My ringlets would not grow again.
So now that I am old and gray,
And all my hair is nearly gone,
They take my wig from me and say
‘How can you put such rubbish on?’
And still, whenever I appear,
They hoot at me and call me ‘Pig!’14
And that is why they do it, dear,
Because I wear a yellow wig.”
“I’m very sorry for you,” Alice said heartily: “and I think if your wig fitted a little better, they wouldn’t tease you quite so much.”
“Your wig fits very well,” the Wasp murmured, looking at her with an expression of admiration: “it’s the shape of your head as does it. Your jaws ain’t well shaped, though—I should think you couldn’t bite well?”
Alice began with a little scream of laughter, which she turned into a cough as well as she could.15 At last she managed to say gravely, “I can bite anything I want.”16
“Not with a mouth as small as that,” the Wasp persisted. “If you was a-fighting, now—could you get hold of the other one by the back of the neck?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Alice.
“Well, that’s because your jaws are too short,” the Wasp went on: “but the top of your head is nice and round.” He took off his own wig as he spoke, and stretched out one claw towards Alice,17 as if he wished to do the same for her, but she kept out of reach, and would not take the hint. So he went on with his criticisms.
“Then your eyes—they’re too much in front, no doubt. One would have done as well as two, if you must have them so close—”18
Alice did not like having so many personal remarks made on her, and as the Wasp had quite recovered his spirits, and was getting very talkative, she thought she might safely leave him. “I think I must be going on now,” she said. “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, and thank-ye,” said the Wasp, and Alice tripped down the hill again, quite pleased that she had gone back and given a few minutes to making the poor old creature comfortable.
1. The abrupt changes of scenery that take place whenever Alice leaps a brook resemble the changes that occur in a chess game whenever a move is made, as well as the sudden transitions that occur in dreams.
2. Worrit was a slang noun in Carroll’s time for worry or mental distress. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes Mr. Bumble (in Dickens’s Oliver Twist): “A porochial life, ma’am, is a life of worrit and vexation and hardihood.” Worrity was another form of the noun commonly used by British lower classes.
3. If any insect had a newspaper it would be the social wasp. Wasps are great paper makers. Their thin paper nests, usually in hollow trees, are made from a pulp which they produce by chewing leaves and wood fiber.
4. “brown sugar”: Wasps are fond of all kinds of man-made sweets, especially sugar. Morton Cohen points out that the Wasp’s preference for brown sugar is characteristic of Victorian lower classes, who found it cheaper than the refined white.
5. “Engulph” was a common spelling of “engulf” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was occasionally seen in Carroll’s time, and the Wasp may be voicing Carroll’s personal dislike of the spelling. Perhaps it is Alice’s incorrect pronunciation, “en-gulph-ed” (three syllables instead of two), that the Wasp finds so outlandish. Donald L. Hotson suggests that Carroll may here be playing on a university slang expression of the time. According to The Slang Dictionary (Chatto & Windus, 1974), gulfed (sometimes spelled “gulphed”) was “originally a Cambridge term, denoting that a man is unable to enter for the classical examination from having failed in the mathematical. . . . The expression is common now in Oxford as descriptive of a man who goes in for honours, and only gets a pass.”
6. “all along of”: all because of. Another lower-class expression of the day.
7. “worrits”: The word was also vulgarly used as a verb. “Don’t worrit your poor mother,” says Mrs. Saunders in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. The Wasp’s speech marks him clearly as a drone in the wasp social structure.
Carroll not only identified his cantankerous aged man with a creature universally feared and hated, he also made him lower class, in sharp contrast to Alice’s upper-class background—facts that make her kindness toward the insect all the more remarkable.
8. A yellow silk handkerchief, colloquially called a “yellowman,” was fashionable in Victorian England.
9. Tying a handkerchief around the face, with a poultice inside, was in Carroll’s time believed around the world to provide relief from a toothache. Persons who considered themselves good-looking must have frequently been seen in this condition, and their appearance surely would not have strengthened their conceit.
10. A stiff neck is a bodily ailment as well as the bearing of a haughty, proud, or conceited person. Perhaps the Wasp is warning Alice of the danger of becoming a haughty Queen, as stiff-necked as an ivory chess queen. Indeed, as soon as Alice finds the gold crown on her head she walks about “rather stiffly” to keep the crown from falling off. In the last chapter she commands the black kitten to “sit up a little more stiffly” like the Red Queen she fancied the kitten to have been in her dream. Compare also with the “proud and stiff” messenger in Humpty Dumpty’s poem.
Professor Cohen observes that the Wasp reverses history when he calls stiff-neck a newfangled name. It is a much older word than conceit. “You are a stiff-necked people,” the Lord commanded Moses to tell the Israelites (Exodus 33:5).
11. “bright yellow”: The phrase is used again by Carroll in Chapter 9, where it is also associated with advanced age. A “very old frog” is dressed in “bright yellow.”
12. “comb”: another pun. Note that if Alice is a bee, she is about to become a Queen bee.
13. Is this poem, like so many of the others in both Alice books, a parody? Many poems and songs of the time begin “When I was young . . .” but I could find none that seemed a probable basis for this poem. Carroll may have been aware that the phrase “ringlets waved” occurs in John Milton’s beautiful description of the naked Eve (Paradise Lost, Book 4):
She, as a veil down to the slender waist,
Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved
As the vine curls her tendrils . . .
And there is the following line from Alexander Pope’s “Sappho”:
No more my locks, in ringlets, curled . . .
However, since ringlets always curl and wave, the parallels may be coincidental.
It may be worth pointing out that the word ringlets usually refers not to short curls but to long locks in helical form, like the vines mentioned by Milton. As a mathematician Carroll knew that the helix is an asymmetrical structure which (in Alice’s words) “goes the other way” in the mirror.
As mentioned earlier, it is no accident that the second Alice book is filled with references to mirror reversals and asymmetric objects. The helix itself is mentioned several times. Humpty Dumpty compares the toves to corkscrews, and Tenniel drew them with helical tails and snouts. Humpty also speaks in a poem about waking up fish with a corkscrew, and in Chapter 9 the White Queen recalls that Humpty had a corkscrew in hand when he was looking for a hippopotamus. In Tenniel’s pictures the unicorn and the goat have helical horns. The road that leads up the hill in Chapter 3 twists like a corkscrew. Carroll must have realized that the young (perhaps then conceited?) Wasp, admiring himself in a mirror, would have seen his ringlets curl “the other way.”
Any way you look at it, the poem itself is a strange one to appear in a book for children, though no more so, perhaps, than the inscrutable poem recited by Humpty in Chapter 6. The cutting off of hair, like decapitation and teeth extraction, is a familiar Freudian symbol of castration. Interesting interpretations of the poem by psychoanalytically oriented critics are possible.
14. In the Pig and Pepper chapter of Alice in Wonderland, Alice at first thinks that “Pig!,” shouted by the Duchess, is addressed to her. I
t turns out that the Duchess is hurling the epithet at the baby boy she is nursing, who soon turns into an actual pig. The use of “pig” as a derisive name for a person, says the OED, was common in Victorian England. Surprisingly, even then it was an epithet often used against police officers. An 1874 slang dictionary adds: “The word is almost exclusively applied by London thieves to a plain-clothes man.”
J. A. Lindon, a British writer of comic verse, suggests that it is the Wasp’s baldness (cf. the baldness of the Duchess’s baby) that prompts the epithet; and he recalls the association of pig and wig in “piggywiggy,” which the OED says is applied to both a little pig and a child. In “The Owl and the Pussycat,” Edward Lear writes:
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood,
With a ring at the end of its nose.
15. Alice changed her “little scream of laughter” at the Wasp to a discreet cough. A short time before she had tried unsuccessfully to hold back a “little scream of laughter” at the White Knight. We cannot be sure, of course, that all parallels such as this were in the original text. After removing the Wasp episode, Carroll may have borrowed some of its phrases and images for use elsewhere when he polished the rest of the galleys.
16. Alice once frightened her nurse by shouting in her ear, “Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena, and you’re a bone!” (Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 1).
17. This somewhat terrifying scene, a large wasp reaching out a “claw” to remove Alice’s hair, recalls three other episodes in the book. The White Knight, mounting his horse, steadies himself by holding Alice’s hair. The White Queen grabs Alice’s hair with both hands in Chapter 9. And, in a reversal of ages, Carroll planned to have Alice seize the hair of an old lady sitting near her when the railway carriage jumps the second brook, as we know from Tenniel’s letter.
18. Unlike Alice, wasps have bulbous compound eyes on the sides of their heads and large strong jaws. Like Alice’s, their heads are “nice and round.” Other Looking-glass creatures (the Rose, the Tiger lily, the Unicorn) size up Alice in similar fashion, in the light of their own physical attributes.
Tenniel, at the age of twenty, lost the sight of one eye in a fencing bout with his father. The button accidentally dropped from his father’s foil, and the blade’s tip flicked across his right eye with a sudden pain that must have felt like a wasp’s sting. One can understand why Tenniel might have been offended by the Wasp’s remark; if so, it could have colored his attitude toward the episode.
ORIGINAL PENCIL SKETCHES BY TENNIEL
A NOTE ABOUT LEWIS CARROLL SOCIETIES
The Lewis Carroll Society of North America is a nonprofit organization that encourages the study of the life, work, times, and influence of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. The society was founded in 1974 and has grown from several dozen members to several hundred, drawn from across North America and from abroad. Current members include leading authorities on Carroll, collectors, students, general enthusiasts, and libraries. The society is making a concerted professional effort to become the center for Carroll activities and studies.
The society meets twice a year, usually in the fall and in the spring, at the site of an important Carroll collection in the eastern United States. Meetings have featured distinguished speakers and outstanding exhibitions.
The society maintains an active publications program, administered by a distinguished committee interested in publishing and assisting in the publication of materials dealing with the life and work of Lewis Carroll. Members receive the society’s newsletter (the Knight Letter), chapbooks in the society’s series (Carroll Studies), and other special publications. The Wasp in a Wig was first published as part of this series.
Further information can be obtained by writing to The Secretary, Ellie Luchinsky, Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 18 Fitzharding Place, Owings Mill, Maryland 21117.
England’s older Lewis Carroll Society was founded in 1969. It publishes a periodical—The Carrollian (formerly titled Jabberwocky), edited by Anne Clark Amor—and Bandersnatch, a newsletter. For information write to The Secretary, Sarah Stanfield, Acorns, Dargate, Near Faversham, Kent, England ME 13 9HG.
The Lewis Carroll Society of Canada publishes White Rabbit Tales, a newsletter edited by Dayna McCausland, Box 321, Erin, Ontario, Canada N0B 1T0.
The Lewis Carroll Society of Japan issues a newsletter in both English and Japanese. The society’s secretary is Katsuko Kasai, 3-6-15 Funato, Abiko 270-11, Japan. Carroll has a large following in Japan, with about sixty Japanese editions of the Alice books in print.
SELECTED REFERENCES
By Lewis Carroll
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 1865. Carroll arranged for the first edition of two thousand copies to be published on July 4 to commemorate the date of the boating trip, three years earlier, on which he first told the story of Alice. This edition was recalled by Carroll and Tenniel because they did not like the quality of the printing. Unbound sheets were then sold to the New York firm of Appleton, who issued a thousand copies with a new title page printed at Oxford and dated 1866. This was the second issue of the first edition. The third issue was the remaining batch of 952 copies, carrying a title page printed in the United States. Carroll had little interest in the quality of his U.S. printings. “I fear it is true that there are no children in America,” he wrote in his diary (Sept. 3, 1880) after meeting an eight-year-old New York girl whose behavior he did not approve.
An Elementary Treatise on Determinants. 1867.
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. 1871.
The Hunting of the Snark, An Agony in Eight Fits. 1876.
Euclid and His Modern Rivals. 1879; reprint, 1973.
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. 1886; reprint, 1965. A facsimile of the original manuscript, which Carroll hand-lettered and crudely illustrated as a gift for Alice Liddell. It is a little more than half the length of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Sylvie and Bruno. 1889; reprint, 1988.
The Nursery “Alice.” 1889; reprint, 1966. A rewritten and shortened version of the first Alice book, for very young readers “from Nought to Five.” The illustrations are Tenniel’s, enlarged and colored.
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. 1893.
The Lewis Carroll Picture Book. Edited by Stuart Dodgson Collingwood. 1899; reprint, 1961. A valuable collection of miscellaneous short pieces by Carroll, including many of his original games, puzzles, and other mathematical recreations.
Further Nonsense Verse and Prose. Edited by Langford Reed. 1926.
The Russian Journal and Other Selections from the Works of Lewis Carroll. Edited by John Francis McDermott. 1935; reprint, 1977. Includes Carroll’s diary record of his trip to Russia in 1867 with Canon Henry Liddon.
The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. Introduction by Alexander Woollcott. 1937. The title is something of a fraud for the book is far from complete even when one excludes (as this book does) the many books published under the name of Charles Dodgson. It continues, however, (as a Modern Library book), to be the most easily obtained collection of Carroll’s prose and verse.
The Diaries of Lewis Carroll. 2 volumes. Edited by Roger Lancelyn Green. 1953. Indispensable for any student of Carroll, though one regrets that Green’s excisions include “mathematical and logical formulae and minor problems,” and “long accounts of how he [Carroll] saw children on the shore at Eastbourne, but failed to cultivate their friendship.” An excellent review by W. H. Auden appeared in the New York Times Book Review, February 28, 1954.
Symbolic Logic and the Game of Logic. Reprint, 1958. Single-volume reprint of Carroll’s two books on logic, both intended for children.
Pillow Problems and a Tangled Tale. Reprint, 1958. Single-volume reprint of Carroll’s two books of problems in recreational mathematics.
The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch. Reprint, 1971. A reprint of two early manuscripts by Carroll.
The Oxford Pamphlets, Letters, and Circulars of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
Edited by Edward Wakeling. 1993.
Lewis Carroll’s Diaries. Edited by Edward Wakeling. Vol. 1 (1993), Vol. 2 (1994), Vol. 3 (1995), Vol. 4 (1997).
Phantasmagoria. Edited by Martin Gardner. 1998. A reprint of Carroll’s comic ballad about a ghost.
Annotated Editions of the Alice Books
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Edited by Roger Lancelyn Green. 1971.
Alice in Wonderland. Edited by Donald J. Gray. 1971.
The Philosopher’s Alice. Edited by Peter Heath. 1974.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. 2 volumes. Edited by James R. Kincaid. 1982–83.
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Edited by Hugh Haughton. 1998.
Illustrated Editions of Alice
More than a hundred artists have illustrated the Alice books. For a checklist, see The Illustrators of Alice in Wonderland, edited by Graham Ovenden, with an introduction by Jack Davis. Published in 1972 by Academy Editions in England and here by St. Martin’s Press. This handsome volume reproduces numerous illustrations, some in full color.
Letters of Lewis Carroll
A Selection from the Letters of Lewis Carroll to His Child-Friends. Edited by Evelyn M. Hatch. 1933.
The Letters of Lewis Carroll. 2 volumes. Edited by Morton N. Cohen. 1979.
Lewis Carroll and the Kitchins. Edited by Morton N. Cohen. 1980.
Lewis Carroll and the House of Macmillan. Edited by Morton N. Cohen and Anita Gandolfo. 1987.
Lewis Carroll’s Letters to Skeffington. Edited by Anne Clark Amor. 1990.
Theatrical Productions of Alice
Alice on Stage. Charles C. Lovett. 1990.
Biographies of Lewis Carroll
The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood. 1898. A biography by Carroll’s nephew; the primary source of information about Carroll’s life.
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (The Annotated Books) Page 38