“Oh, please mind what you’re doing!” cried Alice, jumping up and down in an agony of terror. “Oh, there goes his precious nose!”, as an unusually large saucepan flew close by it, and very nearly carried it off.
“If everybody minded their own business,” the Duchess said, in a hoarse growl, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”
“Which would not be an advantage,” said Alice, who felt very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge. “Just think what work it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis—”
“Talking of axes,” said the Duchess, “chop off her head!”
Alice glanced rather anxiously at the cook, to see if she meant to take the hint; but the cook was busily stirring the soup, and seemed not to be listening, so she went on again: “Twenty-four hours, I think; or is it twelve? I—”
“Oh, don’t bother me!” said the Duchess. “I never could abide figures!” And with that she began nursing her child again, singing a sort of lullaby to it as she did so, and giving it a violent shake at the end of every line:—4
“Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.”
CHORUS
(in which the cook and the baby joined):—
“Wow! wow! wow!”
While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing the baby violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so, that Alice could hardly hear the words:—
“I speak severely to my boy,
I beat him when he sneezes;
For he can thoroughly enjoy
The pepper when he pleases!”
CHORUS
“Wow! wow! wow!”
“Here! You may nurse it a bit, if you like!” the Duchess said to Alice, flinging the baby at her as she spoke. “I must go and get ready to play croquet with the Queen,” and she hurried out of the room. The cook threw a frying-pan after her as she went, but it just missed her.
Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, “just like a star-fish,” thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it.
As soon as she had made out the proper way of nursing it (which was to twist it up into a sort of knot, and then keep tight hold of its right ear and left foot, so as to prevent its undoing itself), she carried it out into the open air. “If I don’t take this child away with me,” thought Alice, “they’re sure to kill it in a day or two. Wouldn’t it be murder to leave it behind?” She said the last words out loud, and the little thing grunted in reply (it had left off sneezing by this time). “Don’t grunt,” said Alice; “that’s not at all a proper way of expressing yourself.”
The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see what was the matter with it. There could be no doubt that it had a very turn-up nose, much more like a snout than a real nose: also its eyes were getting extremely small for a baby: altogether Alice did not like the look of the thing at all. “But perhaps it was only sobbing,” she thought, and looked into its eyes again, to see if there were any tears.
No, there were no tears. “If you’re going to turn into a pig, my dear,” said Alice, seriously, “I’ll have nothing more to do with you. Mind now!” The poor little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible to say which), and they went on for some while in silence.
Alice was just beginning to think to herself, “Now, what am I to do with this creature, when I get it home?” when it grunted again, so violently, that she looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be no mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be quite absurd for her to carry it any further.5
So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood. “If it had grown up,” she said to herself, “it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.” And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs, and was just saying to herself “if one only knew the right way to change them—” when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire-Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.6
The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.
“Cheshire-Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. “Come, it’s pleased so far,” thought Alice, and she went on. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.7
“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. “What sort of people live about here?”
“In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”8
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you ca’n’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”9
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Alice didn’t think that proved it at all: however, she went on: “And how do you know that you’re mad?”
“To begin with,” said the Cat, “a dog’s not mad. You grant that?”
“I suppose so,” said Alice.
“Well, then,” the Cat went on, “you see a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.”
“I call it purring, not growling,” said Alice.
“Call it what you like,” said the Cat. “Do you play croquet with the Queen to-day?”
“I should like it very much,” said Alice, “but I haven’t been invited yet.”
“You’ll see me there,” said the Cat, and vanished.
Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so well used to queer things happening. While she was still looking at the place where it had been, it suddenly appeared again.
“By-the-bye, what became of the baby?” said the Cat. “I’d nearly forgotten to ask.”
“It turned into a pig,” Alice answered very quietly, just as if the Cat had come back in a natural way.
“I thought it would,” said the Cat, and vanished again.
Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it did not appear, and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in which the March Hare was said to live. “I’ve seen hatters before,” she said to herself: “the March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps, as this is May, it wo’n’t be raving mad—at least not so mad as it was in March.” As she said this, she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on a branch of a tree.10
“Did you say ‘pig’, or ‘fig’?” said the Cat.
“I said ‘pig’,” replied Alice; “and I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy!”
“All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the
end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.
“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!”11
She had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house of the March Hare: she thought it must be the right house, because the chimneys were shaped like ears and the roof was thatched with fur. It was so large a house, that she did not like to go nearer till she had nibbled some more of the left-hand bit of mushroom, and raised herself to about two feet high: even then she walked up towards it rather timidly, saying to herself “Suppose it should be raving mad after all! I almost wish I’d gone to see the Hatter instead!”
1. Not until Chapter 9, when Alice and the Duchess meet again, are we told that Alice tried to keep her distance from the Duchess because she “was very ugly,” and because the Duchess kept prodding her shoulder with her “sharp little chin.” The sharp chin is mentioned two more times in this episode. The whereabouts of the Duke, if living, is left in mystery.
The chin of Tenniel’s Duchess is not very little or sharp, but she is certainly ugly. It seems likely that he copied a painting attributed to the sixteenth-century Flemish artist Quentin Matsys (his name has variant spellings). The portrait is popularly regarded as one of the fourteenth-century duchess Margaret of Carinthia and Tyrol. She had the reputation of being the ugliest woman in history. (Her nickname, “Maultasche,” means “pocket-mouthed.”) Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel The Ugly Duchess is about her sad life. See also “A Portrait of the Ugliest Princess in History,” by W. A. Baillie-Grohman, Burlington Magazine (April 1921).
On the other hand, there are numerous engravings and drawings almost identical with Matsys’s painting, including a drawing by Francesco Melzi, a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci. Part of the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace, it is said to be a copy of a lost original by da Vinci! For the confusing history of these pictures, which may have no connection whatever with Duchess Margaret, see Chapter 4 of Michael Hancher’s, The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books.
QUENTIN MATSYS’S PAINTING OF THE
“UGLY DUCHESS.”
(National Gallery, London)
2. The pepper in the soup and in the air suggests the peppery ill temper of the Duchess. Was it the custom in Victorian England for lower classes to put excessive pepper in their soup to mask the taste of slightly spoiled meat and vegetables?
For Savile Clarke’s stage production of Alice, Carroll provided the following lines to be spoken by the cook while she stirs the soup: “There’s nothing like pepper, says I…Not half enough yet. Nor a quarter enough.” The cook then recites, like a witch chanting a charm:
Boil it so easily,
Mix it so greasily,
Stir it so sneezily,
One! Two!! Three!!!
“One for the Missus, two for the cat, and three for the baby,” the cook continues, striking the baby’s nose.
I quote from Charles C. Lovett’s valuable book Alice on Stage: A History of the Early Theatrical Productions of Alice in Wonderland (Meckler, 1990). The lines appeared both in the stage production and in the script’s published version.
3. “Grin like a Cheshire cat” was a common phrase in Carroll’s day. Its origin is not known. The two leading theories are: (1) A sign painter in Cheshire (the county, by the way, where Carroll was born) painted grinning lions on the signboards of inns in the area (see Notes and Queries, No. 130, April 24, 1852, page 402); (2) Cheshire cheeses were at one time molded in the shape of a grinning cat (see Notes and Queries, No. 55, Nov. 16, 1850, page 412). “This has a peculiar Carrollian appeal,” writes Dr. Phyllis Greenacre in her psychoanalytic study of Carroll, “as it provokes the fantasy that the cheesy cat may eat the rat that would eat the cheese.” The Cheshire Cat is not in the original manuscript, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.
David Greene sent me this quotation from an 1808 letter of Charles Lamb: “I made a pun the other day, and palmed it upon Holcroft, who grinned like a Cheshire cat. Why do cats grin in Cheshire? Because it was once a county palatine and the cats cannot help laughing whenever they think of it, though I see no great joke in it.”
Hans Haverman wrote to suggest that Carroll’s vanishing cat might derive from the waning of the moon—the moon has long been associated with lunacy—as it slowly turns into a fingernail crescent, resembling a grin, before it finally disappears.
Did T. S. Eliot have the Cheshire Cat in mind when he concluded “Morning at the Window” with this couplet?
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.
For more on the grin, see “The Cheshire-Cat and Its Origins,” by Ken Oultram, in Jabberwocky (Winter 1973).
A 1989 pamphlet published in Japan, Lewis Carroll and His World—Cheshire Cat, by Katsuko Kasai, quotes the following lines from Thackeray’s novel Newcomes (1855): “That woman grins like a Cheshire cat…Who was the naturalist who first discovered that peculiarity of the cats in Cheshire?” Kasai also quotes from Captain Gosse’s A Dictionary of the Buckish Slang, University Wit and Pickpocket Eloquence (1811): “He grins like a Cheshire cat; said of any one who shews his teeth and gums in laughing.” Other quotes and various theories about the phrase’s origin are discussed by Kasai. In a 1995 letter to me, Kasai makes an interesting conjecture. We know that Cheshire cheese was once sold in the shape of a grinning cat. One would tend to slice off the cheese at the cat’s tail end until finally only the grinning head would remain on the plate.
Knight Letter, the official organ of The Lewis Carroll Society of North America, published Joel Birenbaum’s article (Summer 1992), “Have We Finally Found the Cheshire Cat?” Birenbaum reports on his tour of St. Peter’s Church, in Croft-on-Tees, where Carroll’s father was rector. On the chancel’s east wall he noticed a stone carving of a cat’s head, floating in the air a few feet above the floor. When he got on his knees for closer inspection and looked up, the cat’s mouth appeared as a broad grin. His discovery made the front page of the Chicago Tribune (July 13, 1992).
Whoopi Goldberg was the Cheshire Cat in NBC’s undistinguished, boring television version of Alice in Wonderland that aired on February 28, 1999.
4. The original of this burlesque is “Speak Gently,” a happily unremembered poem attributed by some authorities to one G. W. Langford and by other authorities to David Bates, a Philadelphia broker.
John M. Shaw, in The Parodies of Lewis Carroll and their Originals (the catalog and notes of an exhibition at the Florida State University Library, December 1960) reports that he was unsuccessful in his search for Langford’s version; in fact he failed to find Langford himself. Shaw did find the poem on page 15 of The Eolian, a book of verse published by Bates in 1849. Shaw points out that Bates’s son, in a preface to his father’s Poetical Works (1870) states that his father had indeed written this widely quoted poem.
Speak gently! It is better far
To rule by love than fear;
Speak gently; let no harsh words mar
The good we might do here!
Speak gently! Love doth whisper low
The vows that true hearts bind;
And gently Friendship’s accents flow;
Affection’s voice is kind.
Speak gently to the little child!
Its love be sure to gain;
Teach it in accents soft and mild;
It may not long remain.
Speak gently to the young, for they
Will have enough to bear;
Pass through this life as best they may,
’Tis full of anxious care!
Speak gently to the aged one,
Grieve not the care-worn heart;
Whose sands of life are nearly run,
Let such in peace depart!
Speak gently, kindly, to the poor;
Let no harsh tone be heard;
They hav
e enough they must endure,
Without an unkind word!
Speak gently to the erring; know
They may have toiled in vain;
Perchance unkindness made them so;
Oh, win them back again!
Speak gently! He who gave his life
To bend man’s stubborn will,
When elements were in fierce strife,
Said to them, “Peace, be still.”
Speak gently! ’tis a little thing
Dropped in the heart’s deep well;
The good, the joy, that it may bring,
Eternity shall tell.
The Langford family tradition is that George wrote the poem while visiting his birthplace in Ireland in 1845. All British printings of the poem prior to 1900 are either anonymous or credited to Langford. No known printing of the poem in England predates 1848.
Bates’s case was strongly boosted by the discovery in 1986 that the poem, signed “D.B.,” appeared on the second page of the Philadelphia Inquirer, July 15, 1845. Unless an earlier printing can be found in a British or Irish newspaper, it seems highly improbable that Langford could have written it, although a capital mystery remains. How did his name become so firmly attached to the poem in England?
For a detailed history of the controversy, see my essay “Speak Gently,” in Lewis Carroll Observed (Clarkson N. Potter, 1976), edited by Edward Guiliano, and reprinted with additions in my Order and Surprise.
5. It was surely not without malice that Carroll turned a male baby into a pig, for he had a low opinion of little boys. In Sylvie and Bruno Concluded an unpleasant child named Uggug (“a hideous fat boy…with the expression of a prize-pig”) finally turns into a porcupine. Carroll now and then made an effort to be friendly with a little boy, but usually only when the lad had sisters that Carroll wanted to meet. In one of his concealed-rhyme letters (a letter that seems to be prose but on closer inspection turns out to be verse) he closed a P.S. with these lines:
The Annotated Alice Page 10