The King was saying “I assure you, my dear, I turned cold to the very ends of my whiskers!”
To which the Queen replied “You haven’t got any whiskers.”12
“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never forget!”
“You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”
Alice looked on with great interest as the King took an enormous memorandum-book out of his pocket, and began writing. A sudden thought struck her, and she took hold of the end of the pencil, which came some way over his shoulder, and began writing for him.13
The poor King looked puzzled and unhappy, and struggled with the pencil for some time without saying anything; but Alice was too strong for him, and at last he panted out “My dear! I really must get a thinner pencil. I ca’n’t manage this one a bit: it writes all manner of things that I don’t intend—”
“What manner of things?” said the Queen, looking over the book (in which Alice had put “The White Knight is sliding down the poker. He balances very badly”.14 “That’s not a memorandum of your feelings!”
There was a book lying near Alice on the table, and while she sat watching the White King (for she was still a little anxious about him, and had the ink all ready to throw over him, in case he fainted again), she turned over the leaves, to find some part that she could read, “—for it’s all in some language I don’t know,” she said to herself.
It was like this.
She puzzled over this for some time, but at last a bright thought struck her. “Why, it’s a Looking-glass book, of course! And, if I hold it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again.”15
This was the poem that Alice read.
Jabberwocky16
’Twas brillig, and the slithy17 toves18
Did gyre19 and gimble20 in the wabe:
All mimsy21 were the borogoves,22
And the mome23 raths24 outgrabe.25
“Beware the Jabberwock,26 my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub27 bird, and shun
The frumious28 Bandersnatch!”29
He took his vorpal30 sword in hand:
Long time the manxome31 foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum32 tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish33 thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling34 through the tulgey wood,
And burbled35 as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!36
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing37 back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?38
Come to my arms, my beamish39 boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh!40 Callay!”
He chortled41 in his joy.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate—”42
“But oh!” thought Alice, suddenly jumping up, “if I don’t make haste, I shall have to go back through the Looking-glass, before I’ve seen what the rest of the house is like! Let’s have a look at the garden first!” She was out of the room in a moment, and ran down stairs—or, at least, it wasn’t exactly running, but a new invention for getting down stairs quickly and easily, as Alice said to herself. She just kept the tips of her fingers on the hand-rail, and floated gently down without even touching the stairs with her feet: then she floated on through the hall, and would have gone straight out at the door in the same way, if she hadn’t caught hold of the door-post. She was getting a little giddy with so much floating in the air, and was rather glad to find herself walking again in the natural way.
1. It was characteristic of Carroll, with his love of sharp contrast, to open his sequel on an indoor, midwinter scene. (The previous book opens out of doors on a warm May afternoon.) The wintry weather also harmonizes with the wintry symbols of age and approaching death that enter into his prefatory and terminal poems. The preparation for a bonfire and Alice’s remark “Do you know what tomorrow is, Kitty?” suggest that the date was November 4, the day before Guy Fawkes Day. (The holiday was annually celebrated at Christ Church with a huge bonfire in Peckwater Quadrangle.) This is supported by Alice’s statement to the White Queen (Chapter 5) that she is exactly seven and one half years old, for Alice Liddell’s birthday was May 4, and the previous trip to Wonderland occurred on May 4, when Alice presumably was exactly seven (see Note 6, Chapter 7 of the previous book). As Robert Mitchell says in a letter, May 4 and November 4, being six months apart, are two dates that could not be further separated.
This leaves open the question of whether the year is 1859 (when Alice actually was seven), 1860, 1861, or 1862 when Carroll told and wrote down the story of Alice’s first adventure. November 4, 1859, was a Friday. In 1860 it was Sunday, in 1861 Monday, and in 1862 Tuesday. The last date seems the most plausible in view of Alice’s remark to the kitten (in the next paragraph but one) that she is saving up her punishments until a week from Wednesday.
Mrs. Mavis Baitey, in her booklet Alice’s Adventures in Oxford (A Pitkin Pictorial Guide, 1980), argues that the day was March 10, 1863, the wedding day of the Prince of Wales. The occasion was celebrated at Oxford with bonfires and fireworks, and in his diary Carroll tells of taking Alice on an evening tour through the university: “It was delightful to see the thorough abandonment with which Alice enjoyed the whole thing.” However, Carroll’s diary for March 9 and 10 makes no mention of the snow Alice speaks of. However, Mrs. Baitey’s conjecture is supported by the fact that in England snow is very rare in early November and quite common in March.
2. Snowdrop was the name of a kitten belonging to one of Carroll’s early child-friends, Mary MacDonald. Mary was the daughter of Carroll’s good friend George MacDonald, the Scottish poet and novelist, and author of such well-known children’s fantasies as The Princess and the Goblin and At the Back of the North Wind. The MacDonald children were in part responsible for Carroll’s decision to publish Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. To test the story’s general appeal, he asked Mrs. MacDonald to read the manuscript to her children. The reception was enthusiastic. Greville, age six (who later recalled the occasion in his book George MacDonald and His Wife), declared that there ought to be sixty thousand copies of it.
Kitty and Snowdrop, the black and white kittens, reflect the chessboard’s black and white squares, and the red and white pieces of the book’s chess game.
3. “Wednesday week”: a week after the coming Wednesday.
4. “Wriggling” is a good description of how the knight moves across a chessboard.
5. The looking-glass theme seems to have been a late addition to the story. We have the word of Alice Liddell that a good part of the book was based on chess tales that Carroll told the Liddell girls at a time when they were learning excitedly how to play the game. It was not until 1868 that another Alice, Carroll’s distant cousin Alice Raikes, played a role in suggesting the mirror motif. This is how she told the story in the London Times, January 22, 1932:
As children, we lived in Onslow Square and used to play in the garden behind the houses. Charles Dodgson used to stay with an old uncle there, and walk up and down, his hands behind him, on the strip of lawn. One day, hearing my name, he called me to him saying, “So you are another Alice. I’m very fond of Alices. Would you like to come and see something which is rather puzzling?” We followed him into his house which opened, as
ours did, upon the garden, into a room full of furniture with a tall mirror standing across one corner.
“Now,” he said, giving me an orange, “first tell me which hand you have got that in.” “The right,” I said. “Now,” he said, “go and stand before that glass, and tell me which hand the little girl you see there has got it in.” After some perplexed contemplation, I said, “The left hand.” “Exactly,” he said, “and how do you explain that?” I couldn’t explain it, but seeing that some solution was expected, I ventured, “If I was on the other side of the glass, wouldn’t the orange still be in my right hand?” I can remember his laugh. “Well done, little Alice,” he said. “The best answer I’ve had yet.”
I heard no more then, but in after years was told that he said that had given him his first idea for Through the Looking-Glass, a copy of which, together with each of his other books, he regularly sent me.
In a mirror all asymmetrical objects (objects not superposable on their mirror images) “go the other way.” There are many references in the book to such left-right reversals. Tweedledee and Tweedledum are, as we shall see, mirror-image twins; the White Knight sings of squeezing a right foot into a left shoe; and it may not be accidental that there are several references to corkscrews, for the helix is an asymmetric structure with distinct right and left forms. If we extend the mirror-reflection theme to include the reversal of any asymmetric relation, we hit upon a note that dominates the entire story. It would take too much space to list here all the instances, but the following examples make the point. To approach the Red Queen, Alice walks backward; in the railway carriage the Guard tells her she is traveling the wrong way; the King has two messengers, “one to come, and one to go.” The White Queen explains the advantages of living backward in time; the looking-glass cake is handed around first, then sliced. Odd and even numbers, the combinatorial equivalent of left and right, are worked into the story at several points (e.g., the White Queen requests jam every other day). In a sense, nonsense itself is a sanity-insanity inversion. The ordinary world is turned upside down and backward; it becomes a world in which things go every way except the way they are supposed to.
Inversion themes occur, of course, throughout all of Carroll’s nonsense writing. In the first Alice book Alice wonders if cats eat bats or bats eat cats, and she is told that to say what she means is not the same as meaning what she says. When she eats the left side of the mushroom, she grows large; the right side has the reverse effect. These changes in size, which take place so often in the first book, are in themselves reversals (e.g., instead of a large girl and small puppy we have a large puppy and small girl). In Sylvie and Bruno we learn about “imponderal,” an antigravity wool that can be stuffed into parcel-post packages to make them weigh less than nothing; a watch that reverses time; black light; Fortunatus’s purse, a projective plane with outside inside and inside outside. We learn that E-V-I-L is simply L-I-V-E backward.
In real life also Carroll milked the notion of inversion as much as he could to amuse his child-friends. One of his letters speaks of a doll whose right hand becomes “left” when the left hand drops off; another letter tells how he sometimes goes to bed so soon after getting up that he finds himself back in bed before he gets up. He wrote letters in mirror writing that had to be held to a mirror to be read. He wrote letters that had to be read by starting at the last word and reading to the first. He had a collection of music boxes and one of his favorite stunts was to play them backward. He drew funny pictures that changed to different pictures when you turned them upside down.
Even in serious moments Carroll’s mind, like that of the White Knight, seemed to function best when he was seeing things upside down. He invented a new method of multiplication in which the multiplier is written backward and above the multiplicand. The Hunting of the Snark, he tells us, was actually composed backward. The final line, “For the Snark was a Boojum, you see,” came into his head as a sudden inspiration, then he fashioned a stanza to fit the line and finally a poem to fit the stanza.
Closely related to Carroll’s inversion humor is his humor of logical contradiction. The Red Queen knows of a hill so large that, compared to it, this hill is a valley; dry biscuits are eaten to quench thirst; a messenger whispers by shouting; Alice runs as fast as she can to stay in the same place. It is not surprising to learn that Carroll was fond of the Irish bull, of which logical contradiction is the essence. He once wrote to his sister: “Please analyze logically the following piece of reasoning: Little Girl: ‘I’m so glad I don’t like asparagus.’ Friend: ‘Why, my dear?’ Little Girl: ‘Because if I did like it, I should have to eat it—and I can’t bear it!’” One of Carroll’s acquaintances recalled hearing him speak about a friend he knew whose feet were so big that he had to put his trousers on over his head.
Treating a “null class” (a set with no members) as though it were an existing thing is another rich source of Carrollian logical nonsense. The March Hare offers Alice some nonexistent wine; Alice wonders where the flame of a candle is when the candle is not burning; the map in The Hunting of the Snark is “a perfect and absolute blank”; the King of Hearts thinks it unusual to write letters to nobody, and the White King compliments Alice on having keen enough eyesight to see nobody at a great distance down the road.
Why was Carroll’s humor so interwoven with logical twists of these sorts? We shall not enter here into the question of whether Carroll’s interest in logic and mathematics is a sufficient explanation, or whether there were unconscious compulsions that made it necessary for him to be forever warping and stretching, compressing and inverting, reversing and distorting the familiar world. Surely the thesis advanced by Florence Becker Lennon in her otherwise admirable biography Victoria Through the Looking Glass is hardly adequate. She argues that Carroll was born left-handed but forced to use his right hand, and that “he took his revenge by doing a little reversing himself.” Unfortunately there is only the flimsiest, most unconvincing evidence that Carroll was born left-handed. Even if true, it seems a woefully inadequate explanation for the origin of Carrollian nonsense.
R. B. Shaberman, writing on the influence of George MacDonald on Carroll (Jabberwocky, Summer 1976), quotes the following passage from Chapter 13 of MacDonald’s 1858 novel, Phantastes:
What a strange thing a mirror is! And what a wondrous affinity exists between it and a man’s imagination! For this room of mine, as I behold it in the glass, is the same and yet not the same. It is not the mere representation of the room I live in, but it looks just as if I were reading about it in a story I like. All its commonness has disappeared. The mirror has lifted it out of the region of fact into the realms of art…I should like to live in that room if I could only get into it.
6. Alice’s speculation about looking-glass milk has a significance greater than Carroll suspected. It was not until several years after the publication of Through the Looking-Glass that stereochemistry found positive evidence that organic substances had an asymmetric arrangement of atoms. Isomers are substances that have molecules composed of exactly the same atoms, but with these atoms linked together in structures that are topologically quite different. Stereoisomers are isomers that are identical even in topological structure, but, owing to the asymmetric nature of this structure, they come in mirror-image pairs. Most substances that occur in living organisms are stereoisometric. Sugar is a common example; in right-handed form it is called dextrose, in left-handed form, levulose. Because the intake of food involves complicated chemical reactions between asymmetric food and asymmetric substances in the body, there often are marked differences in the taste, smell, and digestibility of left- and right-handed forms of the same organic substance. No laboratory or cow has yet produced reversed milk, but if the asymmetric structure of ordinary milk were to be reflected, it is a safe bet that this looking-glass milk would not be good to drink.
In this judgment on looking-glass milk only a reversal of the structure by which the milk’s atoms are linked to each other is cons
idered. Of course a true mirror reflection of milk would also reverse the structure of the elementary particles themselves. In 1957 two Chinese-American physicists, Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, received the Nobel Prize for theoretical work that led to the “gay and wonderful discovery” (in Robert Oppenheimer’s happy phrase) that some elementary particles are asymmetric. It now appears likely that particles and their antiparticles (that is, identical particles with opposite charges) are, like stereoisomers, nothing more than mirror-image forms of the same structure. If this is true, then looking-glass milk would be composed of “anti-matter,” which would not even be drinkable by Alice; both milk and Alice would explode as soon as they came in contact. Of course an anti-Alice, on the other side of the looking-glass, would find anti-milk as tasty and nourishing as usual.
Readers who would like to learn more about the philosophical and scientific implications of left- and right-handedness are referred to Hermann Weyl’s delightful little book on Symmetry (1952) and Philip Morrison’s article “The Overthrow of Parity,” in Scientific American (April 1957). On the lighter side there is my discussion of left-right topics in the last chapter of The Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions (1959) and my story “Left or Right?” in Esquire (February 1951). The classic science-fiction tale involving left-right reversal is “The Plattner Story” by H. G. Wells. And one must not overlook The New Yorker’s Department of Amplification, December 15, 1956, page 164, in which Dr. Edward Teller comments with Carrollian wit on a previously published New Yorker poem (November 10, 1956, page 52) that describes the explosion that occurred when Dr. Teller shook hands with Dr. Edward Anti-Teller.
Recent nontechnical references on the symmetry and asymmetry of space and time include Reality’s Mirror: Exploring the Mathematics of Symmetry, by Bryan Bunch (Wiley, 1989); my New Ambidextrous Universe (W. H. Freeman, 1990); and “The Handedness of the Universe,” by Roger Hegstrom and Dilip Kondepudi, in Scientific American (January 1990).
The Annotated Alice Page 20