Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to make out which were the two sides of it; and, as it was perfectly round, she found this a very difficult question. However, at last she stretched her arms round it as far as they would go, and broke off a bit of the edge with each hand.
“And now which is which?” she said to herself, and nibbled a little of the right-hand bit to try the effect. The next moment she felt a violent blow underneath her chin: it had struck her foot!
She was a good deal frightened by this very sudden change, but she felt that there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly: so she set to work at once to eat some of the other bit. Her chin was pressed so closely against her foot, that there was hardly room to open her mouth; but she did it at last, and managed to swallow a morsel of the left-hand bit.
* * * *
* * *
* * * *
“Come, my head’s free at last!” said Alice in a tone of delight, which changed into alarm in another moment, when she found that her shoulders were nowhere to be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a sea of green leaves that lay far below her.
“What can all that green stuff be?” said Alice. “And where have my shoulders got to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I ca’n’t see you?” She was moving them about, as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow, except a little shaking among the distant green leaves.
As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was going to dive in among the leaves, which she found to be nothing but the tops of the trees under which she had been wandering, when a sharp hiss made her draw back in a hurry: a large pigeon had flown into her face, and was beating her violently with its wings.
“Serpent!” screamed the Pigeon.
“I’m not a serpent!” said Alice indignantly. “Let me alone!”
“Serpent, I say again!” repeated the Pigeon, but in a more subdued tone, and added, with a kind of sob, “I’ve tried every way, but nothing seems to suit them!”
“I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about,” said Alice.
“I’ve tried the roots of trees, and I’ve tried banks, and I’ve tried hedges,” the Pigeon went on, without attending to her; “but those serpents! There’s no pleasing them!”
Alice was more and more puzzled, but she thought there was no use in saying anything more till the Pigeon had finished.
“As if it wasn’t trouble enough hatching the eggs,” said the Pigeon; “but I must be on the look-out for serpents, night and day! Why, I haven’t had a wink of sleep these three weeks!”
“I’m very sorry you’ve been annoyed,” said Alice, who was beginning to see its meaning.
“And just as I’d taken the highest tree in the wood,” continued the Pigeon, raising its voice to a shriek, “and just as I was thinking I should be free of them at last, they must needs come wriggling down from the sky! Ugh, Serpent!”
“But I’m not a serpent, I tell you!” said Alice. “I’m a—I’m a—”
“Well! What are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see you’re trying to invent something!”
“I—I’m a little girl,” said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through, that day.
“A likely story indeed!” said the Pigeon, in a tone of the deepest contempt. “I’ve seen a good many little girls in my time, but never one with such a neck as that! No, no! You’re a serpent; and there’s no use denying it. I suppose you’ll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!”
“I have tasted eggs, certainly,” said Alice, who was a very truthful child; “but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.”
“I don’t believe it,” said the Pigeon; “but if they do, why, then they’re a kind of serpent: that’s all I can say.”
This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent for a minute or two, which gave the Pigeon the opportunity of adding “You’re looking for eggs, I know that well enough; and what does it matter to me whether you’re a little girl or a serpent?”
“It matters a good deal to me,” said Alice hastily; “but I’m not looking for eggs, as it happens; and, if I was, I shouldn’t want yours: I don’t like them raw.”
“Well, be off, then!” said the Pigeon in a sulky tone, as it settled down again into its nest. Alice crouched down among the trees as well as she could, for her neck kept getting entangled among the branches, and every now and then she had to stop and untwist it. After a while she remembered that she still held the pieces of mushroom in her hands, and she set to work very carefully, nibbling first at one and then at the other, and growing sometimes taller, and sometimes shorter, until she had succeeded in bringing herself down to her usual height.
It was so long since she had been anything near the right size, that it felt quite strange at first; but she got used to it in a few minutes, and began talking to herself, as usual, “Come, there’s half my plan done now! How puzzling all these changes are! I’m never sure what I’m going to be, from one minute to another! However, I’ve got back to my right size: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful garden—how is that to be done, I wonder?” As she said this, she came suddenly upon an open place, with a little house in it about four feet high. “Whoever lives there,” thought Alice, “it’ll never do to come upon them this size: why, I should frighten them out of their wits!” So she began nibbling at the right-hand bit again, and did not venture to go near the house till she had brought herself down to nine inches high.
1. In The Nursery “Alice,” Carroll calls attention to the Caterpillar’s nose and chin in Tenniel’s drawing and explains that they are really two of its legs. Ned Sparks took the role of the Caterpillar in Paramount’s 1933 movie production of Alice, and Richard Haydn supplied the Caterpillar’s voice in Walt Disney’s 1951 animation of the tale. One of the most striking visual effects in the Disney film was obtained by having the Caterpillar illustrate his words by blowing multicolored smoke rings that assumed the shapes of letters and objects.
2. Fred Madden, in Jabberwocky (Summer/Autumn 1988), calls attention to a chapter titled “Popular Follies of Great Cities,” in Charles Mackay’s classic work, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841). Mackay tells of various catch phrases which sprang up suddenly in London. One such phrase was “Who are you,” spoken with emphasis on the first and last words. It appeared suddenly, “like a mushroom…One day it was unheard, unknown, uninvented; the next day it pervaded London…Every new comer into an alehouse tap room was asked unceremoniously ‘Who are you?’”
In “Who Are You: A Reply” (Jabberwocky, Winter/Spring 1990), John Clark points out that Carroll owned Mackay’s book and probably heard the question shouted at him when it was a short-lived London rage. Did he have this craze in mind when he had his blue Caterpillar, sitting on a mushroom, ask Alice, “Who are you?” It certainly seems possible. I first learned about the Mackay reference in a letter from Teller, of the Penn and Teller comedy/magic team.
3. Selwyn Goodacre (in Jabberwocky, Spring 1982) has an interesting comment on Alice’s folded hands here, and her crossed hands in Chapter 2 (“as if she were saying lessons”) when she repeated “How doth the little crocodile…”:
I discussed these passages with a retired primary school headmaster…and he confirmed to me that that is exactly how children were taught—i.e., they had to repeat their lessons (note that the word is not “recite”—that refers to house parties and home entertainment), this means learning by rote; she would have been expected to know the lessons by heart—and to cross her hands if sitting, to fold them if standing, both systems intended to concentrate the mind and prevent fidgeting.
>
“You are old, father William,” one of the undisputed masterpieces of nonsense verse, is a clever parody of Robert Southey’s (1774–1843) long-forgotten didactic poem, “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them.”
“You are old, father William,” the young man cried,
“The few locks which are left you are grey;
You are hale, father William, a hearty old man;
Now tell me the reason, I pray.”
“In the days of my youth,” father William replied,
“I remember’d that youth would fly fast,
And abus’d not my health and my vigour at first,
That I never might need them at last.”
“You are old, father William,” the young man cried,
“And pleasures with youth pass away.
And yet you lament not the days that are gone;
Now tell me the reason, I pray.”
“In the days of my youth,” father William replied,
“I remember’d that youth could not last;
I thought of the future, whatever I did,
That I never might grieve for the past.”
“You are old, father William,” the young man cried,
“And life must be hast’ning away;
You are cheerful and love to converse upon death;
Now tell me the reason, I pray.”
“I am cheerful, young man,” father William replied,
“Let the cause thy attention engage;
In the days of my youth I remember’d my God!
And He hath not forgotten my age.”
Although Southey had an enormous literary output of both prose and poetry, he is little read today except for a few short poems such as “The Inchcape Rock” and “The Battle of Blenheim,” and for his version of the immortal folktale about Goldilocks and the three bears.
4. In the original version of this poem, in Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the price of the ointment is five shillings.
5. In Tenniel’s illustration for this line you see in the background what looks like a bridge. Philip Benham, writing in Jabberwocky (Winter 1970), says: “The ‘bridge’ is in fact an eel trap, built across a stream or river, and consists of a barrier of conical baskets woven out of rushes or sometimes willow.”
Robert Wakeman adds that one made of iron still exists near Guildford. “A small hole at the end of each basket enables the eels to escape into a separate pond, while other types of fish are unable to go through the holes.” For more details and other pictures of eel traps, see Michael Hancher’s The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books (Ohio State University Press, 1985).
6. In Alice’s Adventures Under Ground the Caterpillar tells Alice that the top of the mushroom will make her grow taller and the stalk will make her grow shorter.
Many readers have referred me to old books, which Carroll could have read, that describe the hallucinogenic properties of certain mushrooms. Amanita muscaria (or fly agaric) is most often cited. Eating it produces hallucinations in which time and space are distorted. However, as Robert Hornback makes clear in his delightful “Garden Tour of Wonderland,” in Pacific Horticulture (Fall 1983), this cannot be the mushroom drawn by Tenniel:
Amanita muscaria has bright red caps that appear to be splattered with bits of cottage cheese. The Caterpillar’s perch is, instead, a smooth-capped species, very like Amanita fulva, which is nontoxic and rather tasty. We might surmise that neither Tenniel nor Carroll wanted children to emulate Alice and end up eating poisonous mushrooms.
7. The Caterpillar has read Alice’s mind. Carroll did not believe in spiritualism, but he did believe in the reality of ESP and psychokinesis. In an 1882 letter (see Morton Cohen’s The Letters of Lewis Carroll, Vol. 1, pages 471–72) he speaks of a pamphlet on “thought reading,” published by the Society for Psychical Research, which strengthened his conviction that psychic phenomena are genuine. “All seems to point to the existence of a natural force, allied to electricity and nerve-force, by which brain can act on brain. I think we are close on the day when this shall be classed among the known natural forces, and its laws tabulated, and when the scientific sceptics, who always shut their eyes till the last moment to any evidence that seems to point beyond materialism, will have to accept it as a proved fact in nature.”
Carroll was an enthusiastic charter member all his life of the Society for Psychical Research, and his library contained dozens of books on the occult. See “Lewis Carroll and the Society for Psychical Research,” by R. B. Shaberman, in Jabberwocky (Summer 1972).
Chapter VI
Pig and Pepper
For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and wondering what to do next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood—(she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a fish)—and rapped loudly at the door with his knuckles. It was opened by another footman in livery, with a round face, and large eyes like a frog; and both footmen, Alice noticed, had powdered hair that curled all over their heads. She felt very curious to know what it was all about, and crept a little way out of the wood to listen.
The Fish-Footman began by producing from under his arm a great letter, nearly as large as himself, and this he handed over to the other, saying, in a solemn tone, “For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.” The Frog-Footman repeated, in the same solemn tone, only changing the order of the words a little, “From the Queen. An invitation for the Duchess to play croquet.”
Then they both bowed low, and their curls got entangled together.
Alice laughed so much at this, that she had to run back into the wood for fear of their hearing her; and, when she next peeped out, the Fish-Footman was gone, and the other was sitting on the ground near the door, staring stupidly up into the sky.
Alice went timidly up to the door, and knocked.
“There’s no sort of use in knocking,” said the Footman, “and that for two reasons. First, because I’m on the same side of the door as you are: secondly, because they’re making such a noise inside, no one could possibly hear you.” And certainly there was a most extraordinary noise going on within—a constant howling and sneezing, and every now and then a great crash, as if a dish or kettle had been broken to pieces.
“Please, then,” said Alice, “how am I to get in?”
“There might be some sense in your knocking,” the Footman went on, without attending to her, “if we had the door between us. For instance, if you were inside, you might knock, and I could let you out, you know.” He was looking up into the sky all the time he was speaking, and this Alice thought decidedly uncivil. “But perhaps he ca’n’t help it,” she said to herself; “his eyes are so very nearly at the top of his head. But at any rate he might answer questions.—How am I to get in?” she repeated, aloud.
“I shall sit here,” the Footman remarked, “till to-morrow—”
At this moment the door of the house opened, and a large plate came skimming out, straight at the Footman’s head: it just grazed his nose, and broke to pieces against one of the trees behind him.
“—or next day, maybe,” the Footman continued in the same tone, exactly as if nothing had happened.
“How am I to get in?” asked Alice again, in a louder tone.
“Are you to get in at all?” said the Footman. “That’s the first question, you know.”
It was, no doubt: only Alice did not like to be told so. “It’s really dreadful,” she muttered to herself, “the way all the creatures argue. It’s enough to drive one crazy!”
The Footman seemed to think this a good opportunity for repeating his remark, with variations. “I shall sit here,” he said, “on and off, for days and days.”
“But what am I to do?” said Alice.
“Anything you like,” said the Footman, and began whistling.
“Oh, there’s no use in talking to him,” said Alice desperately: “he�
�s perfectly idiotic!” And she opened the door and went in.
The door led right into a large kitchen, which was full of smoke from one end to the other: the Duchess1 was sitting on a three-legged stool in the middle, nursing a baby: the cook was leaning over the fire, stirring a large cauldron which seemed to be full of soup.
“There’s certainly too much pepper in that soup!”2 Alice said to herself, as well as she could for sneezing.
There was certainly too much of it in the air. Even the Duchess sneezed occasionally; and as for the baby, it was sneezing and howling alternately without a moment’s pause. The only two creatures in the kitchen, that did not sneeze, were the cook, and a large cat, which was lying on the hearth and grinning from ear to ear.
“Please would you tell me,” said Alice, a little timidly, for she was not quite sure whether it was good manners for her to speak first, “why your cat grins like that?”
“It’s a Cheshire-Cat,”3 said the Duchess, “and that’s why. Pig!”
She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped; but she saw in another moment that it was addressed to the baby, and not to her, so she took courage, and went on again:—
“I didn’t know that Cheshire-Cats always grinned; in fact, I didn’t know that cats could grin.”
“They all can,” said the Duchess; “and most of ’em do.”
“I don’t know of any that do,” Alice said very politely, feeling quite pleased to have got into a conversation.
“You don’t know much,” said the Duchess; “and that’s a fact.”
Alice did not at all like the tone of this remark, and thought it would be as well to introduce some other subject of conversation. While she was trying to fix on one, the cook took the cauldron of soup off the fire, and at once set to work throwing everything within her reach at the Duchess and the baby—the fire-irons came first; then followed a shower of saucepans, plates, and dishes. The Duchess took no notice of them even when they hit her; and the baby was howling so much already, that it was quite impossible to say whether the blows hurt it or not.
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