While all this was going on, hundreds of readers of AA sent me letters that called attention to aspects of Carroll’s text I had failed to appreciate and that suggested where old notes could be improved and new ones added. When those letters reached the top of a large carton, I said to myself that the time had come to publish this new material. Should I try to revise and update the original book? Or should I write a sequel called More Annotated Alice? I finally decided that a sequel would be better. Readers who owned the original would not find it obsolete. There would be no need to compare its pages with those in a revised edition to see where fresh notes had been added. And it would have been a horrendous task to squeeze all the new notes into the marginal spaces of the original book.
A sequel also offered an opportunity to introduce readers to different illustrations. It is true that Tenniel’s drawings are eternally part of the Alice “canon,” but they are readily accessible in The Annotated Alice, as well as in scores of other editions currently in print. Peter Newell was not the first graphic artist after Tenniel to illustrate Alice, but he was the first to do so in a memorable way. An edition of the first Alice book with forty plates by Newell was published by Harper and Brothers in 1901, followed by the second Alice book, again with forty plates, in 1902. Both volumes are now costly collector’s items. Whatever readers may think of Newell’s art, I believe they will find it refreshing to see Alice and her friends through another artist’s imagination.
Newell’s fascinating article on his approach to Alice is reprinted here, followed by the latest and best of several essays about Newell and his work. I had planned to discuss Newell in this introduction until I discovered that my friend Michael Hearn, author of The Annotated Wizard of Oz and other books, had said everything in an essay that I could have said and much more.
The famous lost episode about a wasp in a wig—Carroll deleted it from the second Alice book after Tenniel complained that he couldn’t draw a wasp and thought the book would be better without the episode—is included here at the back of the book, rather than in the chapter about the White Knight where Carroll had intended it to go. The episode was first published in 1977 as a chapbook by the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, with my introduction and notes. This book is now out of print, and I am pleased to have obtained permission to include the entire volume here.
A few errors in the introduction to The Annotated Alice need correcting. I spoke of Shane Leslie’s essay, “Lewis Carroll and the Oxford Movement,” as though it were serious criticism. Readers were quick to inform me it is no such thing. It was intended to spoof the compulsion of some scholars to search for improbable symbolism in Alice. I said that none of Carroll’s photographs of naked little girls seemed to have survived. Four such pictures, hand colored, later turned up in the Carroll collection of the Rosenbach Foundation in Philadelphia. They are reproduced in Lewis Carroll’s Photographs of Nude Children, a handsome monograph published by the foundation in 1979, with an introduction by Professor Cohen.
There has been considerable speculation among Carrollians about whether Carroll was “in love” with the real Alice. We know that Mrs. Liddell sensed something unusual in his attitude toward her daughter, took steps to discourage his attentions, and eventually burned all his early letters to Alice. My introduction mentioned a cryptic reference in Carroll’s diary (October 28, 1862) to his being out of Mrs. Liddell’s good graces “ever since Lord Newry’s business.” When Viscount Newry, age eighteen, was an undergraduate at Christ Church, Mrs. Liddell hoped he might marry one of her daughters. In 1862 Lord Newry wanted to give a ball, which was against college rules. He petitioned the faculty for permission, with Mrs. Liddell’s support, but was turned down. Carroll had voted against him. Does this fully explain Mrs. Liddell’s antagonism? Or was her anger reinforced by a feeling that Carroll himself wished someday to marry Alice? For Mrs. Liddell this was out of the question, not only because of the large age difference, but also because she considered Carroll too low on the social scale.
The page in Carroll’s diary that covered the date of his break with Mrs. Liddell was cut from the volume by an unknown member of the Carroll family and was presumably destroyed. Alice’s son Caryl Hargreaves is on record as having said he thought Carroll was romantically in love with his mother, and there are other indications, not yet made public, that Carroll may have expressed marital intentions to Alice’s parents. Anne Clark, in her biographies of Carroll and of Alice, is convinced that some sort of proposal was made.
The question was thoroughly dealt with in Morton Cohen’s biography of Carroll. Professor Cohen originally thought Carroll never considered marrying anyone, but Cohen later altered his opinion. Here is how he explained it in an interview published in Soaring with the Dodo (Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 1982), a collection of essays edited by Edward Guiliano and James Kincaid:
Actually, I didn’t change my mind recently; I changed it in 1969 when I first got a photocopy of the diaries from the family. When I sat down and read through the diaries—the complete diaries not just the published excerpts—somewhere between 25 and 40% was never published, and naturally those unpublished bits and pieces are enormously significant. Those were the parts that the family decided should not be published. Roger Lancelyn Green, who edited the diaries, actually never even saw the full unpublished diaries because he worked from an edited typescript. When I first read through the unpublished portions of the diaries, however, I realized that another dimension to Lewis Carroll’s “romanticism” existed. Of course it is pretty hard to reconcile the stern Victorian clergyman with the man who favored little girls to a point where he would want to propose marriage to one or more of them. I believe now that he made some sort of proposal of marriage to the Liddells, not saying “may I marry your eleven-year-old daughter,” or anything like that, but perhaps advancing some meek suggestion that after six or eight years, if we feel the same way that we feel now, might some kind of alliance be possible? I believe also that he went on later on to think of the possibility of marrying other girls, and I think that he would have married. He was a marrying man. I very firmly believe that he would have been happier married than as a bachelor, and I think one of the tragedies of his life was that he never managed to marry.
Some critics have likened Carroll to Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Both were indeed attracted to what Nabokov called nymphets, but their motives were quite different. Lewis Carroll’s little girls may have appealed to him precisely because he felt sexually secure with them. There was a tendency in Victorian England, reflected in much of its literature and art, to idealize the beauty and virginal purity of little girls. This surely made it easier for Carroll to take for granted that his fondness for them was on a high spiritual plane. Carroll was a devout Anglican, and no scholar has suggested that he was conscious of anything but the noblest intentions, nor is there a hint of impropriety in the recollections of his many child-friends.
Although Lolita has many allusions to Edgar Allan Poe, who shared Humbert’s sexual preferences, it contains no references to Carroll. Nabokov spoke in an interview about Carroll’s “pathetic affinity” with Humbert, adding that “some odd scruple prevented me from alluding in Lolita to his wretched perversion and to those ambiguous photographs he took in dim rooms.”
Nabokov was a great admirer of the Alice books. In his youth he translated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into Russian—“not the first translation,” he once remarked, “but the best.” He wrote one novel about a chess player (The Defense) and another with a playing-card motif (King, Queen, Knave). Critics have also noticed the similarity of the endings of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading.*
Several reviewers of AA complained that its notes ramble too far from the text, with distracting comments more suitable for an essay. Yes, I often ramble, but I hope that at least some readers enjoy such meanderings. I see no reason why annotators should not use their not
es for saying anything they please if they think it will be of interest, or at least amusing. Many of my long notes in AA—the one on chess as a metaphor for life, for example—were intended as mini-essays.
The names of readers who provided material for this book are given in the notes, but here I wish to acknowledge a special debt to Dr. Selwyn H. Goodacre, current editor of Jabberwocky and a noted Carrollian scholar. Not only did he provide numerous insights, but he also gave generously of his time in reading a first draft of my notes and offering valuable corrections and suggestions.
*For the many allusions to Alice in Nabokov’s fiction, see note 133 (pages 377–78, Chapter 29) of The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel, Jr. (McGraw-Hill, 1970).
The
Annotated
Alice
The Definitive Edition
Contents
I. Down the Rabbit-Hole
II. The Pool of Tears
III. A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale
IV. The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill
V. Advice from a Caterpillar
VI. Pig and Pepper
VII. A Mad Tea-Party
VIII. The Queen’s Croquet-Ground
IX. The Mock Turtle’s Story
X. The Lobster-Quadrille
XI. Who Stole the Tarts?
XII. Alice’s Evidence
All in the golden afternoon1
Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars, with little skill,
By little arms are plied,
While little hands make vain pretence
Our wanderings to guide.2
Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour,
Beneath such dreamy weather,
To beg a tale of breath too weak
To stir the tiniest feather!
Yet what can one poor voice avail
Against three tongues together?
Imperious Prima flashes forth
Her edict “to begin it”:
In gentler tones Secunda hopes
“There will be nonsense in it!”
While Tertia interrupts the tale
Not more than once a minute.
Anon, to sudden silence won,
In fancy they pursue
The dream-child moving through a land
Of wonders wild and new,
In friendly chat with bird or beast—
And half believe it true.
And ever, as the story drained
The wells of fancy dry,
And faintly strove that weary one
To put the subject by,
“The rest next time—” “It is next time!”
The happy voices cry.
Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:
Thus slowly, one by one,
Its quaint events were hammered out—
And now the tale is done,
And home we steer, a merry crew,
Beneath the setting sun.
Alice! A childish story take,
And, with a gentle hand,
Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined
In Memory’s mystic band,
Like pilgrim’s wither’d wreath of flowers
Pluck’d in a far-off land.3
1. In these prefatory verses Carroll recalls that “golden afternoon” in 1862 when he and his friend the Reverend Robinson Duckworth (then a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, later canon of Westminster) took the three charming Liddell sisters on a rowing expedition up the Thames. “Prima” was the eldest sister, Lorina Charlotte, age thirteen. Alice Pleasance, age ten, was “Secunda,” and the youngest sister, Edith, age eight, was “Tertia.” Carroll was then thirty. The date was Friday, July 4, “as memorable a day in the history of literature,” W. H. Auden has observed, “as it is in American history.”
The trip was about three miles, beginning at Folly Bridge, near Oxford, and ending at the village of Godstow. “We had tea on the bank there,” Carroll recorded in his diary, “and did not reach Christ Church again till quarter past eight, when we took them on to my rooms to see my collection of micro-photographs, and restored them to the Deanery just before nine.” Seven months later he added to this entry the following note: “On which occasion I told them the fairy-tale of Alice’s adventures underground…”
Twenty-five years later (in his article “Alice on the Stage,” The Theatre, April 1887) Carroll wrote:
Many a day had we rowed together on that quiet stream—the three little maidens and I—and many a fairy tale had been extemporised for their benefit—whether it were at times when the narrator was “i’ the vein,” and fancies unsought came crowding thick upon him, or at times when the jaded Muse was goaded into action, and plodded meekly on, more because she had to say something than that she had something to say—yet none of these many tales got written down: they lived and died, like summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon until there came a day when, as it chanced, one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her. That was many a year ago, but I distinctly remember, now as I write, how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards. And so, to please a child I loved (I don’t remember any other motive), I printed in manuscript, and illustrated with my own crude designs—designs that rebelled against every law of Anatomy or Art (for I had never had a lesson in drawing)—the book which I have just had published in facsimile. In writing it out, I added many fresh ideas, which seemed to grow of themselves upon the original stock; and many more added themselves when, years afterwards, I wrote it all over again for publication…
Stand forth, then, from the shadowy past, “Alice,” the child of my dreams. Full many a year has slipped away, since that “golden afternoon” that gave thee birth, but I can call it up almost as clearly as if it were yesterday—the cloudless blue above, the watery mirror below, the boat drifting idly on its way, the tinkle of the drops that fell from the oars, as they waved so sleepily to and fro, and (the one bright gleam of life in all the slumberous scene) the three eager faces, hungry for news of fairy-land, and who would not be said “nay” to: from whose lips “Tell us a story, please,” had all the stern immutability of Fate!
Alice twice recorded her memories of the occasion. The following lines are quoted by Stuart Collingwood in The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll:
Most of Mr. Dodgson’s stories were told to us on river expeditions to Nuneham or Godstow, near Oxford. My eldest sister, now Mrs. Skene, was “Prima”, I was “Secunda”, and “Tertia” was my sister Edith. I believe the beginning of Alice was told one summer afternoon when the sun was so burning that we had landed in the meadows down the river, deserting the boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found, which was under a new-made hayrick. Here from all three came the old petition of “Tell us a story,” and so began the ever-delightful tale. Sometimes to tease us—and perhaps being really tired—Mr. Dodgson would stop suddenly and say, “And that’s all till next time.” “Ah, but it is next time,” would be the exclamation from all three; and after some persuasion the story would start afresh. Another day, perhaps the story would begin in the boat, and Mr. Dodgson, in the middle of telling a thrilling adventure, would pretend to go fast asleep, to our great dismay.
Alice’s son, Caryl Hargreaves, writing in the Cornhill Magazine (July 1932) quotes his mother as follows:
Nearly all of Alice’s Adventures Underground was told on that blazing summer afternoon with the heat haze shimmering over the meadows where the party landed to shelter for a while in the shadow cast by the haycocks near Godstow. I think the stories he told us that afternoon must have been better than usual, because I have such a distinct recollection of the expedition, and also, on the next day I started to pester him to write down the story for me, which I had never done before. It was due to my “going on, going on” and importunity that, after saying he would think about it, he eventua
lly gave the hesitating promise which started him writing it down at all.
Finally, we have the Reverend Duckworth’s account, to be found in Collingwood’s The Lewis Carroll Picture Book:
I rowed stroke and he rowed bow in the famous Long Vacation voyage to Godstow, when the three Miss Liddells were our passengers, and the story was actually composed and spoken over my shoulder for the benefit of Alice Liddell, who was acting as ‘cox’ of our gig. I remember turning round and saying, “Dodgson, is this an extempore romance of yours?” And he replied, “Yes, I’m inventing as we go along.” I also well remember how, when we had conducted the three children back to the Deanery, Alice said, as she bade us good-night, “Oh, Mr. Dodgson, I wish you would write out Alice’s adventures for me.” He said he should try, and he afterwards told me that he sat up nearly the whole night, committing to a MS. book his recollections of the drolleries with which he had enlivened the afternoon. He added illustrations of his own, and presented the volume, which used often to be seen on the drawing-room table at the Deanery.
It is with sadness I add that when a check was made in 1950 with the London meteorological office (as reported in Helmut Gernsheim’s Lewis Carroll: Photographer) records indicated that the weather near Oxford on July 4, 1862, was “cool and rather wet.”
This was later confirmed by Philip Stewart, of Oxford University’s Department of Forestry. He informed me in a letter that the Astronomical and Meteorological Observations Made at the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford, Vol. 23, gives the weather on July 4 as rain after two P.M., cloud cover 10/10, and maximum shade temperature of 67.9 degrees Fahrenheit. These records support the view that Carroll and Alice confused their memories of the occasion with similar boating trips made on sunnier days.
The Annotated Alice Page 3