“The first thing I’ve got to do,” said Alice to herself, as she wandered about in the wood, “is to grow to my right size again; and the second thing is to find my way into that lovely garden. I think that will be the best plan.”
It sounded an excellent plan, no doubt, and very neatly and simply arranged: the only difficulty was, that she had not the smallest idea how to set about it; and, while she was peering about anxiously among the trees, a little sharp bark just over her head made her look up in a great hurry.
An enormous puppy was looking down at her with large round eyes, and feebly stretching out one paw, trying to touch her.9 “Poor little thing!” said Alice, in a coaxing tone, and she tried hard to whistle to it; but she was terribly frightened all the time at the thought that it might be hungry, in which case it would be very likely to eat her up in spite of all her coaxing.
Hardly knowing what she did, she picked up a little bit of stick, and held it out to the puppy: whereupon the puppy jumped into the air off all its feet at once, with a yelp of delight, and rushed at the stick, and made believe to worry it: then Alice dodged behind a great thistle, to keep herself from being run over; and, the moment she appeared on the other side, the puppy made another rush at the stick, and tumbled head over heels in its hurry to get hold of it: then Alice, thinking it was very like having a game of play with a cart-horse, and expecting every moment to be trampled under its feet, ran round the thistle again: then the puppy began a series of short charges at the stick, running a very little way forwards each time and a long way back, and barking hoarsely all the while, till at last it sat down a good way off, panting, with its tongue hanging out of its mouth, and its great eyes half shut.
This seemed to Alice a good opportunity for making her escape: so she set off at once, and ran till she was quite tired and out of breath, and till the puppy’s bark sounded quite faint in the distance.
“And yet what a dear little puppy it was!” said Alice, as she leant against a buttercup to rest herself, and fanned herself with one of the leaves. “I should have liked teaching it tricks very much, if—if I’d only been the right size to do it! Oh dear! I’d nearly forgotten that I’ve got to grow up again! Let me see—how is it to be managed? I suppose I ought to eat or drink something or other; but the great question is ‘What?’”
The great question certainly was “What?” Alice looked all round her at the flowers and the blades of grass, but she could not see anything that looked like the right thing to eat or drink under the circumstances. There was a large mushroom growing near her, about the same height as herself; and, when she had looked under it, and on both sides of it, and behind it, it occurred to her that she might as well look and see what was on the top of it.
She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the mushroom, and her eyes immediately met those of a large blue caterpillar, that was sitting on the top, with its arms folded, quietly smoking a long hookah, and taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else.
1. In Alice’s Adventures Under Ground the White Rabbit exclaims: “The Marchioness! The Marchioness! oh my dear paws! oh my fur and whiskers! She’ll have me executed as sure as ferrets are ferrets!” There is no Duchess in this first version of the story; we later learn from the White Rabbit: “The Queen’s the Marchioness: didn’t you know that?” And he adds: “Queen of Hearts and Marchioness of Mock Turtles.”
We learn in the Pig and Pepper chapter that the White Rabbit’s fear is justified, because the Duchess shouts at Alice, “Talking of axes, chop off her head!” Selwyn Goodacre thinks it out of character for a duchess to order executions. He suggests that Carroll introduced the Duchess’s remark in an effort to harmonize the story with the White Rabbit’s exclamation in the earlier version.
Ferrets are a semidomesticated variety of the English polecat, used mainly for hunting rabbits and mice. They are usually yellowish white, with pink eyes. The White Rabbit had good reason to refer to ferrets in his fear of being “executed.” Here is a passage from Oliver Goldsmith’s section on “The Ferret” in his History of the Earth and Animated Nature:
It is naturally such an enemy of the rabbit kind, that if a dead rabbit be presented to a young ferret, although it has never seen one before, it instantly attacks and bites it with an appearance of rapacity. If the rabbit be living, the ferret is still more eager, seizes it by the neck, winds itself round it, and continues to suck its blood, till it be satiated.
In addition to the use of ferret as a verb, the word was colloquially applied in England to thieving moneylenders. According to Peter Heath’s note in The Philosopher’s Alice (St. Martin’s, 1974), the phrase “as sure as ferrets are ferrets” was current in Carroll’s day. Heath cites its use in one of Anthony Trollope’s novels.
As Carroll notes in his Nursery “Alice,” Tenniel drew a ferret among the twelve jurors for the trial of the Knave of Hearts.
Owning a ferret in New York City, which is said to have ten thousand ferrets, is a health code violation. An Associated Press story (September 18, 1983) reported the formation of the New York City Friends of the Ferret, a group seeking to lift the city’s injunction. Spokesmen for the group contended that ferrets “give you love and affection…know their names and can do tricks.” During the previous summer the group held a “ferret festival” in Central Park. It was attended by two hundred people who brought along about seventy-five ferrets.
The New York Times (June 25, 1995) reported the founding of Modern Ferret, a glossy magazine devoted to praise of ferrets, published by Eric and Mary Shefferman of Massapequa Park, New York.
2. According to Roger Green, Mary Ann was at the time a British euphemism for “servant girl.” Dodgson’s friend Mrs. Julia Cameron, a passionate amateur photographer, actually had a fifteen-year-old housemaid named Mary Anne, and there is a photograph of her in Anne Clark’s biography of Carroll to prove it. Mary Anne Paragon was the dishonest servant who took care of David Copperfield’s house (see Chapter 44 of the Dickens novel). Her nature, we are told, was “feebly expressed” by her last name.
Slang dictionaries give other meanings to Mary Ann that were current in Carroll’s day. A dressmaker’s dress stand was called a Mary Ann. Later the name became attached to women, especially in Sheffield, who attacked sweatshop owners. Still later it became a vulgar term for sodomites.
Before the French Revolution Mary Anne was a generic term for secret republican organizations, as well as a slang term for the guillotine. Marianne became and still is a mythic female symbol of republican virtues, a French symbol comparable to England’s John Bull and our Uncle Sam. She is traditionally depicted, in political cartoons and statuettes, as wearing the red Phrygian, or liberty, bonnet worn by republicans in the French Revolution. It is probably coincidental that Carroll’s use of the name anticipates the obsession with beheading shared by the Duchess and the Queen of Hearts.
3. Note how the White Rabbit’s angry ordering about of his servants, here and elsewhere in the chapter, is in keeping with his timid character as described by Carroll in the passage quoted in Note 2 of Chapter 2.
4. Going messages is a phrase still used in England. It means “running errands.”
5. In the Pennyroyal edition of Alice in Wonderland (University of California, 1982), James Kincaid glosses Alice’s remark this way:
This is a double-edged line and perhaps a poignant one, given Carroll’s feelings about his child-friends growing up. [His] letters are full of self-pitying jokes on the subject: “Some children have a most disagreeable way of getting grown-up. I hope you won’t do anything of that sort before we meet again.”
In his “Confessions of a Corrupt Annotator” (Jabberwocky, Spring 1982), Kincaid defends the right of annotators to take off in any direction they like. He cites the above note as an example. “The historical context does not call for a gloss, but the passage provides an opportunity to point out the ambivalence that may attend the central figure and her desire to grow up.” I tha
nk Mr. Kincaid for supporting my own rambling.
6. This is the second time the White Rabbit has called for his gloves, but whether he ever obtained them we are not told. Gloves were as important to Carroll as they were to the Rabbit, both in reality and linguistically. “He was a little eccentric in his clothes,” Isa Bowman writes in The Story of Lewis Carroll (J. M. Dent, 1899). “In the coldest weather he would never wear an overcoat, and he had a curious habit of always wearing, in all seasons of the year, a pair of grey and black cotton gloves.”
Gloves are the topic of one of Carroll’s most amusing letters, written to Isa Bowman’s sister Maggie. Carroll pretended that when Maggie spoke of sending him “sacks full of love and baskets full of kisses,” she really meant to write “a sack full of gloves and a basket full of kittens!” A sack full of 1,000 gloves arrived, he goes on, and a basket of 250 kittens. He was thus able to put four gloves on each kitten to prevent their paws from scratching the schoolgirls to whom he gave the kittens:
So the little girls went dancing home again, and the next morning they came dancing back to school. The scratches were all healed, and they told me “The kittens have been good!” And, when any kitten wants to catch a mouse, it just takes off one of its gloves; and if it wants to catch two mice, it takes off two gloves; and if it wants to catch three mice, it takes off three gloves; and if it wants to catch four mice, it takes off all its gloves. But the moment they’ve caught the mice, they pop their gloves on again, because they know we can’t love them without their gloves. For, you see, “gloves” have got “love” inside them—there’s none outside.
7. A cucumber frame is a glass frame that provides heat for growing cucumbers by trapping solar radiation.
Carrollians have noticed that in Tenniel’s illustration of this scene the White Rabbit’s vest, white in an earlier picture, has become checked like his jacket.
8. Is this another French joke? As reader Michael Bergmann points out in a letter, “apple” is pomme in French, and “potato” is pomme de terre, or “apple of the earth.” No, it is an Irish joke. Pat is an Irish name and he speaks in an Irish brogue. As Everett Bleiler informs me, Irish apples was a nineteenth-century slang term for Irish potatoes.
What kind of animal is Pat, the apple digger? Carroll doesn’t say. Denis Crutch and R. B. Shaberman, in Under the Quizzing Glass, conjecture that Pat is one of the two guinea pigs who revive Bill after he has been kicked out of the chimney. During the trial of the Knave of Hearts both guinea pigs are in the courtroom, where they are “suppressed” for cheering.
9. Many commentators have felt that this puppy is out of place in Wonderland, as if it had wandered into Alice’s dream from the real world. Denis Crutch has observed that it is the only important creature in Wonderland who does not speak to Alice.
Chapter V
Advice from a
Caterpillar
The Caterpillar1 and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”
“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar, sternly. “Explain yourself!”
“I ca’n’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”
“I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar.
“I’m afraid I ca’n’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied, very politely, “for I ca’n’t understand it myself, to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.”
“It isn’t,” said the Caterpillar.
“Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,” said Alice; “but when you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, wo’n’t you?”
“Not a bit,” said the Caterpillar.
“Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,” said Alice: “all I know is, it would feel very queer to me.”
“You!” said the Caterpillar contemptuously. “Who are you?”2
Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation. Alice felt a little irritated at the Caterpillar’s making such very short remarks, and she drew herself up and said, very gravely, “I think you ought to tell me who you are, first.”
“Why?” said the Caterpillar.
Here was another puzzling question; and, as Alice could not think of any good reason, and the Caterpillar seemed to be in a very unpleasant state of mind, she turned away.
“Come back!” the Caterpillar called after her. “I’ve something important to say!”
This sounded promising, certainly. Alice turned and came back again.
“Keep your temper,” said the Caterpillar.
“Is that all?” said Alice, swallowing down her anger as well as she could.
“No,” said the Caterpillar.
Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hearing. For some minutes it puffed away without speaking; but at last it unfolded its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said “So you think you’re changed, do you?”
“I’m afraid I am, Sir,” said Alice. “I ca’n’t remember things as I used—and I don’t keep the same size for ten minutes together!”
“Ca’n’t remember what things?” said the Caterpillar.
“Well, I’ve tried to say ‘How doth the little busy bee,’ but it all came different!” Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.
“Repeat ‘You are old, Father William,’” said the Caterpillar.
Alice folded her hands,3 and began:—
“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”
“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son,
“I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.”
“You are old,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—
Pray, what is the reason of that?”
“In my youth,” said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
“I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment—one shilling the box—4
Allow me to sell you a couple?”
“You are old,” said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—
Pray, how did you manage to do it?”
“In my youth,” said his father, “I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw
Has lasted the rest of my life.”
“You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—5
What made you so awfully clever?”
“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”
Said his father. “Don’t give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I’ll kick you down-stairs!”
“That is not said right,” said the Caterpillar.
“Not quite right, I’m afraid,” said Alice, timidly: “some of the words have got altered.”
&
nbsp; “It is wrong from beginning to end,” said the Caterpillar, decidedly; and there was silence for some minutes.
The Caterpillar was the first to speak.
“What size do you want to be?” it asked.
“Oh, I’m not particular as to size,” Alice hastily replied; “only one doesn’t like changing so often, you know.”
“I don’t know,” said the Caterpillar.
Alice said nothing: she had never been so much contradicted in all her life before, and she felt that she was losing her temper.
“Are you content now?” said the Caterpillar.
“Well, I should like to be a little larger, Sir, if you wouldn’t mind,” said Alice: “three inches is such a wretched height to be.”
“It is a very good height indeed!” said the Caterpillar angrily, rearing itself upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high).
“But I’m not used to it!” pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And she thought to herself “I wish the creatures wouldn’t be so easily offended!”
“You’ll get used to it in time,” said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth, and began smoking again.
This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again. In a minute or two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away into the grass, merely remarking, as it went, “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.”6
“One side of what? The other side of what?” thought Alice to herself.
“Of the mushroom,” said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud;7 and in another moment it was out of sight.
The Annotated Alice Page 8