uncommonly long, and would not Tenniel have written that the episode should be removed to “shorten the chapter” rather than “shorten the book”? On the other hand, the fact that the chapter was too long may have been another reason why Carroll was willing to excise the episode. Unfortunately no other galleys for the book are known to have survived, so we are forced to rely on indirect evidence for deciding which view is correct.
Edward Guiliano favors the view that Tenniel had “episode” in mind. He supports the arguments already
presented, and also feels that the incidents of the episode would have added thematic unity to the White Knight chapter. After conversing with the White Knight, an upper-class gentleman still in his vigor, Alice meets a lower-class worker in his declining years.* She waves good-bye to the White Knight with a handkerchief; the Wasp has a handkerchief around his face. The White Knight talks about bees and honey; the Wasp thinks Alice is a bee and asks her if she has any honey. Even the pun about the comb, Guiliano believes, is not quite so feeble in the context of the chapter as originally planned. These and other incidents in the Wasp episode link it to the White Knight chapter in ways that suggest it was not intended to stand alone.
Was the Wasp episode worth preserving? It was, of course, eminently worth saving for historical reasons, but that is not what I mean. Does it have intrinsic merit? Tenniel said it did not interest him in the least, and many who have recently read the episode agree that it is not (in Collingwood’s words) “up to the level of the rest of the book.” Peter Heath feels that one reason the episode lacks the vivacity of other parts of the book is that it repeats so many themes that occur elsewhere. Alice had a previous conversation with an unhappy insect, the Gnat, in Chapter 3. In the chapter following the Wasp episode Alice converses with another elderly lower-class male, the Frog. The Wasp’s criticisms of Alice’s face are reminiscent of Humpty Dumpty’s criticisms. Alice’s attempts to repair the Wasp’s disheveled appearance parallel her attempts to remedy the untidyness of the White Queen in Chapter 5. There are other echoes of familiar themes that Professor Heath has noted. “It’s as if Carroll’s inventiveness was flagging a bit,” he writes in a letter, “and the momentum of the narrative had temporarily been lost.”
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (The Annotated Books) Page 36