Hatta looked round and nodded, and went on with his bread-and-butter.
“Were you happy in prison, dear child?” said Haigha.
Hatta looked round once more, and this time a tear or two trickled down his cheek; but not a word would he say.
“Speak, ca’n’t you!” Haigha cried impatiently. But Hatta only munched away, and drank some more tea.
“Speak, wo’n’t you!” cried the King. “How are they getting on with the fight?”
Hatta made a desperate effort, and swallowed a large piece of bread-and-butter. “They’re getting on very well,” he said in a choking voice: “each of them has been down about eighty-seven times.”
“Then I suppose they’ll soon bring the white bread and the brown?” Alice ventured to remark.
“It’s waiting for ’em now,” said Hatta; “this is a bit of it as I’m eating.”
There was a pause in the fight just then, and the Lion and the Unicorn sat down, panting, while the King called out “Ten minutes allowed for refreshments!” Haigha and Hatta set to work at once, carrying round trays of white and brown bread. Alice took a piece to taste, but it was very dry.
“I don’t think they’ll fight any more today,” the King said to Hatta: “go and order the drums to begin.” And Hatta went bounding away like a grasshopper.
For a minute or two Alice stood silent, watching him. Suddenly she brightened up. “Look, look!” she cried, pointing eagerly. “There’s the White Queen running across the country!11 She came flying out of the wood over yonder—How fast those Queens can run!”
“There’s some enemy after her, no doubt,” the King said, without even looking round. “That wood’s full of them.”
“But aren’t you going to run and help her?” Alice asked, very much surprised at his taking it so quietly.
“No use, no use!” said the King. “She runs so fearfully quick. You might as well try to catch a Bandersnatch! But I’ll make a memorandum about her, if you like—She’s a dear good creature,” he repeated softly to himself, as he opened his memorandum-book. “Do you spell ‘creature’ with a double ‘e’?”
At this moment the Unicorn sauntered by them, with his hands in his pockets. “I had the best of it this time?” he said to the King, just glancing at him as he passed.
“A little—a little,” the King replied, rather nervously. “You shouldn’t have run him through with your horn, you know.”
“It didn’t hurt him,” the Unicorn said carelessly, and he was going on, when his eye happened to fall upon Alice: he turned round instantly, and stood for some time looking at her with an air of the deepest disgust.
“What—is—this?” he said at last.
“This is a child!” Haigha replied eagerly, coming in front of Alice to introduce her, and spreading out both his hands towards her in an Anglo-Saxon attitude. “We only found it to-day. It’s as large as life, and twice as natural!”12
“I always thought they were fabulous monsters!” said the Unicorn. “Is it alive?”
“It can talk,” said Haigha solemnly.
The Unicorn looked dreamily at Alice, and said “Talk, child.”
Alice could not help her lips curling up into a smile as she began: “Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!”
“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?”
“Yes, if you like,” said Alice.
“Come, fetch out the plum-cake, old man!” the Unicorn went on, turning from her to the King. “None of your brown bread for me!”
“Certainly—certainly!” the King muttered, and beckoned to Haigha. “Open the bag!” he whispered. “Quick! Not that one—that’s full of hay!”
Haigha took a large cake out of the bag, and gave it to Alice to hold, while he got out a dish and carving-knife. How they all came out of it Alice couldn’t guess. It was just like a conjuring-trick, she thought.
The Lion had joined them while this was going on: he looked very tired and sleepy, and his eyes were half shut. “What’s this!” he said, blinking lazily at Alice, and speaking in a deep hollow tone that sounded like the tolling of a great bell.13
“Ah, what is it, now?” the Unicorn cried eagerly. “You’ll never guess! I couldn’t.”
The Lion looked at Alice wearily. “Are you animal—or vegetable—or mineral?”14 he said, yawning at every other word.
“It’s a fabulous monster!” the Unicorn cried out, before Alice could reply.
“Then hand round the plum-cake, Monster,” the Lion said, lying down and putting his chin on his paws. “And sit down, both of you,” (to the King and the Unicorn): “fair play with the cake, you know!”
The King was evidently very uncomfortable at having to sit down between the two great creatures; but there was no other place for him.
“What a fight we might have for the crown, now!” the Unicorn said, looking slyly up at the crown, which the poor King was nearly shaking off his head, he trembled so much.
“I should win easy,” said the Lion.
“I’m not so sure of that,” said the Unicorn.
“Why, I beat you all round the town, you chicken!” the Lion replied angrily, half getting up as he spoke.
Here the King interrupted, to prevent the quarrel going on: he was very nervous, and his voice quite quivered. “All round the town?” he said. “That’s a good long way. Did you go by the old bridge, or the market-place? You get the best view by the old bridge.”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” the Lion growled out as he lay down again. “There was too much dust to see anything. What a time the Monster is, cutting up that cake!”
Alice had seated herself on the bank of a little brook, with the great dish on her knees, and was sawing away diligently with the knife. “It’s very provoking!” she said, in reply to the Lion (she was getting quite used to being called “the Monster”). “I’ve cut several slices already, but they always join on again!”
“You don’t know how to manage Looking-glass cakes,” the Unicorn remarked. “Hand it round first, and cut it afterwards.”
This sounded nonsense, but Alice very obediently got up, and carried the dish round, and the cake divided itself into three pieces as she did so. “Now cut it up,” said the Lion, as she returned to her place with the empty dish.
“I say, this isn’t fair!” cried the Unicorn, as Alice sat with the knife in her hand, very much puzzled how to begin. “The Monster has given the Lion twice as much as me!”15
“She’s kept none for herself, anyhow,” said the Lion. “Do you like plum-cake, Monster?”
But before Alice could answer him, the drums began.
Where the noise came from, she couldn’t make out: the air seemed full of it, and it rang through and through her head till she felt quite deafened. She started to her feet and sprang across the little brook in her terror,16
* * * *
* * *
* * * *
and had just time to see the Lion and the Unicorn rise to their feet, with angry looks at being interrupted in their feast, before she dropped to her knees, and put her hands over her ears, vainly trying to shut out the dreadful uproar.
“If that doesn’t ‘drum them out of town,’” she thought to herself, “nothing ever will!”
1. The two horses are needed in the chess game to provide steeds for the two white knights.
2. Mathematicians, logicians, and some metaphysicians like to treat zero, the null class, and Nothing as if they were Something, and Carroll was no exception. In the first Alice book the Gryphon tells Alice that “they never executes nobody.” Here we encounter the unexecuted Nobody walking along the road, and later we learn that Nobody walks slower or faster than the Messenger. “If you see Nobody come into the room,” Carroll wrote to one of his child-friends, “please give him a kiss for me.” In Carroll’s book Euclid and His Modern Rivals, we
meet Herr Niemand, a German professor whose name means “nobody.” When did Nobody first enter the Alice books? At the Mad Tea Party. “Nobody asked your opinion,” Alice said to the Mad Hatter. He turns up again in the book’s last chapter when the White Rabbit produces a letter that he says the Knave of Hearts has written to “somebody.” “Unless it was written to nobody,” comments the King, “which isn’t usual, you know.”
Critics have recalled how Ulysses deceived the one-eyed Polyphemus by calling himself Noman before putting out the giant’s eye. When Polyphemus cried out, “Noman is killing me!” no one took this to mean that someone was actually attacking him.
3. In his references to Anglo-Saxon attitudes Carroll is spoofing the Anglo-Saxon scholarship fashionable in his day. Harry Morgan Ayres, in his book Carroll’s Alice (Columbia University Press, 1936), reproduces some drawings of Anglo-Saxons in various costumes and attitudes, from the Caedmon Manuscript of the Junian codex (owned by Oxford’s Bodleian Library), and suggests that they may have been used as a source by both Carroll and Tenniel. A novel by Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, quotes this passage of Carroll’s on the title page.
4. Hatta is the Mad Hatter, newly released from prison, and Haigha, whose name, when pronounced to rhyme with “mayor,” sounds like “Hare,” is of course the March Hare. In his book Carroll’s Alice, Harry Morgan Ayres suggests that Carroll may have had in mind Daniel Henry Haigh, a noted nineteenth-century expert on Saxon runes and the author of two scholarly books about the Saxons.
It is curious that Alice fails to recognize either of her two old friends.
Just why Carroll disguised the Hatter and the Hare as Anglo-Saxon Messengers (and Tenniel underscored this whimsy by dressing them as Anglo-Saxons and giving them “Anglo-Saxon attitudes”) continues to be puzzling. “In the context of Alice’s dream,” writes Robert Sutherland in Language and Lewis Carroll (Mouton, 1970), “they come like ghosts to trouble scholars’ joy.”
The presence in Alice’s dream of the chess-men, the characters from nursery rhymes, the talking animals, the various more bizarre creatures is easily explained. They either have their counterparts in Alice’s waking experience or are the fantastic creations of a little girl’s dreaming mind. But the Anglo-Saxon Messengers! They are not mentioned in the first chapter, where various aspects of the dream are foreshadowed in Alice’s drawing-room. Are we to assume on Alice’s part a reading of Anglo-Saxon history in her schoolbooks? Or is the presence of the Anglo-Saxon Messengers a gratuitous addition of Carroll’s, constituting a minor flaw in the otherwise consistently conceived structure of the book? Is their presence an intrusion of a private joke at the expense of contemporary Anglo-Saxon scholarship, and a reflection of his own interest in British antiquity? The question of Dodgson’s intentions in creating the Anglo-Saxon Messengers is a vexed problem which will remain obscure until further information comes to light.
Roger Green (in Jabberwocky, Autumn 1971) offers the following guess. Carroll recorded in his diary (December 5, 1863) his attendance at a Christ Church theatrical that included a burlesque skit called “Alfred the Great.” Mrs. Liddell was there with her children. Green surmises that the skit included Anglo-Saxon settings and costumes, which may have given Carroll the idea of turning the Hatter and the Hare into Anglo-Saxon Messengers.
5. “I love my love with an A” was a popular parlor game in Victorian England. The first player recited:
I love my love with an A because he’s———.
I hate him because he’s———.
He took me to the Sign of the———
And treated me with———.
His name’s———
And he lives at———.
In each blank space the player used a suitable word beginning with A. The second player then repeated the same lines, using B instead of A, and the game continued in this fashion through the alphabet. Players unable to supply an acceptable word dropped out of the game. The wording of the recitation varied; the lines quoted above are taken from James Orchard Halliwell’s The Nursery Rhymes of England, a book popular in Carroll’s day. It was clever of Alice to start the game with H instead of A, for the Anglo-Saxon Messengers undoubtedly dropped their H’s.
6. “sal-volatile”: smelling salts.
7. Taking phrases literally instead of as they are commonly understood is characteristic of the creatures behind the looking-glass, and a basis for much of Carroll’s humor. Another good example occurs in Chapter 9, when the Red Queen tells Alice that she couldn’t deny something if she tried with both hands.
One of Carroll’s most amusing hoaxes furnishes still another instance of his fondness for this variety of nonsense. In 1873, when Ella Monier-Williams (a child-friend) let him borrow her travel diary, he returned the book with the following letter:
MY DEAR ELLA,
I return your book with many thanks; you will be wondering why I kept it so long. I understand, from what you said about it, that you have no idea of publishing any of it yourself, and hope you will not be annoyed at my sending three short chapters of extracts from it, to be published in The Monthly Packet. I have not given any names in full, nor put any more definite title to it than simply “Ella’s Diary, or The Experiences of an Oxford Professor’s Daughter, during a Month of Foreign Travel.”
I will faithfully hand over to you any money I may receive on account of it, from Miss Yonge, the editor of The Monthly Packet.
Your affect. friend,
C. L. DODGSON.
Ella suspected that he was joking, but began to take him seriously when she received a second letter containing the following passage:
I grieve to tell you that every word of my letter was strictly true. I will now tell you more—that Miss Yonge has not declined the MS., but she will not give more than a guinea a chapter. Will that be enough?
Carroll’s third letter cleared up the hoax:
MY DEAR ELLA,
I’m afraid I have hoaxed you too much. But it really was true. I “hoped you wouldn’t be annoyed at my etc.,” for the very good reason that I hadn’t done it. And I gave no other title than “Ella’s Diary,” nor did I give that title. Miss Yonge hasn’t declined it—because she hasn’t seen it. And I need hardly explain that she hasn’t given more than three guineas!
Not for three hundred guineas would I have shown it to any one—after I had promised you I wouldn’t.
In haste,
Yours affectionately,
C. L. D.
8. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, rivalry between the lion and unicorn goes back for thousands of years. The nursery rhyme is popularly supposed to have arisen in the early seventeenth century when the union of Scotland and England resulted in a new British coat of arms on which the Scottish unicorn and the British lion appear, as they do today, as the two supporters of the royal arms.
9. For reasons not clear, the White King, by running to see the Lion and Unicorn fight, violates his slow square-by-square way of moving in a chess game.
10. If Carroll intended his Lion and Unicorn to represent Gladstone and Disraeli (see Note 13 below), then this dialogue takes on an obvious meaning. Carroll, who was conservative in his political views and did not care for Gladstone, composed two remarkable anagrams on the full name, William Ewart Gladstone. They are: “Wilt tear down all images?” and “Wild agitator! Means well.” (See The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, Vol. II, page 277.)
11. The White Queen is moving from a square due west of the Red Knight to QB8. She really doesn’t have to flee—the Knight could not have taken her, whereas she could have taken him—but the move is characteristic of her stupidity.
12. “As large as life and quite as natural” was a common phrase in Carroll’s time (the Oxford English Dictionary quotes it from an 1853 source); but apparently Carroll was the first to substitute “twice” for “quite.” This is now the usual phrasing in both England and the United States.
13. Did Tenniel intend the beasts to
caricature Gladstone and Disraeli, who often sparred with each other? Michael Hancher, in his book on Tenniel’s art, maintains that neither Carroll nor Tenniel had such resemblances in mind. He reproduces one of Tenniel’s Punch cartoons, showing a Scottish unicorn and a British lion, both drawn almost exactly like those in Alice, confronting one another.
14. See Chapter 9, note 8, of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
15. That is, a lion’s share. The phrase comes from a fable of Aesop’s that tells how a group of beasts divided the spoils of a hunt. The lion demanded one-fourth in virtue of his rank, another fourth for his superior courage, a third quarter for his wife and children. As for the remaining fourth, the lion adds, anyone who wishes to dispute it with him is free to do so.
16. Alice advances to Q7.
Chapter VIII
“It’s My Own
Invention”
After a while the noise seemed gradually to die away, till all was dead silence, and Alice lifted up her head in some alarm. There was no one to be seen, and her first thought was that she must have been dreaming about the Lion and the Unicorn and those queer Anglo-Saxon Messengers. However, there was the great dish still lying at her feet, on which she had tried to cut the plum-cake, “So I wasn’t dreaming, after all,” she said to herself, “unless—unless we’re all part of the same dream. Only I do hope it’s my dream, and not the Red King’s! I don’t like belonging to another person’s dream,” she went on in a rather complaining tone: “I’ve a great mind to go and wake him, and see what happens!”
At this moment her thoughts were interrupted by a loud shouting of “Ahoy! Ahoy! Check!” and a Knight, dressed in crimson armour, came galloping down upon her, brandishing a great club. Just as he reached her,1 the horse stopped suddenly: “You’re my prisoner!” the Knight cried, as he tumbled off his horse.
The Annotated Alice Page 31