The Annotated Alice

by Lewis Carroll

  “If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”11

  “I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if I’m only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?”

  “Ditto,” said Tweedledum.

  “Ditto, ditto!”12 cried Tweedledee.

  He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn’t help saying “Hush! You’ll be waking him, I’m afraid, if you make so much noise.”

  “Well, it’s no use your talking about waking him,” said Tweedledum, “when you’re only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you’re not real.”

  “I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.

  “You wo’n’t make yourself a bit realler by crying,” Tweedledee remarked: “there’s nothing to cry about.”

  “If I wasn’t real,” Alice said—half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous—“I shouldn’t be able to cry.”

  “I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.

  “I know they’re talking nonsense,” Alice thought to herself: “and it’s foolish to cry about it.” So she brushed away her tears, and went on, as cheerfully as she could, “At any rate I’d better be getting out of the wood, for really it’s coming on very dark. Do you think it’s going to rain?”

  Tweedledum spread a large umbrella over himself and his brother, and looked up into it. “No, I don’t think it is,” he said: “at least—not under here. Nohow.”

  “But it may rain outside?”

  “It may—if it chooses,” said Tweedledee: “we’ve no objection. Contrariwise.”

  “Selfish things!” thought Alice, and she was just going to say “Good-night” and leave them, when Tweedledum sprang out from under the umbrella, and seized her by the wrist.

  “Do you see that?” he said, in a voice choking with passion, and his eyes grew large and yellow all in a moment, as he pointed with a trembling finger at a small white thing lying under the tree.

  “It’s only a rattle,” Alice said, after a careful examination of the little white thing. “Not a rattlesnake, you know,” she added hastily, thinking that he was frightened: “only an old rattle—quite old and broken.”

  “I knew it was!” cried Tweedledum, beginning to stamp about wildly and tear his hair. “It’s spoilt, of course!” Here he looked at Tweedledee, who immediately sat down on the ground, and tried to hide himself under the umbrella.

  Alice laid her hand upon his arm, and said, in a soothing tone, “You needn’t be so angry about an old rattle.”

  “But it isn’t old!” Tweedledum cried, in a greater fury than ever. “It’s new, I tell you—I bought it yesterday—my nice NEW RATTLE!”13 and his voice rose to a perfect scream.

  All this time Tweedledee was trying his best to fold up the umbrella, with himself in it: which was such an extraordinary thing to do, that it quite took off Alice’s attention from the angry brother. But he couldn’t quite succeed, and it ended in his rolling over, bundled up in the umbrella, with only his head out: and there he lay, opening and shutting his mouth and his large eyes—“looking more like a fish than anything else,” Alice thought.

  “Of course you agree to have a battle?” Tweedledum said in a calmer tone.

  “I suppose so,” the other sulkily replied, as he crawled out of the umbrella: “only she must help us to dress up, you know.”

  So the two brothers went off hand-in-hand into the wood, and returned in a minute with their arms full of things—such as bolsters, blankets, hearth-rugs, table-cloths, dish-covers, and coal-scuttles. “I hope you’re a good hand at pinning and tying strings?” Tweedledum remarked. “Every one of these things has got to go on, somehow or other.”

  Alice said afterwards she had never seen such a fuss made about anything in all her life—the way those two bustled about—and the quantity of things they put on—and the trouble they gave her in tying strings and fastening buttons—“Really they’ll be more like bundles of old clothes than anything else, by the time they’re ready!” she said to herself, as she arranged a bolster round the neck of Tweedledee, “to keep his head from being cut off,”14 as he said.

  “You know,” he added very gravely, “it’s one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle—to get one’s head cut off.”

  Alice laughed loud: but she managed to turn it into a cough, for fear of hurting his feelings.

  “Do I look very pale?” said Tweedledum, coming up to have his helmet tied on. (He called it a helmet, though it certainly looked much more like a saucepan.)

  “Well—yes—a little,” Alice replied gently.

  “I’m very brave, generally,” he went on in a low voice: “only to-day I happen to have a headache.”

  “And I’ve got a toothache!” said Tweedledee, who had overheard the remark. “I’m far worse than you!”

  “Then you’d better not fight to-day,” said Alice, thinking it a good opportunity to make peace.

  “We must have a bit of a fight, but I don’t care about going on long,” said Tweedledum. “What’s the time now?”

  Tweedledee looked at his watch, and said “Half-past four.”

  “Let’s fight till six, and then have dinner,” said Tweedledum.

  “Very well,” the other said, rather sadly: “and she can watch us—only you’d better not come very close,” he added: “I generally hit every thing I can see—when I get really excited.”

  “And I hit every thing within reach,” cried Tweedledum, “whether I can see it or not!”

  Alice laughed. “You must hit the trees pretty often, I should think,” she said.

  Tweedledum looked round him with a satisfied smile. “I don’t suppose,” he said, “there’ll be a tree left standing, for ever so far round, by the time we’ve finished!”

  “And all about a rattle!” said Alice, still hoping to make them a little ashamed of fighting for such a trifle.

  “I shouldn’t have minded it so much,” said Tweedledum, “if it hadn’t been a new one.”

  “I wish the monstrous crow would come!” thought Alice.

  “There’s only one sword, you know,” Tweedledum said to his brother: “but you can have the umbrella—it’s quite as sharp. Only we must begin quick. It’s getting as dark as it can.”

  “And darker,” said Tweedledee.

  It was getting dark so suddenly that Alice thought there must be a thunderstorm coming on. “What a thick black cloud that is!” she said. “And how fast it comes! Why, I do believe it’s got wings!”15

  “It’s the crow!” Tweedledum cried out in a shrill voice of alarm; and the two brothers took to their heels and were out of sight in a moment.

  Alice ran a little way into the wood, and stopped under a large tree. “It can never get at me here,” she thought: “it’s far too large to squeeze itself in among the trees. But I wish it wouldn’t flap its wings so—it makes quite a hurricane in the wood—here’s somebody’s shawl being blown away!”

  1. In the 1720s there was a bitter rivalry between George Frederick Handel, the German-English composer, and Giovanni Battista Bononcini, an Italian composer. John Byrom, an eighteenth-century hymn writer and teacher of shorthand, described the controversy as follows:

  Some say, compared to Bononcini

  That Mynheer Handel’s but a ninny;

  Others aver that he to Handel

  Is scarcely fit to hold a candle;

  Strange all this difference should be

  Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.

  No one knows whether the nursery rhyme about the Tweedle brothers originally had reference to this famous musical battle, or whether it was an older rhyme from which Byrom borrowed in the last line of his doggerel. (See the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, 1952, edited by Iona and Peter Opie, page 418.)

  2. Tenniel’s Tweedle brothers, in their schoolboy skeleton suits, as
they were called, strongly resemble his drawings of John Bull in Punch. See the first chapter of Michael Hancher’s The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books.

  “First Boy,” Everett Bleiler writes in a letter, was a term used in British schools for the brightest boy in a class, or an older boy who served as a sort of class monitor.

  3. Tweedledum and Tweedledee are what geometers call “enantiomorphs,” mirror-image forms of each other. That Carroll intended this is strongly suggested by Tweedledee’s favorite word, “contrariwise,” and by the fact that they extend right and left hands for a handshake. Tenniel’s picture of the two enantiomorphs arrayed for battle, standing in identical postures, indicates that he looked upon the twins in the same way. Note that the position of the fingers of Tweedledum’s right hand (or is it Tweedledee’s?—the bolster was put around the neck of Dee, but the saucepan marks him as Dum) exactly matches the position of his brother’s left fingers.

  The Tweedle brothers are mentioned in Finnegans Wake (Viking, 1959) on page 258.

  4. “In composing ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter,’” Carroll wrote to an uncle in 1872, “I had no particular poem in my mind. The metre is a common one, and I don’t think ‘Eugene Aram’ [a poem by Thomas Hood] suggested it more than the many other poems I have read in the same metre” (The Letters of Lewis Carroll, edited by Morton Cohen, Vol. 1, page 177).

  As a check against the tendency to find too much intended symbolism in the Alice books it is well to remember that, when Carroll gave the manuscript of this poem to Tenniel for illustrating, he offered the artist a choice of drawing a carpenter, butterfly, or baronet. Each word fitted the rhyme scheme, and Carroll had no preference so far as the nonsense was concerned. Tenniel chose the carpenter.

  The boxlike paper hat that Tenniel placed on the carpenter’s head is no longer folded by carpenters. However, these hats are still widely used by operators of newspaper printing presses; they fold them from blank sheets of newsprint and wear them to keep the ink out of their hair. J. B. Priestley has written an amusing article on “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (New Statesman, August 10, 1957, p. 168) in which he interprets the two figures as archetypes of two kinds of politicians.

  5. Richard Boothe notices in a letter that Peter Newell, in his illustration for this scene, violated the poem by putting both birds and clouds in the sky. (See More Annotated Alice, page 219.) Newell’s Walrus wears a Victorian bathing suit. The key hanging from his neck is for a bathing machine that Newell placed in the background.

  6. At Tenniel’s suggestion this line was altered from “Were walking hand in hand.”

  7. Cabbages and Kings was the title of O. Henry’s first book. The first four lines of this stanza are the best known and most often quoted lines of the poem. In “The Adventure of the Mad Tea Party,” the last story in The Adventures of Ellery Queen, these lines are an important element in the detective’s curious method of frightening a confession out of a murderer.

  Jane O’Connor Creed wrote to point out how Carroll’s lines echo the following portion of King Richard’s speech in Shakespeare’s Richard the Second, Act 3, Scene 2:

  Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

  Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

  Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

  Let’s choose executors and talk of wills;

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

  And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

  8. For Savile Clarke’s Alice operetta Carroll added an additional verse:

  The Carpenter he ceased to sob;

  The Walrus ceased to weep;

  They’d finished all the oysters;

  And they laid them down to sleep—

  And of their craft and cruelty

  The punishment to reap.

  After the Walrus and Carpenter have gone to sleep, the ghosts of two oysters appear on the stage to sing and dance and punish the sleepers by stamping on their chests. Carroll felt, and apparently audiences agreed with him, that this provided a more effective ending for the episode and also somewhat mollified oyster sympathizers among the spectators.

  The ghost of the first oyster dances a mazurka and sings:

  The Carpenter is sleeping, the butter’s on his face,

  The vinegar and pepper are all about the place!

  Let oysters rock your cradle and lull you into rest;

  And if that will not do it, we’ll sit upon your chest!

  We’ll sit upon your chest! We’ll sit upon your chest!

  The simplest way to do it is to sit upon your chest!

  The ghost of the second oyster dances a horn-pipe and sings:

  O woeful, weeping Walrus, your tears are all a sham!

  You’re greedier for Oysters than children are for jam.

  You like to have an Oyster to give the meal a zest—

  Excuse me, wicked Walrus, for stamping on your chest!

  For stamping on your chest!

  For stamping on your chest!

  Excuse me, wicked Walrus, for stamping on your chest!

  (All the above stanzas are quoted from Roger Green’s notes to The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, Vol. II, pages 446–47.)

  9. Alice is puzzled because she faces here the traditional ethical dilemma of having to choose between judging a person in terms of acts or in terms of intentions.

  10. This well-known, much-quoted discussion of the Red King’s dream (the monarch is snoring on a square directly east of the square currently occupied by Alice) plunges poor Alice into grim metaphysical waters. The Tweedle brothers defend Bishop Berkeley’s view that all material objects, including ourselves, are only “sorts of things” in the mind of God. Alice takes the common-sense position of Samuel Johnson, who supposed that he refuted Berkeley by kicking a large stone. “A very instructive discussion from a philosophical point of view,” Bertrand Russell remarked, commenting on the Red King’s dream in a radio panel discussion of Alice. “But if it were not put humorously, we should find it too painful.”

  The Berkeleyan theme troubled Carroll as it troubles all Platonists. Both Alice adventures are dreams, and in Sylvie and Bruno the narrator shuttles back and forth mysteriously between real and dream worlds. “So, either I’ve been dreaming about Sylvie,” he says to himself early in the novel, “and this is the reality. Or else I’ve really been with Sylvie, and this is a dream! Is Life itself a dream, I wonder?” In Through the Looking-Glass Carroll returns to the question in the first paragraph of Chapter 8, in the closing lines of the book, and in the last line of the book’s terminal poem.

  An odd sort of infinite regress is involved here in the parallel dreams of Alice and the Red King. Alice dreams of the King, who is dreaming of Alice, who is dreaming of the King, and so on, like two mirrors facing each other, or that preposterous cartoon of Saul Steinberg’s in which a fat lady paints a picture of a thin lady who is painting a picture of the fat lady who is painting a picture of the thin lady, and so on deeper into the two canvases.

  James Branch Cabell, in Smire, the last novel of his Smirt, Smith, Smire trilogy, introduces the same circular paradox of two persons, each dreaming the other. Smire and Smike confront one another in Chapter 9, each claiming to be asleep and dreaming the other. In a preface to his trilogy, Cabell described it as a “full-length dream story” that attempts “to extend the naturalism of Lewis Carroll.”

  The Red King sleeps throughout the entire narrative until he is checkmated at the close of Chapter 9 by Queen Alice when she captures the Red Queen. No chess player needs reminding that kings tend to sleep throughout most chess games, sometimes not moving after castling. Tournament games are occasionally played in which a king remains on its starting square throughout the entire game.

  11. This remark of Tweedledum’s was anticipated by Alice in the first chapter of the previous book where she wonders if her shrinking size might result in her “going out altogether, like a candl
e.”

  12. Molly Martin, in a letter, suggests that Tweededee’s “Ditto, ditto” underscores the doubling of twins and the identical forms of objects and their mirror reflections.

  13. The broken rattle can be seen on the ground in Tenniel’s illustration for this scene. In a letter to Henry Savile Clark (November 29, 1886) Carroll complained about how Tenniel had slyly drawn a watchman’s rattle: “Mr. Tenniel has introduced a false ‘reading’ in his picture of the quarrel of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I am certain that ‘my nice new rattle’ meant, in the old nursery-song, a child’s rattle not a watchman’s rattle as he has drawn it.”

  In those days a watchman’s rattle consisted of a thin wooden strip that vibrated against the teeth of a ratchet wheel when the rattle was whirled, producing a loud clacking noise that sounded an alarm. They are sold today mainly as party noisemakers. As reader H. P. Young pointed out in a letter, they are fragile and easily broken.

  In a shrewd analysis of the objects attached to the White Knight’s horse in Chapter 8, Janis Lull identifies a large watchman’s rattle at the front of the horse. It is visible in three pictures, as well as in the book’s frontispiece. Tenniel had earlier drawn such a rattle in the Punch cartoon (January 19, 1856) shown below.

  14. Tenniel’s illustration of this scene seems to show Alice arranging a bolster around Tweedledee’s neck, which would make the other brother Tweedledum. But if you look closely you will see a string in both her hands. The twin on the left is Tweedledum, and Alice is tying a pot on his head. As Michael Hancher points out in his book on the Tenniel pictures, the artist apparently made a mistake here in giving the wooden sword to Tweedledee.

  15. J. B. S. Haldane, in his book Possible Worlds (Chapter 2), thinks that the monstrous black crow of the nursery rhyme is a way of describing a solar eclipse:

  Every one, for example, has heard of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, whose battle was interrupted by a monstrous crow as big as a tar-barrel. The true story of these heroes is as follows: King Alyattes of Lydia, father of the celebrated Croesus, had been engaged for five years in a war with Cyaxares, king of the Medes. In its sixth year, on May 28, 585 B.C., as we now know, a battle was interrupted by a total eclipse of the sun. The kings not only stopped the battle, but accepted mediation. One of the two mediators was no less a person than Nebuchadnezzar, who in the preceding year had destroyed Jerusalem and led its people into captivity.