The Annotated Alice

by Lewis Carroll

  My best love to yourself,—to your Mother

  My kindest regards—to your small,

  Fat, impertinent, ignorant brother

  My hatred—I think that is all.

  (Letter 21, to Maggie Cunnynghame, in A Selection from the Letters of Lewis Carroll to His Child-friends, edited by Evelyn M. Hatch.)

  Tenniel’s picture of Alice holding the pig-baby appears, with the baby redrawn as a human one, on the front of the envelope holding the Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case. This was a cardboard case designed to hold postage stamps, invented by Carroll and sold by a firm in Oxford. When you slip the case out of its envelope, you find on the front of it the same picture except that the baby has become a pig, as in Tenniel’s original drawing. The back of the envelope and case provide a similar transformation from Tenniel’s picture of the grinning Cheshire Cat to the picture in which the cat has mostly faded away. Slipped into the case was a tiny booklet titled Eight or Nine Words about Letter Writing. This delightfully written essay by Carroll opens as follows:

  Some American writer has said “the snakes in this district may be divided into one species—the venomous.” The same principle applies here. Postage-Stamp-Cases may be divided into one species, the “Wonderland.” Imitations of it will soon appear, no doubt: but they cannot include the two Pictorial Surprises, which are copyright.

  You don’t see why I call them ‘Surprises’? Well, take the Case in your left hand, and regard it attentively. You see Alice nursing the Duchess’s Baby? (An entirely new combination, by the way: it doesn’t occur in the book.) Now, with your right thumb and forefinger, lay hold of the little book, and suddenly pull it out. The Baby has turned into a Pig! If that doesn’t surprise you, why, I suppose you wouldn’t be surprised if your own Mother-in-law suddenly turned into a Gyroscope!

  Frankie Morris, in Jabberwocky (Autumn 1985), suggests that the baby’s transformation into a pig may derive from a famous prank played on James I by the Countess of Buckingham. She arranged for His Majesty to witness the baptism of what he thought was an infant in arms but was actually a pig, an animal that James I particularly loathed.

  6. In The Nursery “Alice” Carroll calls attention to the Fox Glove showing in the background of Tenniel’s drawing for this scene (it can be seen also in the previous illustration). Foxes do not wear gloves, Carroll explains to his young readers. “The right word is ‘Folk’s-Gloves.’ Did you ever hear that Fairies used to be called ‘the good Folk’?”

  7. These remarks are among the most quoted passages in the Alice books. An echo is heard in Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road:

  “…we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.”

  “Where we going, man?”

  “I don’t know but we gotta go.”

  John Kemeny places Alice’s question, and the Cat’s famous answer, at the head of his chapter on science and values in A Philosopher Looks at Science, 1959. In fact each chapter of Kemeny’s book is preceded by an appropriate quote from Alice. The Cat’s answer expresses very precisely the eternal cleavage between science and ethics. As Kemeny makes clear, science cannot tell us where to go, but after this decision is made on other grounds, it can tell us the best way to get there.

  I am told there is a passage in the Talmud that says: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”

  8. The phrases “mad as a hatter” and “mad as a March hare” were common at the time Carroll wrote, and of course that was why he created the two characters. “Mad as a hatter” may have been a corruption of the earlier “mad as an adder” but more likely owes its origin to the fact that until recently hatters actually did go mad. The mercury used in curing felt (there are now laws against its use in most states and in parts of Europe) was a common cause of mercury poisoning. Victims developed a tremor called “hatter’s shakes,” which affected their eyes and limbs and addled their speech. In advanced stages they developed hallucinations and other psychotic symptoms.

  “Did the Mad Hatter Have Mercury Poisoning?” is the title of an article by H. A. Waldron in The British Medical Journal (December 24–31, 1983). Dr. Waldron argues that the Mad Hatter was not such a victim, but Dr. Selwyn Goodacre and two other physicians dispute this in the January 28, 1984, issue.

  Two British scientists, Anthony Holley and Paul Greenwood, reported (in Nature, June 7, 1984) on extensive observations that fail to support a folk belief that male hares go into a frenzy during the March rutting season. The main behavior of hares throughout their entire eight-month breeding period consists in males chasing females, then getting into boxing matches with them. March is no different from any other month. It was Erasmus who wrote “Mad as a marsh hare.” The scientists think “marsh” got corrupted to “March” in later decades.

  When Tenniel drew the March Hare he showed wisps of straw on the hare’s head. Carroll does not mention this, but at the time it was a symbol, both in art and on the stage, of madness. In The Nursery “Alice” Carroll writes, “That’s the March Hare with the long ears, and straws mixed up with his hair. The straws showed he was mad—I don’t know why.” For more on this, see Michael Hancher’s chapter on straw as a sign of insanity in The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books. In Harry Furniss’s drawings of the Mad Gardener in Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno books you’ll see similar straw in the Gardener’s hair and clothing.

  The Hatter and the Hare appear at least twice in Finnegans Wake: “Hatters hares” (page 83, line 1, of the Viking revised edition, 1959), and “hitters hairs” (page 84, line 28).

  9. Compare the Cheshire Cat’s remarks with the following entry, of February 9, 1856, in Carroll’s diary:

  Query: when we are dreaming and, as often happens, have a dim consciousness of the fact and try to wake, do we not say and do things which in waking life would be insane? May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: “Sleep hath its own world,” and it is often as lifelike as the other.

  In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates and Theaetetus discuss this topic as follows:

  THEAETETUS: I certainly cannot undertake to argue that madmen or dreamers think truly, when they imagine, some of them that they are gods, and others that they can fly, and are flying in their sleep.

  SOCRATES: Do you see another question which can be raised about these phenomena, notably about dreaming and waking?

  THEAETETUS: What question?

  SOCRATES: A question which I think that you must often have heard persons ask: how can you determine whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

  THEAETETUS: Indeed, Socrates, I do not know how to prove the one any more than the other, for in both cases the facts precisely correspond; and there is no difficulty in supposing that during all this discussion we have been talking to one another in a dream; and when in a dream we seem to be narrating dreams, the resemblance of the two states is quite astonishing.

  SOCRATES: You see, then, that a doubt about the reality of sense is easily raised, since there may even be a doubt whether we are awake or in a dream. And as our time is equally divided between sleeping and waking, in either sphere of existence the soul contends that the thoughts which are present to our minds at the time are true; and during one half of our lives we affirm the truth of the one, and, during the other half, of the other; and are equally confident of both.

  THEAETETUS: Most true.

  SOCRATES: And may not the same be said of madness and the other disorders? The difference is only that the times are not equal.

  (Cf. Chapter 12, Note 9, and Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 4, Note 10.)

  10. Selwyn Goodacre has observed that although Alice had “walked on,” Tenniel shows the Cheshire Cat, when it reappears, sitting in the same tree as before. This enabled Carroll, in his Nursery “Alice,”
to add a bit of paper-folding whimsy. Tenniel’s two pictures were placed on left-hand pages so that (in Carroll’s words) “if you turn up the corner of this leaf, you’ll have Alice looking at the Grin: and she doesn’t look a bit more frightened than when she was looking at the Cat, does she?”

  11. The phrase “grin without a cat” is not a bad description of pure mathematics. Although mathematical theorems often can be usefully applied to the structure of the external world, the theorems themselves are abstractions that belong in another realm “remote from human passions,” as Bertrand Russell once put it in a memorable passage, “remote even from the pitiful facts of Nature…an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.”

  Chapter VII

  A Mad Tea-Party

  There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter1 were having tea at it: a Dormouse2 was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. “Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,” thought Alice; “only as it’s asleep, I suppose it doesn’t mind.”

  The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it. “No room! No room!” they cried out when they saw Alice coming. “There’s plenty of room!” said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.

  “Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.

  Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea.3 “I don’t see any wine,” she remarked.

  “There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.

  “Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it,” said Alice angrily.

  “It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,” said the March Hare.

  “I didn’t know it was your table,” said Alice: “it’s laid for a great many more than three.”

  “Your hair wants cutting,”4 said the Hatter. He had been looking at Alice for some time with great curiosity, and this was his first speech.

  “You should learn not to make personal remarks,” Alice said with some severity: “it’s very rude.”

  The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”5

  “Come, we shall have some fun now!” thought Alice. “I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles—I believe I can guess that,” she added aloud.

  “Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.

  “Exactly so,” said Alice.

  “Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

  “I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”

  “Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”

  “You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”

  “You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”

  “It is the same thing with you,” said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.

  The Hatter was the first to break the silence. “What day of the month is it?” he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.

  Alice considered a little, and then said “The fourth.”6

  “Two days wrong!” sighed the Hatter. “I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works!” he added, looking angrily at the March Hare.

  “It was the best butter,” the March Hare meekly replied.

  “Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,” the Hatter grumbled: “you shouldn’t have put it in with the bread-knife.”

  The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, “It was the best butter, you know.”

  Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity. “What a funny watch!”7 she remarked. “It tells the day of the month, and doesn’t tell what o’clock it is!”

  “Why should it?” muttered the Hatter. “Does your watch tell you what year it is?”

  “Of course not,” Alice replied very readily: “but that’s because it stays the same year for such a long time together.”

  “Which is just the case with mine,” said the Hatter.

  Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter’s remark seemed to her to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. “I don’t quite understand you,” she said, as politely as she could.

  “The Dormouse is asleep again,” said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea upon its nose.

  The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its eyes, “Of course, of course: just what I was going to remark myself.”

  “Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.

  “No, I give it up,” Alice replied. “What’s the answer?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.

  “Nor I,” said the March Hare.

  Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said, “than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers.”

  “If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Alice.

  “Of course you don’t!” the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. “I dare say you never even spoke to Time!”

  “Perhaps not,” Alice cautiously replied; “but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.”

  “Ah! That accounts for it,” said the Hatter. “He wo’n’t stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o’clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you’d only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!”

  (“I only wish it was,” the March Hare said to itself in a whisper.)

  “That would be grand, certainly,” said Alice thoughtfully; “but then—I shouldn’t be hungry for it, you know.”

  “Not at first, perhaps,” said the Hatter: “but you could keep it to half-past one as long as you liked.”

  “Is that the way you manage?” Alice asked.

  The Hatter shook his head mournfully. “Not I!” he replied. “We quarreled last March—just before he went mad, you know—” (pointing with his teaspoon at the March Hare,) “—it was at the great concert given by the Queen of Hearts, and I had to sing8

  ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!

  How I wonder what you’re at!’

  You know the song, perhaps?”

  “I’ve heard something like it,” said Alice.

  “It goes on, you know,” the Hatter continued, “in this way:—

  ‘Up above the world you fly

  Like a tea-tray in the sky.

  Twinkle, twinkle—’”

  Here the Dormouse shook itself, and began singing in its sleep “Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, twinkle—” and went on so long that they had to pinch it to make it stop.

  “Well, I’d hardly finished the first verse,” said the Hatter, “when the Queen bawled out ‘He’s murdering the time!9 Off with his head!’”

  “How dreadfully savage!” exclaimed Alice.


  “And ever since that,” the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, “he wo’n’t do a thing I ask! It’s always six o’clock now.”

  A bright idea came into Alice’s head. “Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?” she asked.

  “Yes, that’s it,” said the Hatter with a sigh: “it’s always tea-time,10 and we’ve no time to wash the things between whiles.”

  “Then you keep moving round, I suppose?” said Alice.

  “Exactly so,” said the Hatter: “as the things get used up.”

  “But what happens when you come to the beginning again?” Alice ventured to ask.

  “Suppose we change the subject,” the March Hare interrupted, yawning. “I’m getting tired of this. I vote the young lady tells us a story.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know one,” said Alice, rather alarmed at the proposal.

  “Then the Dormouse shall!” they both cried. “Wake up, Dormouse!” And they pinched it on both sides at once.

  The Dormouse slowly opened its eyes. “I wasn’t asleep,” it said in a hoarse, feeble voice, “I heard every word you fellows were saying.”

  “Tell us a story!” said the March Hare.

  “Yes, please do!” pleaded Alice.

  “And be quick about it,” added the Hatter, “or you’ll be asleep again before it’s done.”

  “Once upon a time there were three little sisters,” the Dormouse began in a great hurry; “and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie;11 and they lived at the bottom of a well—”

  “What did they live on?” said Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking.

  “They lived on treacle,”12 said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two.

  “They couldn’t have done that, you know,” Alice gently remarked. “They’d have been ill.”

  “So they were,” said the Dormouse; “very ill.”

  Alice tried a little to fancy to herself what such an extraordinary way of living would be like, but it puzzled her too much: so she went on: “But why did they live at the bottom of a well?”